WASHINGTON, June 30: The United States pressed on with its effort to force the removal of Yasser Arafat on Sunday, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying Washington was not talking to the Palestinian chairman now and had no plans to in the future.
“I worked for 18 months to try to put in place a plan that would allow Chairman Arafat to demonstrate his leadership,” he told CBS “Face the Nation.” “We would have been way along if the violence had been brought down. Chairman Arafat simply did not seize any of these opportunities to bring the violence under control.”
“Moreover, after the Israelis pulled back from the recent occupation, we thought maybe we have some movement,” said Powell. “What we saw instead were more bombings. Bombing after bombing after bombing after bombing, day after day. Frankly, we also saw continuing indications that there was complicity with the senior levels in the Palestinian Authority.”
US ALONE ON ANTI-ARAFAT EFFORT: The United States appears nearly alone internationally in being convinced that Arafat must go.
In a statement issued after a summit in Canada, the Group of Eight industrial nations said Palestinians must adopt democracy but failed to get behind the effort to replace Arafat.
British Foreign Minister Tony Blair expressed frustration with Arafat but did not call for his removal. “It’s for the Palestinians to elect the people that they choose to elect,” said Blair, the closest US ally.
And Saudi Arabia, Washington’s main Gulf Arab ally, opposes replacing Arafat, the head of Saudi intelligence was quoted as saying in an interview published on Saturday.
Prince Nawaf bin Abdul-Aziz told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat newspaper that Bush could complicate Middle East peace efforts by demanding that Palestinians dump the leader they elected in 1996.
“The kingdom is against any intervention in the internal affairs of the Palestinians. We must leave it to them to decide who their president is and not to have any power such as the United States impose one on them,” Nawaf said.
Arafat himself offered on Sunday to meet with Bush “any time, anywhere” to promote Middle East peace.
“I would like to meet President Bush any time at a place of his choice so we can work towards comprehensive peace,” Arafat, speaking by satellite link, told an audience of businessmen and political leaders in the Swiss mountain resort of Crans Montana.
SAEB ERAKAT: Egypt and the Palestinians want a final deadline for Israel’s withdrawal to its 1967 pre-war borders, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said on Sunday in Cairo.
The “common Egyptian-Palestinian vision is the necessity of an Israeli withdrawal to the borders of June 4 1967 and with a final deadline,” Erakat told journalists after talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
“This is the Egyptian message to all the countries of the world, including the United States,” Erakat said, concerning the Palestinians’ demand for a full Israeli pull-out from the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Erakat said that US President Bush’s Middle East speech, delivered last Monday, “unfortunately did not constitute a complete plan” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“The speech gave no calendar, set no milestones and gives no final result,” said Erakat.
For his part, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said Egypt had asked US officials to clarify the means of implementing the main points of Bush’s speech and a timeline for doing so. Both officials avoided comment on the cornerstone of Bush’s speech — a veiled call for the dumping of Yasser Arafat as Palestinian leader.
Bush said as a condition for US support for a Palestinian state, Palestinians must elect “leaders not compromised by terror.”
Neither did Bush lay down a timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state, something Mubarak strived to get from him on his visit to Washington from June 5-9.—Reuters/AFP