PLO headquarters in Jerusalem faces new threats
"It does not make any sense that we pay municipal taxes to the West Jerusalem municipality for a movie theater that has been shut for some ten years," said Faisal Husseini, PLO Executive Committee member who is in charge of the Jerusalem file in the Palestinian government.
Husseini was referring to reports that the Orient House, in theory the PLO headquarters in Jerusalem, owes the West Jerusalem municipality huge amounts of debts in the form of municipal taxes and water bills.
Municipality sources said the debt, estimated at a bit over half a million US dollars, relates to a number of houses and compounds that are part of the Arab Studies Society in the city. Some of those compounds, the sources claimed, were established over the past two years. But Husseini denied that his Orient House had established any new offices since 1993.
"Because of the financial crisis we have been facing, we never opened up any new branches in Jerusalem in five years. On the contrary, we had to shut down part of our offices in order to save some money," said Husseini, whose Orient House became popular back in 1991 when the Palestinian negotiating team to the Madrid Peace conference used it as its base. Since then, it became the venue for meetings between Husseini and his colleagues in the team with foreign diplomats.
The status of the Orient House as headquarters of the Palestinian peace negotiators made it become the unofficial bureau of the PLO in Jerusalem, even back in the days of the former right wing Likud government of Yitzhak Shamir. When the present government of Benjamin Netanyahu took over in June 1996, it decided to eliminate the special status of the Orient House and warned it would take tough measures, including a closure order, against it. Two years ago, the municipality cut the water supplies to the Orient House after it failed to pay its water bills, which amounted to some US $200,000. The water supplies were redelivered only after the debt was paid, said municipality sources.
It was because of those threats and intensive diplomatic efforts made by Israel with western countries that foreign diplomats ceased to meet Palestinian officials at the Orient House. When UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited the region a few weeks ago, he met with Husseini at the UNDP officers in East Jerusalem and not at the Orient House.