|
||||||||
  |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Mideast 'quartet' talks set for next monthMeeting will promote U.S. road map for Palestinian state
From Andrea Koppel
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell will meet next month with fellow ministers of the so-called Mideast "quartet" in Washington to advance a U.S.-sponsored road map for the creation of a Palestinian state, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday. Plans for the December 20 meeting had been reported unofficially last week. The quartet includes the United States, Russia, United Nations and European Union. Diplomats said the talks will take place on the sidelines of the U.S.-European Union summit in Washington. The talks are a follow-up to a quartet meeting two weeks ago in Amman, Jordan. That discussion came after Assistant Secretary of State William Burns' visit last month to the Middle East. Burns presented the Israelis, Palestinians and key Arab allies with the Bush administration's outline for a provisional Palestinian state by the end of 2003 and a final status agreement by the end of 2005. The proposal drew mixed reviews. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians said the ideas included positive elements, but they criticized other aspects. Since then, the State Department has been "fine-tuning" the road map based on feedback from the parties. Although the quartet would like to announce a final version of the plan at the meeting next month, diplomats said they were unsure if the document would be ready. "Our aim is to roll it out," one senior diplomat said last week. "I think we have done a lot to advance it, but there are some further touches that have to be made." Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky said last week that he told U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Vice President Dick Cheney that these talks should be postponed until after the Israeli elections in January. Sharansky said that because of the heated campaign environment in Israel it will be "very problematic" to hold meaningful discussions about moving forward with the U.S. road map. "It will be very difficult to have such serious discussions or fruitful discussions with the atmosphere of elections because, of course, those decisions will become part of the political issues for the electoral debate," Sharansky told reporters after the Armitage meeting. In particular, Israel has taken issue with a timeline laid out in the U.S. plan, Sharansky said, because it says the Palestinians did not live to up their obligations under the Oslo Accords. "We learned this game with Oslo, when each time there was an attempt to make a timeline, this date would become something sacred, and all the others expected from us to deliver on this date," he said. He also said Palestinian reform was not sufficiently "developed" in the road map because it focused on the election of new leaders instead of emphasizing systematic changes. "I believe that Palestinian people will reach democracy not through some cosmetic changes of putting one person instead of the other person but through real changes," he said. Another complicating factor is this week's Likud party primary in Israel. Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is challenging Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the Likud leadership. Should Netanyahu lose, it may be awkward for him to travel to Washington to meet with Powell.
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
