MIDDLE EAST:A few weeks ago, Sheikh Yazid Khader had one of the most coveted jobs in the Palestinian Authority. A senior bureaucrat in the information ministry and a Hamas loyalist, he had a plush office, a staff of dozens and a million-dollar budget at his disposal.
Now, just showing up for work is enough to get him arrested.
"We've all been told to make ourselves disappear," Khader said from his new office, a sparse storage room tucked away on the ministry's fifth floor with no computer or working telephone.
Khader is among nearly 20,000 Palestinian public employees who were handed pink slips last week as part of an ongoing campaign by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to crack down on Islamic militancy in the West Bank following his forces' defeat in Gaza.
Last week, Abbas's emergency government issued decrees meant to consolidate his secular Fatah party's hold on power here. He ordered the dismantling of militant groups, restricted Hamas charities and forbade imams from preaching politics.
But the harshest order was issued on Thursday - the dismissal of any public servant hired after Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 - effectively targeting anybody with a government job and sympathies to the Islamist movement.
A spokesperson from the president's office justified the move as cost-cutting, but the order has enraged a newly ousted army of civil servants, the vast majority of whom are Hamas loyalists. "It is better to cut a man's throat than to cut his job," said Abu Hafeeza, who was, until recently, chief of special reports in the ministry of social services.
Dozens of Hamas members have been jailed, and the crackdown has succeeded in driving much of the movement underground. Hamas political leaders are in hiding. Some of the West Bank's most fiery preachers have been silenced.
But inside the Palestinian Authority's swollen bureaucracy, resistance is growing, and according to the government's own figures, more than half of those who were fired have refused to leave their jobs.
"Every Palestinian ministry now has a Shaker al-Abssi," said Hafeeza, referring to the radical leader of Fatah al-Islam, the al-Qaeda-inspired group that recently fought the Lebanese army from inside a Palestinian refugee camp in that country.
Despite officially being without a job, Hafeeza continues to show up for work without pay. Instead of pushing paper, he says, he is plotting revenge.
Many previously soft-spoken civil servants now are threatening to take up arms: "If they continue to act aggressively toward us, we will react. We are not weak. We are approaching a very dangerous state," said Khader.
It is unclear whether Abbas will be strong enough to enforce his decrees, or whether the civil servants will indeed rise up and make good on their threats to retaliate with force.
Palestinian political analysts say Abbas's three-week-old emergency government is too weak to withstand a sudden flare-up of violence. He has called for early elections but, without solid support on the street, is resorting to tactics used in other Middle Eastern countries, which have banned official Islamist groups.
But critics warn Abbas's harsh crackdown will trigger an inevitable backlash. "Whoever believes strongly in Hamas will never waver," said Rajheb Bader, an accountant in the Palestinian ministry of public works and housing, who has vowed to remain in his job and somehow help return Hamas to power. "These decrees will only help Abbas lose his people." - (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)