NEW YORK, July 17: The United States, while determined to ostracise Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, will try to “empower” some of his ministers to promote its plans to streamline Palestinian security forces, a senior US State Department official said on Tuesday.
The US Central Intelligence Agency, which is expected to play a central role in the plans, could deal with people who take their orders from Arafat, such as new Palestinian Interior Minister Abdel-Razaq al-Yehiyeh and the existing heads of the various Palestinian security services, he said.
The approach is tantamount to pretending that Arafat does not exist at the head of the Palestinian Authority and that the subordinate officials are autonomous agents.
It could add to the confusion about US policy toward the Palestinian leader, which only Israel supports.
“What I’m focused on is the question of who we are dealing with and we are not dealing directly with Arafat,” the official, who asked not to be named, said.
“With the Palestinians, part of our message has been to empower individual ministers and others with whom we deal, both from the PA (Palestinian Authority) and from Palestinian civil society,” he added.
The official was speaking after US Secretary of State Colin Powell outlined to European and U.N. colleagues a draft US plan for what he called responsible and professional Palestinian security services.
Powell was chairing a meeting in New York of the Middle East quartet, an informal policy coordination group which includes the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. Powell also met Arab foreign ministers.
Asked who the CIA planned to deal with on the Palestinian side, the US official said: “We’ve talked to the new minister of interior so far. We’ll have to talk to his service chiefs and others ... but we are not talking to Arafat directly.”
Participants in the “quartet” meeting gave contradictory accounts of how far the CIA has gone with the security plan.
US ISOLATED: The United States found itself isolated on two key Middle East issues on Tuesday as its partners in the international diplomatic “quartet” differed sharply with its stance on Yasser Arafat and the pace of Israel’s response to Palestinian reforms.
Meeting just hours after a West Bank bus ambush that killed eight Israelis, representatives of the quartet — the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — found common ground in condemning the attack and endorsing US President George W. Bush’s call for a Palestinian state within three years.
But they appeared deeply split on two issues critical to moving forward with peace efforts.
UN chief Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, representing the European Union, all backed the beleaguered Arafat despite Bush’s call for his ouster and less-than-subtle US moves to marginalize him.
“We all share the end objective of two states living in peace, side by side,” Annan said. “What we have to do is to work out how we get there ... in three years’ time.”
“As for Arafat, we all have our respective positions; the UN still recognizes Chairman Arafat, and we will continue to deal with him until the Palestinians decide otherwise,” Annan said.
Ivanov echoed those remarks.
“As for Chairman Arafat, he is the legitimately elected leader of Palestine, and while he is in this capacity, we will continue to maintain our relations with him,” he said.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who on Monday said he was open to the idea of giving Arafat some kind of symbolic leadership role, acknowledged that it was the right of the Palestinian people to elect their leaders and said the quartet meeting had not focused on any one individual.
“This is about finding a way forward and not about personalities,” Powell said.
A senior State Department official acknowledged the rift.
“We obviously do have tactical differences over the issue of dealing with Arafat,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity after the meeting.—Reuters/AFP