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Egypt Supports Arafat, Powell No Longer Speaking To Him
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Maher, right, says Egypt supports Arafat.
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CAIRO
, June 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Egyptian Foreign
Minister Ahmed Maher reiterated
Egypt
's support for Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, as U.S. Secretary
of State Colin Powell said Sunday that the
U.S.
will "work hard" to help the Palestinians establish their
own state, but they must first overhaul their leadership.
Dismissing U.S.
President George W. Bush's call for Arafat's ouster in his speech last
week, Maher told reporters that "
Egypt
firmly supports the democratically-elected leadership of the
Palestinian people and rejects all efforts aimed at bypassing
it".
"The
Egyptian position ... is that we support the will of the Palestinian
people expressed in 1996 when President Arafat had been democratically
elected in an honest and free election," he said.
Bush conditioned
U.S.
support for a Palestinian state on Palestinians choosing "leaders
not compromised by terror," an implicit swipe at the Palestinian
leader.
Meanwhile, as
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday, echoing Bush, that
the
United States
will "work hard" to help Palestinians establish their own
state, but they must first overhaul their leadership.
The president
"is going to work hard for a state for the Palestinian people so
that they can live side by side in peace with the Jewish state,
Israel
," Powell told Fox News Sunday.
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Bush and Powell want Arafat out of the picture. |
"But it
begins with new leadership that is fighting against terror, not
tolerating terror or even encouraging terror."
Powell's words
echoed those uttered by Bush in a June 24 speech outlining his vision
for
Middle East
peace.
"What the
president did was to finally say what everyone has been
thinking," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told NBC's
Meet the Press television show Sunday.
"Unless
there is a new dynamic, unless there is a change in this leadership,
it is not going to be possible to move forward toward peace."
Powell noted
that, while
U.S.
officials still talk to "a variety of Palestinian leaders,"
they have had no conversations with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat
since Bush delivered the speech.
"At the
moment, we are not dealing with him," Powell said, adding that he
does not expect
Washington
to deal with Arafat in the future, either, "because his
leadership is flawed."
Meanwhile,
Egypt
and the Palestinians want a final deadline for
Israel
's withdrawal to its borders before the 1967 Middle East War, chief
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said
Sunday, June 30, 2002
.
The "common
Egyptian-Palestinian vision is the necessity of an Israeli withdrawal
to the borders of
June 4, 1967
and with a final deadline", Erakat told journalists after talks
with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
"This is the
Egyptian message to all the countries of the world, including the
United States", Erakat said, concerning the Palestinians' demand
for a total Israeli pullout from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Agence
France-Presse (AFP) said.
Erakat said that
Bush's Middle East speech, delivered Monday, June 24,
2002,"unfortunately did not constitute a complete plan" to
end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"The speech
gave no calendar ... and gives no final result," said Erakat.
For his part,
Maher said
Egypt
had asked
U.S.
officials to clarify the means of implementing the main points of
Bush's speech and a timeline for doing so.
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