7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Hectic diplomacy
Egypt has been engaged in a breathless diplomatic effort to hold together the fragile cease-fire in the Palestinian territories following last Friday's deadly Tel Aviv bombing. Khaled Dawoud and Tarek Atia report
Egypt is doing all it can, in coordination with other Arab nations, the United States and Europe, to stabilise the cease-fire in Palestine following the deadly suicide attack against a Tel Aviv discothèque on Friday night. Egypt believes the next step should be a movement towards lifting the tight Israeli siege on the self- rule areas and resumption of talks between the two sides, presidency sources say.
President Mubarak during talks with German Foreign Minister Fischer
photo: Mustafa Attia
Immediately after the Tel Aviv bombing, President Hosni Mubarak became involved in intense contact with concerned world leaders to make sure that Israel did not carry out a massive military reprisal against the Palestinians. Mubarak spoke several times by telephone to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as well as Jordan's King Abdullah, Syria's Bashar Al- Assad, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy commissioner. Mubarak was also in contact with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, whose coincidental visit to Palestine and Israel at this tense juncture left him no option but to try to mediate between the two sides, calling particularly for self-restraint.
Fischer arrived in Cairo on Monday night and held talks with Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher. On Tuesday, he met Mubarak for nearly two hours. Subsequent statements by both Maher and Fischer reflected an agreement on the steps they deem necessary for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and Palestine. After making sure that maintenance of the current cease-fire, which Fischer described as "fragile," remained viable, both sides should move towards implementing the report of former Senator George Mitchell, the Egyptians and Germans said.
The report, issued three weeks ago and aimed at ending the ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories, called for a package of measures to persuade both sides to return to the negotiating table. However, one stumbling block which prevented the implementation of the Mitchell report -- even before the Tel Aviv suicide bombing -- was Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's refusal to accept its recommendation for a total freeze of Israeli settlement activities in the occupied territories. Setting up the Mitchell fact- finding committee was part of an agreement reached between Arafat and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in Sharm El-Sheikh last October, only a few weeks after the outbreak of the Al- Aqsa Intifada.
Following the talks with Mubarak, Fischer said his efforts and those of other concerned parties had managed to prevent what could have been a "very tragic situation."
"We have to start with the political process as soon as possible," he said. "I think there is a link between a continuous cease-fire, stabilisation of this cease-fire and the beginning of the political process."
Presidency sources agreed, saying Egypt's efforts, combined with those of Fischer, the US and other European parties, avoided what might have amounted to a disaster if Israel reoccupied Palestinian self-rule areas in the West Bank. Israeli press reports said Sharon's "war cabinet," convening a few hours after the Tel Aviv bombing, had already defined the targets in the self- rule areas that would be hit. Israel also restricted the movement of all senior Palestinian officials, including Arafat, who now cannot move even from Ramallah to Gaza.
Egyptian officials, however, fear that if Israel were to carry out its threat of targeting activist members of militant Islamist groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it would re- open the door to revenge attacks and a new cycle of deadly violence.
Maher, in his joint news conference with Fischer after the presidential meeting, did not disagree with the German Foreign Minister's comment that the Mitchell report was currently the only initiative on the table. Asked whether the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative to end the violence, on which Cairo and Amman worked for weeks, remained an option, Fischer said all parties, including Cairo, agreed on the steps detailed in the Mitchell report for the resumption of political talks. He added that many of the ideas included in the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative were similar to those made by Mitchell.
Maher, meanwhile, reaffirmed Egypt's stand that Israel should accept the Mitchell report as a package, including a freeze on settlements and ending the tight siege of Palestinian areas. He said that it was important to keep the present relative calm in Palestine. "But at the same time, there is an urgent necessity to work for the implementation of the Mitchell report as a whole," he said.
Maher told reporters that US Secretary of State Colin Powell had telephoned him during the night, immediately after Friday's Tel Aviv attack. He said that Powell was upset, but the urgency of the call made it clear the US had finally decided to take a more active role in stopping the crisis from reaching breaking point. According to Maher, it was important to "direct this [US] involvement towards goals that we see will calm the situation."
Now that Arafat had declared a cease-fire, Maher said after meeting Fischer, it was important that Israel took steps to reduce the suffering of the Palestinian people. That would be the only way to move quickly towards the political dialogue and confidence-building measures necessary if there were any chance of both sides returning to the negotiating table.
Palestinian Minister of Information and Culture Yasser Abd-Rabbou, also in Cairo on Monday for a meeting with Maher, reiterated the same sentiment: "We believe the situation now requires political steps to reinforce the security steps, because the security steps alone, without effective political steps to implement what has been agreed upon, expose the security steps to collapse and failure."
Maher spent most of Saturday on the telephone to Arafat, Solana, EU envoy Miguel Moratinos, Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdel-Illah Al-Khatib and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. "We often hear a lot of contradictory statements coming from Israel, which makes it difficult to figure out at times the reality of Israeli policy," the Egyptian Foreign Minister said he told his Israeli counterpart.
Was there a real desire to restore calm to the region? "We're asking the Israeli government to understand the political dimensions of this whole issue," Maher said. "That its use of violence increases the chances of violence in return. They need to understand that real security is achieved only when each party gets their rights." That was the message Maher was conveying to all the parties he telephoned.
"We condemn any attacks on civilians, whether Israelis or Palestinians," the minister insisted. The fact, however, that "the number of Palestinian civilians, including children and women, who have been killed as a result of Israeli action is far greater than the number of Israeli victims ... is a telling sign of the truth as to where the source of violence is."
Answering a question from Al-Ahram Weekly as to whether he ascertained from his contacts whether the Americans and Israelis felt Arafat was mainly to blame for attacks such as that which took place last Friday. Maher said: "The Israelis say that. The Americans say he can do more. The truth is that the conditions created by Israel are what strangles the efforts made by the Palestinian Authority."
Maher went on: "Occupation is violence in itself, and closures and sieges and all these actions result in thwarted hopes and desperation ... We are not trying to justify these actions, but we want to place them in their proper context."
Maher asked Israel not to react in a way that would make political dialogue difficult, and aggravate an already tense and dangerous situation. "I think the message that I gave them will have an effect," the minister said.
Additional reporting by Soha Abdelaty
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