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TEHRAN, Aug 14 (AFP)-Ambassadors from the Organization of the Islamic Conference nations will hold a meeting here Tuesday to hash out a policy on Jerusalem ahead of a planned OIC reunion next week. Most ambassadors from the pan-Islamic group were expected to attend Tuesday as the OIC prepares for Sunday's executive meeting called after a request from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. The flurry of meetings - including a reunion of the OIC's Jerusalem committee in the Moroccan capital of Rabat on August 28 - comes as Arafat nears his self-imposed September 13 deadline for declaring an independent Palestinian state. Diplomats here who asked not to be named said that Tuesday's Tehran gathering would "in principle outline everything" for Sunday's meeting of the OIC directorship, which includes Djibouti, Morocco and Sierra Leone as well as Iran and the Palestinians. A source at the Iranian foreign ministry, where Tuesday's meeting will be held, said Monday that the directorship meeting was "still in the preparation stage." Meanwhile a diplomat said "our Iranian brothers have been working on the Jerusalem question, particularly after the failure of the Camp David talks." Jerusalem was the main stumbling block at Camp David and since the talks collapsed late last month both sides have made a concerted diplomatic push to bolster international support for their respective positions. Arafat, who is currently in China, was in Iran last week and had been pushing for a full meeting of the OIC's 56 member states on the Jerusalem question. But Sunday's meeting in Tehran - which currently holds the rotating OIC presidency, does not recognize the state of Israel and is opposed to the Middle East peace talks- will only gather the five director members. Iranian officials expressed delight at the collapse of the talks and have repeatedly insisted that Muslims around the world can brook no compromise on the Jerusalem question. Iran has sent its own envoy on a tour of Arab and Islamic capitals in the wake of the Camp David failure and a diplomat said there was currently "a lot of speculation" about the outcome of the diplomatic initiative. The Palestinians want east Jerusalem, occupied by the Israelis since 1967, to be the capital of a future Palestinian state while Israel has insisted the city - holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims - will remain undivided. Both sides had set an ambitious September deadline to reach a final peace accord but with the collapse of the Camp David talks in July, pressure has been increasing on Arafat not to make a unilateral declaration of statehood. Washington and Moscow have both expressed serious reservations about going ahead with the declaration and a senior official of Arafat's PLO said Monday that the Palestinians could delay such a move until November. "If it is not September 13, it may be November 15, but the Palestinian Central Council is to decide about this," said Zakaria al-Agha, a member of the PLO executive committee in Gaza City. The central council, the second-highest Palestinian decision making body, is due to meet in early September on the statehood issue. November 15 is the anniversary of Arafat's declaration of Palestinian independence in Algiers in 1988 at the height of the Intifada, or uprising, against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Meanwhile an OIC official at the group's headquarters in the western Saudi city of Jeddah said that its Jerusalem committee would meet in Rabat in two weeks. The Jerusalem Committee consists of Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Syria, in addition to the Palestinian Authority. |
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