Fatah Creates Morality Police to Undermined Hamas’s Popularity

Officers with new a Morality Police unit in the West Bank detain a teenager accused of smoking in public during Ramadan, a Muslim holiday that calls for fasting.

29 September 2007

By DION NISSENBAUM

RAMALLAH, West Bank-The scrawny teenage detainee squirmed uncertainly in his seat as Palestinian police interrogators peppered him with questions.

“Are you Muslim or not?” one officer asked the sullen waiter, who had been picked up for smoking in public during the daily fast for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. “When I see you eating or smoking, it is shameful.”

“Tell your boss that tomorrow, the first thing we are going to do is close down his restaurant,” warned the second interrogator, who was wearing an armband that read “Morality Police.”

The Morality Police have come to the Palestinian Authority. But the charge isn’t being led by hardliners from the militant Islamist Hamas movement, as many once feared. It is being spearheaded by the secular Fatah party as part of its campaign to undermine growing support for Hamas in the West Bank.

Morality police squads are associated with authoritarian religious regimes such as those in Iran and Saudi Arabia and the deposed Taliban government in Afghanistan.

But here in the West Bank’s most sophisticated city, Fatah has usurped the idea as a way to resurrect its image among an ever-more-conservative population and to ensure that Hamas doesn’t gather the sort of strength and support in the West Bank that allowed it to seize control of the Gaza Strip over the summer.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his secular allies also have clamped down on Hamas charities, mosques and militants in the West Bank.

“Morality is part of the public order,” said Murad Qundah, the 27-year-old police captain who leads the new 10-person unit. “We are not a religious police.”

Launched two weeks ago to coincide with the beginning of Ramadan, Morality Police foot patrols have arrested nearly two dozen Palestinians for smoking or drinking in public when they were supposed to be fasting.

Each day, the patrols are met with a mixture of enthusiastic support, wary disinterest and nervous distance. And while there has been some grumbling, there also are some surprising expressions of support, even among young women who dress in jeans, wear makeup and don’t cover their heads.

“We need this for our country so we can walk freely in the streets without guys disturbing us,” said Nora, a 20-year-old Christian university student who expressed no fears that the unit would try to force her to wear modest clothes or a head scarf. She asked that she be identified only by her first name.

The squad agrees that it isn’t trying to force women to cover their heads. Instead, it is targeting boys who harass girls and people smoking or eating during the daily Ramadan fast.

Penalties are relatively lenient. Although the police tell people that they’ll be jailed until the end of Ramadan for eating, drinking or smoking in public, Qundah said that most people have been freed within a day or two.

Last week, Qundah led his squad across town to where a second unit had corralled the confused teenage boy accused of smoking in public. A member of the Morality Police squad firmly linked arms with the boy and quietly chastised him as they walked to the nearby police station for questioning.

In a sparse, dimly lit office, Qundah and a second unidentified officer castigated the teenager, who was freed after he agreed to sign a statement vowing not to smoke or eat during the Ramadan fast.

“If we allow everyone to break the fast, there would be no Ramadan,” the second interrogator lectured the boy. “You are not fasting to satisfy the Morality Police. You are fasting to satisfy God.”