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Mubarak
(L) stopped in London Wednesday for talks with Blair. |
CAIRO,
June 5 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – With a peace initiative
aimed at breaking the Arab-Israeli deadlock through a proclamation of a
Palestinian mini-state next year, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak heads
Wednesday, June 5, to Washington to meet U.S. President George W. Bush.
Mubarak
stopped Wednesday in London first for talks with British Prime Minister
Tony Blair before heading on to Washington later in the day to meet with
Bush at Camp David Friday, June 7 and Saturday, June 8, Agence
France-Presse (AFP) said, based on a report by Egypt's state-run MENA
news agency.
Mubarak’s
quick visit to London coincides with the Blair’s warning to one of his
aides to immediately sever relations with a prominent British figure of
Syrian origin who had called the deadly Israeli incursions into
Palestinian territories a form of fascism and hardline Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon a Nazi, according to Voice
of America (VOA).
A
senior Arab official told AFP the outlines of Mubarak's peace plan,
including mainly a Palestinian state being proclaimed in early 2003 on
land the Palestinian Authority currently has under the 1993 Oslo
Accords.
That
area makes up no more than 42 percent of the Palestinian territories
Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East War.
The
state would be announced after the Palestinian security services are
restructured, political reforms adopted and presidential and
parliamentary elections held in late 2002, the official said.
The
Palestinian state would be then admitted formally as a United Nations
member, and negotiations subsequently held with Israel, leading to a
total Israeli withdrawal from the lands it occupied in 1967.
In
an interview with The New York Times,
published Tuesday, June 4, 2002, Mubarak said he plans to outline a
final settlement with new ideas for sharing the holy city of Jerusalem
(Al-Quds), determining the fate of Palestinian refugees and tracing the
Palestinian borders with Israel.
A
state covering all the territory recognized as Palestinian by the United
Nations must be accepted before discussions on hot topics such as
Jerusalem, colonial Jewish settlements, and refugees, Mubarak was quoted
as saying.
"We
are fed up with declaration of principles. . . . We're going to discuss
how can we manage to make a breakthrough," he said.
Mubarak's
trip is the latest in a succession of high-level diplomatic missions.
CIA Director George Tenet and U.S. envoy William Burns are in the Middle
East now. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana was there
earlier in the week, as so was German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
The Israeli premier is to travel to Washington Monday, June 10.
White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Tuesday that Bush would listen to
Mubarak and Sharon, then hear back from envoys Burns and Tenet before
determining if the U.S. government should take additional action, AFP
reported.
"We
don't expect an announcement" after the meeting with Bush, Egyptian
spokesman Nabil Osman said Tuesday, or even total acceptance of
Mubarak's ideas, which he described as much more detailed than a Saudi
Arabian initiative along the same lines approved by Arab leaders in
March, The Washington Post
reported.
"What
is required now is to agree on an approach, knowing it will not please
everyone 100 percent," he said.
The
Washington Post said that the question before Bush is how to
flesh out his vision for peace in the Middle East based equally on
Palestinian statehood and Israeli security. Such a question is one that
U.S. officials said the president is still some distance from answering.
Concerning
the issue of the upcoming conference, the Arabs have said there is no
point in having such a meeting unless it begins with a set agenda and a
agreement on statehood.
"We
have gone about as far as we can," a senior Arab official in one of
the key U.S. partner-nations in the region told the Post.
"We
need leverage here, we need you to step in and say, 'Here's what we mean
by a Palestinian state.' " The international meeting, he said,
"can only be convened if you have that final goal . . . and we
can't have a final goal unless we have a date attached to it."
"There
is opportunity," the Arab official said. "It needs a little
bit of guts. I think everybody else has shown it, and now they're
waiting for the president."
Mubarak
told The New York Times
that Sharon and Arafat will never come to an agreement and it is up to
the United States to "make" them.
"It
is time for the United States to muster its imagination, its
energy" to meld ideas into a way forward, Osman said.
Egyptian
sources say that if Mubarak succeeds in persuading Bush to accept this
idea, Mubarak will extend his stay in order to meet with Sharon, who has
been invited to Washington immediately after Mubarak is scheduled to
depart, the daily Israeli newspaper, Haaretz,
reported.
The
paper quoted Egyptian sources as saying that
"if Mubarak succeeds in persuading President Bush to adopt
the Egyptian plan, which enjoys Jordanian and Saudi support, the
international peace conference Bush has proposed could become Madrid
2.".
