|
Top U.S. Officials Embark on Trip to Mideast
 |
|
Burns
begins trip to Mideast to address conflict
|
WASHINGTON
D.C., May 29 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Ahead of
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet’s trip to
the region, U.S. Middle East envoy William Burns arrived in Cairo for
talks with Egyptian leaders about U.S. efforts to promote Arab-Israeli
peace that include reforming Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority,
news agencies reported.
Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, and the
highest ranking official on the region, will meet with Egyptian
Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher later Wednesday and with Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak on Thursday, Egyptian and U.S. officials said.
After Egypt, his first stop, Burns will travel to the Palestinian
Occupied Territories, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday in Rome that
Burns would be consulting with Middle Eastern officials "on a
political way forward."
"We have no illusions about the difficulties ahead," Powell
said in a statement.
"Progress must be made on all three tracks of our strategy if a
lasting end to Israeli-Palestinian violence and progress toward our
vision of two states - Israel and Palestine - living side-by-side in
peace and security can be realized," he added.
Focusing on reform of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority,
"Burns will consult on how best to support serious efforts on the
institution-building and political tracks," Powell continued in
his statement.
Burns' trip will precede that of Tenet who will be looking at
ways to reorganize the Palestinian Authority's security apparatus.
Before leaving Rome for Washington late Tuesday, Bush and Powell said
Tenet would leave on his mission later this week, possibly on Friday.
Bush told reporters he wanted to speak with Tenet before dispatching
him to the region and would do so on Wednesday.
Before Tenet leaves, I do want to go back and visit with him ... and,
at an appropriate time, we'll announce his schedule," Bush said.
"There needs to be the implementation of institutions necessary
for a state to evolve and that's exactly what our strategy is and
that's what we're going to work on," he said.
"The first step is to make sure that there's a security force in
place that keeps the security," Bush said.
"He will talk to them about transformation activities taking
place within the Palestinian Authority," Powell said.
"When we get reports back from Mr. Tenet and from Ambassador
Burns ... we will start to integrate all this information and see what
next steps should be taken," he said.
However, Powell said until hearing back from the two officials,
Washington would not put forward a detailed plan for
Israeli-Palestinian peace.
"We will also look at political options to see what the two
parties believe is possible at this time, and we'll see where that
takes us," he said when asked about a report in The Washington
Post that said Bush and his top aides were weighing whether to suggest
specifics.
"But we are not at this point prepared to table an American plan
with specific deadlines of the kind that was just mentioned by the
questioner," Powell said.
Burns and Tenet "will return to Washington for further review
prior to President's Mubarak's visit next week," Powell said in
his statement, referring to Mubarak's visit to the United States
beginning June 8.
Meanwhile,
a U.S. Defense Department official who met with Maher in Cairo
Wednesday, said that the "challenge of the moment" is to
cultivate the right Palestinian leadership to make peace with Israel
possible and get Washington's Arab allies to help.
During a visit to Egypt, Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for
policy, repeated Bush's “disappointment” with Arafat and Bush's
appeals for Arab states to promote peace.
"We've been encouraging Egypt, Saudi Arabia, [and] Jordan to
increase their role in helping to encourage the creation of the kinds
of conditions to make peace diplomacy fruitful," Feith told
reporters after talks with Maher.
"Of course, there has been a great frustration that the
conditions are not what we would like them to be," Feith said.
Feith, who said he discussed with Maher both the U.S.-led war and the
Arab-Israeli crisis, welcomed Mubarak's visit to the United States
next week as a positive development.
When a reporter asked if Arafat could be considered a write-off, he
replied, "We don't pick other people's leaders but President Bush
has repeatedly lamented Arafat's failure as a leader."
When asked if Israel will retreat to the borders it had before it
captured the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war,
as dictated by U.N. resolutions and international law, he replied that
borders "should be negotiated by the parties" themselves.
He
also addressed the issue of the Palestinian struggle against illegal
Israeli occupation, saying, "The purposeful targeting of
civilians is evil, and it is evil without regard to the cause of the
people perpetrating these attacks.
"If we don't take a clear moral stand against that as a method of
pursuing one's political aims, then there will be no end to it,"
he said.
He
did not, however, clarify whether the same view stands for Israeli
targeting of Palestinian civilians, which has seen over 2,000
Palestinians – the majority of whom are children, women and unarmed
men – killed in the past 19 months of Israeli aggressions. Israel
has been strongly condemned by much of the international community and
human rights groups, including in the U.S. – Israel’s staunchest
ally.
|
