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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 July - 2 August 2000 Issue No. 492
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Before the fall
By Thomas GorguissianLast Monday, the 14th day of the Camp David talks, White House spokesman, Joe Lockhart, confessed, that negotiators were showing signs of fatigue. "I think everyone is feeling the effect of some late nights, but they're still hard at it." He added, "it remains to be seen whether exhaustion will help the process or hurt the process." It is now clear that exhaustion did not help the process.
Indeed, up until the last moment when the talks broke down a "news blackout" had been tightly imposed. The so-called "leaks" served to set the agenda, and were often used as "talking points" for the public debates, television shows and reports, but were of no great help in predicting the outcome of what was taking place behind closed doors.
Last week, and after some dramatic hours on late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning, when US spokesmen announced that the talks had ended with no agreement, most of the press corps gave a sigh of relief. Not because they were over, as the situation was interpreted and analysed at the beginning, or because talks were revived, as became clear later, but because President Bill Clinton, who looked completely exhausted in the press centre, was leaving for Okinawa to participate in the G-8 Summit. The president's absence, even for just three days, gave a chance or, in peace process lexicon, a "window of opportunity" for the journalists to change guard, take a little rest and prepare themselves for work following Clinton's return.
During those dramatic moments, no one was able to tell exactly what made both Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, at a certain moment, decide to leave Camp David, or, later, what made them change their minds and stay to continue talks.
Last minute efforts by Clinton to save Palestinian-Israeli talks had apparently failed to bridge the wide gaps between the two sides. Meanwhile, Palestinians demonstrated in occupied territories over the past week to confirm their support of Arafat and his refusal to compromise on Jerusalem as the future capital of the State of Palestine, to be declared on 13 September
(photos: Reuters, AFP)
As reporters have been informed over and over again, Jerusalem is the issue that presents the biggest challenge to reaching an agreement. What will the future of the city be? What are the terms of engagement in that dispute? and, What would the so-called "shared sovereignty," proposed by the Americans, actually consist of?
During Clinton's absence, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright tried to keep the "revived" talks alive. A basketball game took place between mixed teams of the negotiators, in which neither team won nor lost.
One day after Clinton's departure to Japan, Barak entered into a "seclusion stage" meeting nobody. It was reported in the Israeli press that Barak was "in a gloomy mood." Meanwhile, Arafat was invited by Albright to her farm near Leesburg, Virginia, for a lunch and a relaxing walk in the fields. Over the weekend, Palestinian chief negotiator, Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, returned from Ramallah after attending his son's wedding on Thursday.
On Sunday, the Israeli prime minister requested a trip to the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg. He was accompanied by Secretary Albright. Twenty years ago, former President Jimmy Carter took both late President Anwar Sadat and late Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin to that historical site. Carter wanted to demonstrate, as he wrote later in his memoirs, the high cost of war in order to persuade the two leaders to sign the Camp David peace agreement, the first between Israel and an Arab country.
Last Sunday evening, President Clinton was back at Camp David. In the first press briefing after his return, and after continuing talks until 5.00am, White House spokesman, Lockhart, told reporters, "In the most general sense, the president, in his mind, is working on what I'll call a rolling assessment of whether the substance and atmosphere of these talks are ones that potentially could lead to an agreement." Then he added, "Should he come to the conclusion that the substance of the discussions and the atmosphere of the discussions do not have the potential to lead to an agreement, then he will act accordingly and bring these discussions to an end."
Also on the 14th day of talks it was reported that CIA director George Tenet, "has been up there from time to time," but as has been the case since the beginning of the talks, no specifics of Tenet's involvement were mentioned. Lockhart confirmed this report. "He was here for a day or two. He's now gone. And beyond that, I'm going to leave it to the CIA to say 'no comment,'" Lockhart said. Tenet was also present at the Wye River talks a year ago between Arafat and former right-wing Israeli premier, Binyamin Netanyahu. It was reported that the focus of his presence was the security measures taken or requested by both sides.
In the last day of the Wye talks, and with Netanyahu's insistence on the release of Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, serving a life term in a US jail, it was reported that Tenet categorically rejected that request. Last weekend, the Pollard case was once again mentioned as a condition set by Barak to sign a final deal with the Palestinians. Similarly, the London-based Arabic daily, Al-Hayat, reported that Barak asked Clinton to use Washington's special relation with Cairo to release Israeli spy, Azam Azam, who had been sentenced by a state security court in Egypt to 15 years imprisonment after he was convicted for spying in 1997.
The White House did not provide any calendar deadline, and domestic issues sooner rather than later were bound to dominate the news, overshadowing any thing else. The choice of Dick Cheney as vice-president on the ticket of Republican candidate George W Bush, stole the spotlight throughout Monday evening. By Tuesday afternoon this round of the peace process was announced dead.
