During the last year, Yasser Arafat has left his Ramallah compound only once, for a brief tour of the West Bank in May.

Only a single, tan three-storey office building remains standing in the compound. Sandbags flank its front door. Every window is blocked off by sandbags and concrete-filled trash barrels. The walls of the compound have been torn down. Mr. Arafat's armour-plated Mercedes Benz limousine is buried, along with dozens of other cars, in the rubble that covers the compound's parking lot.

Mr. Arafat himself is pale these days, at least in part because the sandbags and the barrels allow little sunlight into the building in which he sleeps and works. Recent visitors to his office, according to press reports in Israel, say his behaviour has become a little strange. They say he is unfocused, speaks in a confused manner, and his lips are shaking again. His doctors attribute the trembling lips to neurological damage caused in an airplane crash in the Libyan desert some years ago.

The condition might also have something to do with his waning influence in the region. Since June, when President George Bush called for new Palestinian leadership as a pre-condition of US support for Palestinian statehood, Mr. Arafat has begun, slowly, to fade from prominence.

At the end of November, just after Thanksgiving, the White House quietly issued Presidential Determination 2003 to 2004, whose first paragraph instructs the State Department to sanction the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority for non-compliance with obligations placed upon them by the Oslo Accords. It is widely understood that this is in response to evidence of official PA complicity in acts of violence and terrorism that has become too compelling to ignore.

At the beginning of November, Human Rights Watch, a group that has seemed most reluctant in the past to criticise the Palestinians, issued a report that accused them of crimes against humanity.

War criminals

"The people who carry out suicide bombings are not martyrs, they're war criminals," the group's executive director said when the report was released, "and so are the people who help to plan such attacks. The scale and systematic nature of these attacks sets them apart from other abuses committed in times of conflict. They clearly fall under the category of crimes against humanity".

Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, believed for a long time that Mr. Arafat should be expelled from the region, but could not get his cabinet to agree to allow him to do it. He was finally persuaded, in July, that Mr. Arafat should simply be ignored as no longer relevant to the Middle East peace process.

The Israeli Prime Minister has hinted that if Mr. Arafat should leave his compound, even for a short time, his one remaining office building will be pulled down and those remaining inside arrested as suspected militants.

He hinted, too, a few days ago, that he had begun to secretly negotiate a peace plan with another leading Palestinian Authority figure - something Mr. Arafat and the PA hotly denied.

Mr. Arafat's authority, at least in Western eyes, is near the end of a long collapse under the weight of years of broken promises, deception, lies, and corruption. An aide to Prime Minister Sharon said recently that "Arafat constructed through the years an empire of terror and a kingdom of lies. He promised us the peace of the brave, but he gave us the peace of the grave".

No one can now doubt that Mr. Arafat's diplomatic failure at Camp David in the summer of 2000 plunged the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian cause itself into a spiral of despair. It compounded years of failures, first in Jordan, then in Lebanon and now in the Palestinian heartland itself. Its infrastructure has been crushed, its militias wiped out or neutralised, its authority severely weakened. It has become obvious that Yasser Arafat has gained nothing for his people, after 20 months of fighting, except death and diplomatic isolation.

Arafat has betrayed them

With such a record, any other leader would quickly have been ousted. Yet Mr. Arafat remains, still accepted by his people as a legitimate leader. For Israel and the West, the answer to the question of Palestinian reform is therefore not to be found in pressure on Arafat to transform the Palestinian Authority. It can only come from fostering an acceptance among Palestinian citizens that it is not Israel, the United States or the West that is responsible for their desperate condition. Mr. Arafat has betrayed them.

It is a suggestion that has begun to have great resonance with the Palestinians. Little wonder, perhaps, for the scale of Mr. Arafat's betrayal is extraordinary by any measure.

The PLO is known to have used drug trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering and counterfeiting to amass a fortune that was estimated, almost ten years ago, by the British National Criminal Intelligence Services to be about $10 billion.

Mr. Arafat himself is said by the head of Israeli intelligence, Major-General Aharon Ze'ev, to have amassed a fortune of $1.3 billion.

Mr. Arafat is the president of the Palestinian Authority, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisations and head of the Fatah terrorist organisation, its al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and the Tanzim. In those offices, he controls the funds of all the organisations under the PA umbrella. He and his friends have systematically looted all of them.

The 1998 Oslo accords transformed the PLO into the Palestinian Authority, which was to develop a bureaucracy that could become the government of Palestine when the time arrived.

At the time, the PLO was a terrorist organisation which raised money not only by soliciting donations from individuals and nations in the region, but also through a large criminal enterprise that earned money through counterfeiting, kidnapping and extortion, car theft, kickbacks and by selling protection.

The new Palestinian Authority created ministries of health, education, social welfare, taxation, culture, agriculture, civil affairs, finance, transportation and planning. It also now runs a Central Bureau of Statistics, a Land Registry, municipal administration buildings, a Palestinian Legislative Council and other agencies. The Authority created a police force of some 35,000 members - not so much to fight crime, as you might imagine, as to act as a buffer with the Israelis.

This new, legitimate organisation also hugely increased the capacity of Mr. Arafat and his friends to earn income. The Oslo agreement called for aid from the United States, the European Union and from Arab nations. The PA's combined income has been estimated (by the Middle Eastern branch of Info-Prod Research, a respected economic research firm) to have reached $1 billion in 2001 alone, and to have totalled about $4? billion between 1998 and 2001.

According to a study carried out by the American Center for Democracy in New York, the PA and its senior officials earn extra money through criminal activity, through corrupt practices, by creating business monopolies to crush genuine competition in the region, and by a variety of accounting subterfuges that create off-the-books profit. This group's report is available at http://public-integrity.org/money.pdf.

It is a mark of Mr. Arafat's waning influence, perhaps, that the PA's new Finance Minister, Salam Fayyad, a former International Monetary Fund official, last week presented a budget for 2003 to the PA's legislature. It is the first time it has happened - there wasn't one in 2002 and before that, they were secret documents, if they existed. Not only has Mr. Fayyad presented this one to the legislature, he has posted it on the PA's web site for all to see (at www.mof.gov.ps, if you want to have a look). His proposals, expected to be adopted fairly quickly by the legislature, contain a number of provisions that will make corrupt use of funds much more difficult.

West is embarrassed

In doing that, he has put Mr. Arafat in a difficult position. It was he who bowed to pressure and appointed Mr. Fayyad to the job a few months ago. International donors, especially the Europeans, are known to be embarrassed at having their aid systematically looted by PA officials. If Mr. Fayyad were to resign, it would make an already considerably weakened Mr. Arafat's position worse.

But just because the West is embarrassed by his activities does not necessarily mean that his departure from the scene will be either quick or easy.

Grass roots movements never force change in Arab countries. The revolutions of the Arab world have almost all been carried out by military coup. The Palestinian military, however, is either too weak or does have not have enough ideological distance from Arafat to consider usurping him.

And the patriarchal structure of Arab society also mitigates strongly against change. The traditional nuclear family is dominated by the father - unquestioning obedience and respect characterise the relationship between father and children. The political culture in Arab countries is the same - dictatorships thrive in the Arab world, no matter how corrupt they are.

So that single, tan three-storey building still stands. Visitors still have their pictures taken with Mr. Arafat between the piles of sandbags at its front door. But its days, and his, are now numbered.

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