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WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States President Bill Clinton will launch a last-ditch bid to rescue the Middle East peace process in separate talks with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Wednesday. The talks, to be held on the fringes of the U.N. Millennium Summit at the United Nations in New York, are likely to be tinged with pessimism, however. They seek to bring an end to the half-century of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and follow on from the latest three-way talks at Camp David, which ended in failure at the end of July. For the U.S. president, who leaves office at the end of January, a successful outcome to his Wednesday discussions with the two leaders is far from assured, despite a succession of trips by his advisors to the Middle East to prepare the ground for him as a decisive September 13 deadline looms. Arafat has threatened to declare an independent Palestinian state after the deadline, although U.S. and European pressure has led to indications Palestinian leaders may hold off the move for another few months. Clinton prepared for the meetings with an impromptu stopover in Cairo last Tuesday on his return from a tour of Nigeria and Tanzania, for discussions with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Clinton's concern is to find a compromise angle in the key stumbling block to an accord: the status of East Jerusalem over which both Israel and the Palestinians claim sovereignty. During the Camp David talks, Barak suggested to Yasser Arafat that the Arab sectors of East Jerusalem could come under Palestinian control-even Palestinian sovereignty except for the Old City where a special autonomous regime would be introduced. Israel annexed the eastern side of the city in 1967, extending its control further in succeeding years and installing more than 180,000 Israelis. Arafat judged Barak's offer unacceptable, and is still calling publicly for sovereignty of the entire eastern side of the city, where sacred Christian and Muslim sites are located. According to an Israeli official, U.S. Middle East Envoy Dennis Ross was attempting this weekend to pen the points of agreement and differences between the two sides, based on positions taken at Camp David. But the task will be difficult as both sides are now accusing each other of changing their positions on any headway made at Camp David. Different formulas for sovereignty have been put forward to try and get out of the impasse about the status of East Jerusalem. They are unlikely to be acceptable to either side, since the room for compromise on this delicate subject that either will consider is extremely limited. During a visit to France, Egypt's President Mubarak said the Figaro newspaper that Arafat could not accept shared sovereignty with Israel keeping security control in the Palestinian quarters. He said the only solution would be to grant the sacred Muslim sites and the Christian and Armenian neighborhoods to the Palestinians, leaving the Wailing Wall and the Old City's Jewish sector to the Israelis. A new failure of the talks in New York Wednesday could have severe consequences for the peace process because of Barak's increasingly fragile political position, after his coalition fell apart in July with the departure of three allied parties, plus the resignation of his Foreign Minister David Levy. |
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