fugitive peace

I met Badri Patarkatsishvili, who mysteriously died today in Surrey, in 2002. He had decided to grant me and a journalist from the Financial Times his first interview in a year and a half. We went to his house in Tbilisi, an enormous palace on a hill, where were shown into the garden—or rather gardens; there were several of them lumped together, each in a different style (Japanese, tropical, English country, and so on). I think we picked a spot under a gazebo, and sat waiting for Patarkatsishvili, who duly arrived in a golf buggy which he manoeuvred gingerly in between the bushes.

He talked a lot about the need to mend relations with Russia (this was before the Rose Revolution, when Eduard Shevardnadze was still in power, but things had already deteriorated badly), and how to promote Georgian economic development, hinting that he was the ideal person for foreign investors to deal with if they wanted to do business in Georgia.

I’ve posted the (unedited) interview notes here, but unfortunately they don’t give many clues as to why he was killed, if indeed he was killed. He was a close ally of Boris Berezovsky, the oligarch who fled the country after a showdown with Vladimir Putin. When we met him he had already decided Russia was too hot for him too and had moved to Georgia. But in Georgia he stood against Mikheil Saakashvili for president, was under investigation for plotting to overthrow the government, and reportedly left in November to spend time at his homes in Israel and England. One of the people who worked for him was Andrei Lugovoy, the man Britain accuses of murdering Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB man who was poisoned with polonium-210 in London. Lugovoy, however, would now appear to be under the protection of the Kremlin, which accuses Berezovsky of having Litvinenko killed to besmirch Putin.

Confused? What it adds up to is that, like a lot of people who have suddenly disappeared from the Russian scene, Patarkatsishvili had no shortage of enemies, and so his death will probably remain a mystery. Sergei Dorenko, a former TV journalist who worked for Berezovsky’s television channel, ORT, before it was shut down, has posted some recollections of him (Russian). He also says that a friend of his spoke to Patarkatsishvili yesterday at 7pm London time, and he was full of beans. By 11pm he was dead.

Update (November 7th): Another journalist tells me he has had his meeting with a diplomat on November 26th cancelled because, he’s told, the diplomat has to go to Annapolis. Daniel Levy also confirms the date and has his usual sharp analysis of what to expect.

Gossip on the sidelines of the Saban Forum at the weekend and in Ramallah today is that Annapolis will indeed start on November 26th, as planned. Olmert has also just said that it will be at the end of the month. This is not good news.

Palestinian sources have been telling me that it would be better to postpone or cancel the summit than have a half-baked one empty of substance. Other Arab officials have been saying the same thing. Israeli ones, similarly, say that the summit itself is less important than the process. Their positions on the substance remain miles apart: the Israelis still want vagueness on the grounds that too much commitment is dangerous when both leaderships are weak, while the Palestinians want commitment to the main principles (especially the 1967 borders) and to a timeline for completing negotiations, on the grounds that anything less will make Abbas look like a chump. And the lack of enthusiasm for the summit in the White House has been an open secret in Washington for ages.

In short, it feels as if the only one really interested in this any more is Condi Rice.

One source tells me they will hold the summit without any joint declaration on the substantive issues, merely an agreement on the negotiating process to follow it. That might be so — this source has been right before — but it might just be too embarrassing for everyone concerned. It would especially embarrass Abbas, who has been pretty categorical about how he won’t turn up unless Israel makes concrete promises.

And the most foolish-looking would be Rice herself. She has been pushing Annapolis as the answer to America’s problem of how to increase Abbas’s legitimacy, which is America’s strategy for its broader problem of how to weaken Islamist movements like Hamas. If Abbas caves in and comes to a meaningless summit it will do nothing for his legitimacy or America’s policy goals (which I think are quite warped, but that’s another matter).

So I still wouldn’t rule out some kind of breakthrough as the date gets closer. But given the limited pressure that Rice is willing or able to apply to either Olmert or Abbas, it will be a minimal breakthrough designed not to bring peace but to save face: Rice’s face, first and foremost.

You would think the launch party for a big Israeli defence firm would be the perfect place for me to find out exactly what happened during Israel’s raid in Syria. The Mikal Group, the new controlling company for a collection of defence suppliers with its eye on the export market, held a glitzy gathering tonight at the Tel Aviv port. There were hundreds of guests - weapons-business executives, army colonels, brigadier-generals, ex-brigadier-generals (identifiable by their close-cropped greying hair and gimlet-eyed gazes) and journalists. The drinks were free, and the bar staff were pouring them damn strong. Someone had to blab.

Not a chance. While the US and British press continue to dish up scoop after supposed scoop, the Israeli media remain censored and those in the know stay mum. Of course, it’s hard to tell who’s really in the know. All you get is little nuggets here and there - so-and-so’s friend in the air force told him they were preparing for this months ago, such-and-such heard that the pilots weren’t even told what they were going to bomb. I learned nothing. I felt terrible. I felt better after a military-affairs journalist with years of experience told me she had been pumping all her sources and learned nothing either.

I think it’s still OK to say that Israel launched a big raid and had good reasons for doing so. Beyond that, nothing is verifiable. The cheerleaders point to hints of something fishy, such as changes to the port records of a ship that docked in Syria three days before the raid carrying (supposedly) cement. Doubters turn up signs that what Israel hit, if anything, wasn’t nuclear. An Israeli journalist, Yigal Laviv, repeats the argument that if there were proof of nuclear material in Syria, Israel and the US would surely be trumpeting it to the skies (partial translation here). But then again, if there was nothing incriminating in Deir al Zur, surely Syria would be doing the same.

I mentioned to an Israeli acquaintance at the Mikal party how strange it was that, after this barrage of leaks and stories, we still knew basically nothing. “And that’s as it should be,” he said. From Israel’s point of view, the eerie silence at home mixed with tantalising media stories from abroad is working wonders. As I’ve noted before, when there is no hard information, rumours fill the gap, and he who controls the rumours controls the truth (Orwell forgot to include that one). Israelis are starting to believe in their army after its failures during last summer’s Lebanon war. Westerners are beginning to wonder whether there aren’t WMD in the Middle East after all. Arabs are fearful at the thought that Israel can still strike deep in their territory and get away with it. It may all be true; it may all be false; but in terms of the effect on the world, that’s irrelevant. “It’s not what you know,” my interlocutor said, “it’s what you think you know.”

All of which may answer my earlier question about why the Israeli media blackout on the event continues - and suggests that it may not be lifted after all.

Update (September 19th): I was wrong on two counts. One is that the official silence has already been broken - albeit by Bibi Netanyahu, who despite not being a member of the government, let alone one of the three ministers reportedly involved in the decision to attack, claims he was “involved… from the first moment”, whatever that means.

The second is that I apparently misheard over the noise at the Mikal party: the phrase was “it’s what they think you know”. I actually liked the wrong version better.

When I was in Russia, where hard information was like gold dust, people would occasionally start rumours for a bet. You won a prize if the rumour made it into the press. It’s a risky game. Doing some interviews in Ramallah yesterday, I - through a simple misunderstanding - accidentally started the rumour that a prestigious charity led by a very important Palestinian personage was among the NGOs being investigated for administrative irregularities. I got the rumour quashed, but not before the important personage had called up the chief of staff of the interior ministry demanding to know what was going on.

But another rumour I heard yesterday seems to be gaining credibility, though I haven’t yet seen it reported outside the Arabic and Israeli media. This is that Saeb Erekat, the Palestinians’ long-time chief negotiator and one of their most public spokesmen, is about to lose his job - even as Olmert and Abbas negotiate an agreement of principles for the peace conference due in November.

Why Erekat would go now is unclear (I haven’t yet gotten hold of him myself to ask), but that hasn’t stopped le tout Ramallah from speculating. Some say it’s because he’s been ineffective in setting the Palestinian agenda for the current talks. Others think maybe he’s been leaking to the press too much about the talks - which he may have done, but I doubt it’s a firing offence. Or perhaps it’s because he and Salam Fayyad, the prime minister, don’t get on too well; but would Abbas really let Fayyad meddle in negotiations to that extent? Finally and most conspiratorially, it’s that Erekat is being cleared aside for the ex-prime minister and chief negotiator of the Oslo Accords, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa).

My sources are silent on this, and Abu Alaa’s office reportedly denied it. Why would he be put into such a job? A friend reminds me that Abu Alaa and Shimon Peres came up with a peace plan in 2001, after the intifada broke out, which called for creating a Palestinian state in stages. In their original version, Israel would recognise a Palestinian state in the areas already under Palestinian Authority control, and the final borders and other issues would be dealt with later. Could they be planning a re-run, in which Israel recognises a Palestinian state in the West Bank, and leaves Gaza until later?

Perhaps - though if that were the intention, you surely wouldn’t need Abu Alaa and Peres themselves to make it happen. In any case, it’s far from clear that Abu Alaa is taking over. But if Erekat is indeed leaving, it may signal some kind of shift in the Olmert-Abbas talks, which seem to have produced little progress up to now.

(And if anyone bet a bottle of champagne that the rumour about Abu Alaa would get published: congratulations, and please would you save me a glass?)