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Mussa Tells Sharon To
‘Withdraw First, Before Proposing Conferences’
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Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa
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CAIRO, April 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa said Tuesday that Israel's proposal for a Middle East peace conference was only aimed to deflect attention from its military actions, his office reported.
The Israeli proposal falls into the category of "public relations rather than serious work," Mussa told journalists traveling with him to London, according to a transcript of his remarks sent by his headquarters in Cairo, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The proposal seeks to draw attention away from Israel's "aggressive" practices and its "systematic violation" of all humanitarian norms and conventions, Mussa charged.
Mussa denounced Sharon as "the self-proclaimed referee" who decides who attends the conference, complaining he excluded Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and the European Union.
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Arabs view sharon as a not-trustworthy
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Before proposing conferences, Mussa said, the Israeli government should start first by implementing an immediate pullout from the Palestinian territories and lift the siege on the Palestinian people and Arafat.
He said that, based on his contacts, Arab Foreign Ministers had "suspicions concerning the intentions of the Israeli government," believing it "seeks to waste time."
Arab states widely feared that Sharon was playing a trick with his U.S.-backed call for a Middle East peace conference, with Syria rejecting the proposal outright.
Newspapers in Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states that made peace with Israel, as well as in Lebanon and Syria, still technically at war with the Jewish state, scoffed at a "peace" offer from a warmonger.
Palestinian analysts already dismissed Sharon's proposal as a ploy to give his army time to finish off its offensive in the West Bank, a view echoed in Cairo, Amman, Beirut, Damascus, as well as Gulf Arab capitals.
"Sharon's latest proposal is only meant to pull the wool over the world's eyes," columnist Ramadan Kader concluded in the Egyptian Gazette, the English-language sister publication of the government-run al-Gomhuriya.
"He expects the debate his suggestion would raise to be lengthy enough to allow his army to do the gory job," he wrote in the Cairo daily.
With his troops still committing war crimes against the Palestinians, Sharon announced Sunday that he proposed to the United States it organizes a peace conference grouping Israeli, Palestinian, Egyptian, Jordanian, Saudi and Gulf state representatives and perhaps Morocco, but excluded Arafat.
The idea won the swift backing of Washington, but Arab leaders and officials were at the very least cool to it and Syria, through its official Baath daily, rejected it outright as a "dirty maneuver."
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said Egypt had not received an official proposal yet but that Sharon's offer appeared aimed at avoiding "any serious negotiations."
Maher also faulted the proposal for "excluding parties whose participation is important to trying to push forward the peace process in the same direction, such as Europe, Russia and the United Nations."
Egypt backs Arafat as the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinians, even though U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said "the conference does not necessarily require his (Arafat's) personal presence to get started."
In Israel on Monday, the top U.S. diplomat said the meeting need not be at heads of state but at ministerial level, and that the idea was still in the planning phase.
In Amman, Jordanian newspapers scoffed at a conference without Arafat as well as one without major players like the European Union while expressing new doubts about U.S. aims in the region.
"If Sharon expects any Arab country to sit at a table that would be off-limits to Arafat, then credit must be given to his perversely fervid imagination," the Jordan Times said.
The daily newspaper Al-Dustour also poured criticism on Powell as having bowed to a "request by Sharon to a new international conference on peace in the Middle East that will not be attended by Arafat ... raising the level of pessimism around his mission."
Newspapers in the Gulf and Iraq said Sharon's proposal is another attempt "to waste time and turn attention away from the latest butchery of the Palestinian people," in the words of Dubai's official Al-Bayan daily newspaper.
In Beirut, the Al-Mostaqbal daily, owned by Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, asked "what is the use of a new peace conference as long as Israel obstinately refuses to submit to international resolutions and defies the (UN) Security Council" that asked Israel to withdraw its troops from the autonomous Palestinian territories.
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