RAMALLAH, West Bank, April 1 (UPI) -- A representative of Brazil's land reform movement remained in Ramallah Monday in a show of support for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Palestinian claims to Israeli-occupied territory.
Mario Lill, a representative of the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Ruis Sem Terra), or MST, said he went "to show solidarity with Palestinian peasants who are oppressed in the occupied territories," Brazilian newspaper Jornal da Tarde reported.
Several of Brazil's leading daily newspapers carried front-page photos Monday of Lill presenting an MST flag to Arafat, who waved it for supporters and the media.
"They (the Israelis) declared all-out war here, and as a foreigner I am a witness to what is happening here," the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo reported Lill saying. "However there is pressure (from Israel) to prevent foreigners from witnessing what is going on.
"To witness a war (like this) is a terrible feeling, you don't feel safe anywhere ... even we are not safe because Israeli forces have their assassins all over the city," he said.
Lill, along with some 40 land-reform advocates and several members of Via Campesinas -- an international farmers movement calling for political and agricultural reform -- arrived in Ramallah over the weekend and have been staying at Arafat's compound without access to food and water. The group said they would remain there for an unspecified period of time to act as a human shield to protect Arafat from Israeli attacks.
Arafat has been largely confined to his Ramallah compound since shortly after the assassination of Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi more than six months ago. Israeli officials said they would lift the travel ban on Arafat once he arrested Zeevi's killers and curtailed Palestinian attacks on Israel.
Despite Lill's pledge of support for the Palestinian struggle, an MST representative told United Press International Monday in Sao Paulo that the group does not officially endorse Palestinian efforts to regain land seized by Israel in 1967 and later, though it does advocate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The MST has been embroiled in its own land disputes with the Brazilian government. Last weekend some 600 MST members seized control of a ranch in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais belonging to family members of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Sixteen MST members were arrested by Brazilian federal authorities in a raid on the ranch. A second MST seizure took place a couple days later, this time at a ranch belonging to a Cardoso associate in the state of Sao Paulo.
The Brazilian land reform movement has called for restructuring land ownership in a country where the MST claims 60 percent of Brazil's farmland remains unused while 25 million peasants toil as landless laborers.
On Friday, some 200 MST members set off on a protest march from site of the first ranch seizure to the capital, Brasilia, in an effort to call for the release of the 16 land reform advocated being held there.
The group said they would remain in Brasilia until the arrested MST members were released.
(Reported by Carmen Gentile in Sao Paulo, Brazil.)
