29 March - 4 April 2001
Issue No.527
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 29 March - 4 April 2001 Issue No.527 |
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Mubarak's Washington visit
Cairo and Washington do not see eye to eye on all the issues that will be raised during the coming visit of President Mubarak to the White House. Mohamed Sid-Ahmed comments
It is clear from the interview President Mubarak gave Al-Ahram editor-in-chief Ibrahim Nafie last Friday that the Bush administration's hard-line approach to a number of regional issues and its problematic relationship with several Arab states is becoming such a source of tension in Cairo's relations with Washington that the president is planning to bring the issue up with President Bush on his forthcoming visit to Washington.
More specifically, the president intends to talk about Libya and to press for a lifting of the sanctions against it now that the Lockerbie problem is out of the way; about Iraq and the need to end the suffering of the Iraqi people within the framework of UN resolutions; about Sudan, and the dangers inherent in its division; about Syria, whose status as Egypt's partner in the peace process cannot be ignored by Egypt under any circumstances; and about Lebanon and the unresolved Shebaa problem.
For Egypt, these are problems affecting fellow Arab states with which it is keen to have good neighbourly relations. For the present American administration, these states are all "rogue" states implicated, to one extent or another, in terrorist activities which can only be treated by Washington as hostile entities. Mubarak would like to dissipate all misunderstandings and ambiguities surrounding this problem during his visit to Washington, as a necessary prerequisite for healthy, transparent relations with the US and for the strengthening of these relations in future.
Egypt is entitled to expect Washington to apply a non-discriminatory approach towards all states of the world, and not to use double standards in its dealings with the Arab states on one hand and with other states, including Israel, on the other. Whatever the special relationship between Israel and the United States, the rules of international legality should prevail in all cases.
For example, during his visit to Washington a few days ago, Sharon made it clear that there would be no question of a resumption of negotiations until there was a cessation of violence, vowing that he would launch "a relentless fight against terrorism." The implication here is that violence and terrorism are features of the Intifada, and that the Palestinians alone are responsible for delaying the resumption of peaceful talks aimed at reaching a settlement. But according to a report presented by a special commission of enquiry acting on a mandate issued by the UN Human Rights Commission, Israeli security forces have overreacted to the Palestinian uprising. The report found that the army had used "excessive and disproportionate force," and rejected the Israeli government's claim that it acted with the force necessary to protect its own people. The commission said that hundreds of Palestinians had been killed or injured by the Israeli military, whose own soldiers suffered no serious injuries, and noted that the smaller number of Israeli deaths had mostly resulted from direct confrontations between the two sides in areas around Israeli settlements.
The Bush administration has sided with Israel in criticising the report, and it will be interesting to see how it reacts to the findings of another commission of enquiry headed by former US Senator George Mitchell, best known for his remarkable peace-making efforts in Ulster. The Mitchell commission recommended "the urgent need to resume negotiations and take concerted action to put an end to violence." Will Bush embrace the Sharon viewpoint, which categorically refuses to resume negotiations before violence is ended, or the UN viewpoint that negotiations should not be delayed any longer under the pretext that violence is not over?
All this emphasises the need to stop bandying the word terrorism about indiscriminately, and the importance of establishing objective criteria not only to assess the cases of Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan and even Iraq, but also to overcome the present impasse in the Palestinian problem. The new Bush administration has decided to address both the Palestinian problem and the Iraqi issue from the point at which they stood at the time of the previous Bush administration, as though the eight years of the Clinton presidency never happened. But time does not stand still, and it is hard to see how they can erase nearly a decade of American history, indeed of world history, and ignore all the developments that took place and the many agreements signed during those years.
On the Palestinian problem, Bush has discarded Clinton's "ideas" as a basis for a framework agreement between the parties. Given that these ideas were based on the Oslo agreements and all the agreements reached between the Palestinians and Israelis after Oslo, should the decision to relinquish them be read as a relinquishment of the Oslo frame of reference and a return to the framework of the Madrid conference launched in the days of the first Bush administration? In other words, will Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 once again become the exclusive frames of reference for a resolution of the Palestinian problem?
During his trip to Washington, Sharon tried to project the image of a moderate, responsible leader. The American administration played along, treating him as worthy of his position as Israel's elected prime minister rather than as a man whose hands are covered in blood. But the charade did not convince Arab leaders that Sharon has changed, or that he was elected by a wider margin that any prime minister in Israel's history because he had renounced his past.
Quoting Israeli sources, the French daily Libération reported that Sharon asked Bush not to receive Arafat as long as the Intifada continued. According to the same sources, Bush reiterated his promise to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby dashing any hopes the Arabs may have harboured that it was only an electoral promise or a slip of Colin Powell's tongue. Bush then asked the Israeli prime minister to pay to the Palestinian Authority the $50 million Israel owes it, but Sharon refused on the grounds that "there is no reason to pay money to an entity that attacks Israel!" In refusing the American president's request, Sharon was acting true to form, displaying the arrogant intransigence with which he has long been associated, this time not towards the Palestinians but towards Israel's closest ally. Adding insult to injury, he ordered the resumption of construction work on 2,800 housing units in the Har Homa settlement in Arab East Jerusalem on the same day he met with Bush in the White House. Ironically, the former President Bush's secretary of state, James Baker, had asked Sharon, who was Israel's housing minister at the time, not to confiscate Arab land to build the Har Homa settlement.
Bush is in no way indebted to the Jewish lobby in the United States, with the vast majority of American Jews voting for his rival Al Gore. Such connections as he does have with the Middle East are through the American oil lobby, which has close links with the Arab oil states in the gulf, as well as through two leading members of his team, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who held key positions in his father's administration during the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein.
Nevertheless, Bush has decided to deal with Sharon as though he is no longer a terrorist but a respectable statesman, while assuming that not only Iraq and Iran, but also Libya and Sudan, can be classified as "rogue" states. Bush is even ready to consider Sharon's argument that the definition be extended to include Syria, Lebanon and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat!
Egypt adopts a different outlook. It does not look at partners in the peace process as if they are enemies, but furnishes every possible effort to treat even enemies as if they were partners in the process. The Bush administration is faced with the need to choose between these two antipodal outlooks. Adopting them both simultaneously is impossible.
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