Whoever dares to do so, we will break their hands,” Ms Ciller shouted, before taking the same 40-mile route used by the Turkish expeditionary force that in 1974 carved out a canton, now a breakaway state, for the Turkish minority on the island.Such words complicate the work of diplomats struggling to re-establish calm after two ill-judged Greek Cypriot civilian marches on the front lines in the past week. They took the advice of the other director of the project, Esther Andreu, who suggested that if the best parts of the remains were removed and kept, there was no need to preserve the site. “I see no problem in continuing the work in this area,” she concluded.The conservative Mayor of Madrid, Jose Maria Alvarez de Manzano, said yesterday that the remains “were not worth preserving” and that “if there are traffic problems in this part of town, it is the fault of those who are obstinately trying to prevent anything useful being done for the city.”A number of experts, including the director of the Prado Museum, Fernando Checa, tried to stay authorities’ hand in recent days, emphasising that the finds were the last traces of a palace from Spain’s Golden Age in which several artists, including Diego Velazquez, had lived. But the regional authorities were more concerned to improve the city’s chronic traffic problems.

The square, once the favourite venue for Fascist rallies, fronts the present-day royal palace and has been a building site for years.
One of the two directors of the excavations, Manuel Retuerce, resigned over the destruction. He had submitted a report to the regional government urging them to conserve the remains, which he described as “unique in the history of Madrid”, and proposing that they be integrated into an ambitious redevelopment of the square.Earlier this year work was suspended for further excavations and a half- hearted exhibition mounted to canvass public opinion. Madrid’s city fathers were unrepentant yesterday after authorising the destruction this week of the remains of the city’s first royal palace, belonging to 16th- and 17th-century Habsburg monarchs, to make way for an underpass and a car park. The remains of two facades uncovered deep in the bowels of Orient Square in the ancient heart of the capital were bulldozed in defiance of a vigorous last-minute campaign to halt the work. His critics say that when he ruled part of Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s his use of power was equally authoritarian and arbitrary.. Mr Arafat’s defenders say he relies on his security apparatus because his ability to stop more suicide bombings is his one card in dealing with Israel and the US.

Saleh al-Taamari, a council member from Bethlehem, says: “It is not easy. We have to fight.” He admits the Palestinian media seldom covers dissent against Mr Arafat. The editor of al-Bilad, a Palestinian newspaper, who dared to reprint an article from Newsweek about corruption in the Palestinian leadership, was immediately picked up by the security police.Mr Arafat’s model of how the Palestinian enclaves ought to be governed seems to be Syria, with powerful security forces and his Fatah organisation playing the role of the Ba’ath party.In such a system a democratic assembly has little role. Once, in the chamber, he expressed astonishment that a woman should petition the council “when my office could deal with the matter in five minutes.” On another occasion, a discussion of the basic Palestinian law had to be postponed because Mr Arafat was attending a meeting in Cameroon.Ms Ashrawi says the council keeps a form of debate alive.

He said: “My village needs economic help,” which the council cannot give, and held up a fax he had sent to Mr Arafat saying his village supported his “wise leadership”.Mr Arafat seems to see the council, whose election was carefully monitored by the European Union and the former US president, Jimmy Carter, as largely decorative He has ignored 10 decisions to free detainees. “But now they know it is useless.” An elderly village Mukhtar (leader) leaving the building turned out to be on a visit to officials of the Ministry of Education, which also has offices there. In the corridor outside the council chamber, nobody was approaching councillors to express their grievances “They used to come,” one observer said. Attending a meeting yesterday of the council in Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian human rights advocate, said: “The council is working in terms of maintaining a political discourse, a critical appraisal of what is going on, and upholding the rule of law.”She described it as hypocritical for Israel and the United States to criticise the lack of Palestinian human rights while at the same time insisting on a permanent security clampdown in order to prevent suicide bombers.Ordinary Palestinians sense the council is impotent. The only antidote to this is more democracy.” However, few Palestinians, on or off the council, believe that Mr Arafat has any intention of moderating his autocratic style. When we were inside, the security police telephoned twice to say that if the meeting did not end they would attack us and smash up the place.”Haidar Abdul-Shafi, a Palestinian leader from Gaza, who was also in the restaurant, says the order “must have come from Arafat”.Many Palestinians are deeply disappointed by the way in which the 88- member council has been marginalised.Dr Khalil Shikaki, a political scientist at the Centre for Palestine Research and Studies in Nablus, says: “Our security services increasingly dominate every aspect of our political life.