1 - 7 November 2001
Issue No.558
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 1 - 7 November 2001 Issue No.558 |
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Spanish visit
PRESIDENT Hosni Mubarak is due to leave for Spain today to address a Euro-Mediterranean symposium. Mubarak will also conduct talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar on the Middle East peace process and the ongoing US military operation in Afghanistan.Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, who is accompanying the president, will meet with his Israeli counterpart Shimon Peres on the fringes of the same symposium which opens today.
This will be the first meeting between the two foreign ministers in around three months. Asked whether the get-together would be useful in light of Israel's continued attacks against the Palestinians, Maher told reporters yesterday: "We have to knock on all doors as long as our goal is peace, and as long as our demands are clear and precise." He added "it is important to convey to [Peres] our position and opinions."
Meanwhile, Maher told reporters that he had no information whether Palestinian President Yasser Arafat will meet with Peres in Spain. Arafat, touring European countries, is also expected to take part in the Euro-Med symposium.
Ice breaking?
UK PRIME Minister Tony Blair has welcomed Syria's condemnation of the 11 September attacks on the United States, in the first visit to Syria by a British leader for more than 30 years. During the visit, Blair reiterated that terrorism, not Islam, is the target of the US-led campaign. Blair arrived in Syria on Tuesday on the first leg of a Middle East tour.
At a news conference after the talks, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad made clear the importance of tackling the underlying causes of tension in the world in order, as he put it, to pull the rug from under the terrorists. The two leaders clearly had differences of opinion, with the Syrian president criticising the war in Afghanistan. "We cannot accept what we see every day on our television screens, whereby hundreds of innocent civilians are dying," Al-Assad said. He also took issue with some definitions of terrorism, refusing to class Palestinian militant groups with offices in Syria as terrorists. "We have made distinctions between terrorism and resistance, and insisted on the distinction between Islam and terrorism," Al-Assad said.
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