Far from being the unifying panacea to Fatah’s ills that it was meant to be, the Palestinian national movement’s Sixth General Conference has proven an ill-tempered and divisive affair, much, say some, in keeping with the party’s record.

Indeed, so contentious has the conference been that organisers have been forced to extend policy discussions and delay voting to the two main bodies in the movement, the ruling Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council, until at least tonight, possibly tomorrow.

The conference was supposed to end yesterday.

Much of the wrangling has concerned the movement’s internal accountability, both financial and political, with some members angrily demanding that a reckoning take place to hold those leaders accountable who are perceived to have weakened and divided the movement over the past several years.

That division, partly emanating from the lack of opportunity for a younger generation to rise to positions of influence within the party and partly from perceived widespread corruption, is seen by many Fatah members as the cause of the movement’s loss to Hamas in parliamentary elections in 2006 and the subsequent ousting of Fatah as an effective force from Gaza in 2007.

While the conference was meant to address this by absorbing some of the younger generation of leaders into the two ruling bodies and, by holding it in occupied territory, excluding others, organisers appear to have been taken by surprise by the depth of acrimony within the party towards its own leadership.

On Wednesday, Fatah delegates nearly came to blows after being told that the accounting they had been promised about Fatah’s failures over the past years had been included in Tuesday’s opening speech by Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader and head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian Authority.

That speech, a nearly two-hour presentation that included everything from Mr Abbas’s position on negotiations with Israel as a strategic choice to his desire for unity with Gaza, for which failure was blamed on Hamas, as well as his admission that mistakes had been made in the past in Fatah but wouldn’t be repeated, was not seen as enough.

Some delegates said privately that they would not accept drawing a line under the past just because Mr Abbas told them so.

Hussam Khader rose to challenge Mr Abbas in the conference on Wednesday, saying the Fatah leader “was only a delegate like every other delegate”.

Later on Wednesday, accusations surfaced that several hundred delegates not on the official list but reportedly loyal to the leadership had been granted passes to the conference over some who had come from abroad or even from other parts of the West Bank. This has not been verified, although organisers have conceded that there may have been some confusion.

It was easy to see why Nabil Amr, the conference spokesman and the PA’s ambassador to Egypt, in the evening described Wednesday as a “stormy” day.

Organisers are not the only ones who seem surprised at this turn of events. In the run-up, most analysts expected the conference to be, if not a formality, at least an important vote of confidence in Mr Abbas. The widely perceived need for Fatah to present a unified front was predicted to keep dissent to a minimum.

“I didn’t see this happening,” said Khader Khader, an analyst with the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre. “I thought things would be calmer.”

The idea had been, said Mr Khader, for Fatah to close ranks around Mr Abbas and appease the younger generation of leaders by including them, along with the current leadership, on the Central Committee and Revolutionary Council. The fact that that hasn’t happened showed “something is wrong with [the Fatah leadership’s] calculations”.

“I can’t imagine how things will develop now,” said Mr Khader, adding that the conference seemed to have posed more questions than it has answered.

“I had hoped the conference would have made Fatah stronger, but now I don’t think so. In a way that is good, because it shows the courage of some Fatah members to stand up against their leadership. But overall, it will simply leave Fatah as before.”

While that may have surprised analysts and organisers, it elicited no raised eyebrows from three customers at a coffee shop not far from the conference in Bethlehem yesterday.

The three men, all employed by a local hospital, expressed little surprise at the wrangling.

One, Adnan Mohammad, 27, went so far as to say that Fatah “is finished and has been for a while”.

Another, Eyad Radwan, 28, said he was a Fatah supporter, but he too accepted that the movement was “in a mess”.

However, he said, it was important that that mess be straightened out because Fatah “is the historic leader of the Palestinian cause”.

He did not expect the conference to be much help in that regard.

“There will be no change in Fatah from before the conference. The only change that can come is when all the old leaders are gone.”