In an interview with three prominent Egyptian journalists in Cairo, US Secretary of State Colin Powell talks about the US-sponsored roadmap to Palestinian-Israeli peace and America's vision for a post-Saddam Middle East Can we ask you to give us a briefing on your visits to Cairo and Jerusalem? Here in Cairo it is a pleasure to once again spend time with a very distinguished leader of the Arab world, President Mubarak. But beyond that, he's an old friend of mine. We have known each other for between 20 and 25 years now, and I have the greatest respect and admiration for him, so it is a pleasure to meet him. We always have good, candid discussions. Today I briefed him on the situation in Iraq, where we are in the midst of our efforts at stabilisation and providing security for the people, the beginning of our reconstruction efforts and the beginning of the political process to put in place an Iraqi government that will be democratic and represent all of the people. I then told him about my trip to Syria last week and the strong message I gave to President Bashar Al-Assad. I hoped, in light of the changed strategic circumstances in the region, Syria would review its policies with respect to providing a place in Damascus for Hamas and Palestinian groups, like Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which would be destabilising to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Then I briefed the president on my time in Israel and Jericho yesterday, with Prime Minister Sharon and Prime Minister Abbas. From my conversations yesterday I came away with a sense that both Prime Minister Sharon and Prime Minister Abbas want to take advantage of the new situation that is before them. With the confirmation of Prime Minister Abbas, we now have a Palestinian leader that the United States is comfortable working with and talking to. I'm the first senior official to have the chance to meet with Prime Minister Abbas since his confirmation. And Prime Minister Sharon now has somebody that he can talk to and is comfortable talking to. I told President Mubarak that both sides seem to me to be taking preliminary steps, but steps nonetheless, down the path that is laid out in the roadmap. On the Palestinian side, this has involved the appointment of a prime minister and the formation of a cabinet. These are steps that were expected and anticipated in the roadmap. Sharon has announced some steps that he is taking and will be taking in the days ahead. He has also given me some assurances privately that steps will be taken in the coming days. This shows me that he is willing to start moving in this direction. Both of them know that President Bush is now prepared to engage very, very intensely and more fully in this process. The roadmap is a way of capturing President Bush's vision on 24 June of last year. I think it also reflects the vision that the Arab League laid out at the Beirut Summit meeting last year. We support the roadmap. It is something that we wrote with our partners. The Palestinians have fully accepted it. The Israelis have neither accepted it nor rejected it. They have issues with respect to it. They have questions. They have comments they wish to provide us. They are a free sovereign nation. If they wish to provide us with comments, we will look at them. We haven't changed the roadmap. We still think the roadmap captures the president's vision. What is important, I think, is for Prime Minister Abbas to meet with Prime Minister Sharon so that they can start talking directly to one another. As I said to Prime Minister Abbas yesterday, do you want to know why they didn't accept the roadmap? Then you can ask them. When we offered our good offices both prime ministers agreed to a meeting some time in the very near future, when they can talk directly to one another. We will be ready, willing and able to participate in any way that we can, on any level that we have to, whether it's at the level of my envoys, with my personal involvement, or the president. The president's involvement begins next week when he sees Prime Minister Sharon -- the first time he will have seen the prime minister since our operation in Iraq, and since the appointment of a Palestinian prime minister. I hope it will be after Prime Minister Sharon and Prime Minister Abbas have spoken. I hope that will be the case. It all depends on their schedules. So this is a time of promise. Both sides want to see the other side do more. Security remains a key issue that has to be dealt with. The most important issue and the most pressing question is getting started: on security, with the political transformation in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and, on the Israeli side, by starting to open things up: do away with closures, open up opportunities for people to move and get on with their lives, increase the flow of revenue to the PA from the revenues that the Israelis are holding -- which belong to the PA. We have a commitment from Prime Minister [Sharon] to increase the rate of revenue return to assist with housing people. That is what I talked to President Mubarak about. We also talked about our bilateral relations, which are good, and strong. I especially thanked the president and his colleagues for their strong efforts in assisting the Palestinians, finding a way forward to the appointment and confirmation of a prime minister. In the last days the Egyptian government played a very important role in making that happen, as you all know. You couldn't convince Sharon to accept the roadmap? We understand that he has comments so I didn't say he accepted it and didn't say he rejected it. He has comments on the roadmap, some of which he has provided to us. He will provide us with others when he sees the president. So everybody is focussing on this issue as if it were an issue of life and death. The real issue is do we get started? Will we see some movement? Do we start taking some action? I don't know how many times I have started down this road to be frustrated and see no progress being made, because we are perhaps focussing on the wrong word, or the wrong issue, or the wrong concept. What I pressed both sides to do was to get started with security reform and get started with some relief of the conditions under which the Palestinian people live. Is it fair and just to exert pressure on the Palestinian side by asking them to adopt full measures, while at the same time you are satisfied with only limited measures from the other side, a few humanitarian gestures here and there. Is it workable? Of course it is workable. I mean you say just a few humanitarian gestures, but these are more than just a few humanitarian gestures. If we can get the Israelis moving in this direction it is what the Palestinians have been asking for. They [the Palestinians] say: Let us get to our jobs, let us get to our schools, let us start to live a more normal life, let us open up the area so we are not being constantly stopped at these checkpoints. Start to make life better for the Palestinian people. And I don't think what I asked Prime Minister Abbas to do was American pressure or unreasonable. After he was confirmed by the legislature two weeks ago, in his very first speech -- not written by the US or anyone else -- in his very first speech he stood up and said we've got to stop violence, we've got to stop terror, we have to tell the Palestinian people that this must end because it is not getting us anywhere. It is important that he said that and I am pleased, but he has put the burden on himself to begin working to put an end to terror and violence. In the appointment of Mohamed Dahlan as his minister for security, which was very controversial, he put in place a person who knows how to do this, has done it before and has experience and assets available to him. I don't think that saying to Abbas that we push you in these efforts and we encourage you, is pressure. It is assistance to him, and support for his efforts. Remember Hamas and Islamic Jihad and these other types of organisations are not interested in peace, they are not interested in finding a two-state solution. They are interested in the destruction of Israel and as long as that remains their primary objective there will never be any progress toward achieving a state for the Palestinian people. Prime Minister Abbas said that clearly to his people and so I do not think I'm telling him anything that he did not know before or asking him to take a position that he has not already taken. There is a lot of concern here in the Arab world that, by using a delaying tactic, Sharon may succeed in derailing the whole process because of the impact it might have on the president's re-election hopes. What can be done to stop this? First of all, I do not accept the premise. I mean the United States presidential elections never go away, they are always there. And if President Bush was worried about his re-election and how this might affect his re-election prospects, we are only 17 months from the elections. He wouldn't have started, he wouldn't have sent me here, he wouldn't have talked about it, he wouldn't put out the roadmap, he wouldn't have written a speech last Friday talking about a Middle East free trade area, he wouldn't have said I am now going to devote my attention to the Middle East. He would have just said sorry, it is 17 months to the elections, I don't want to take any chances now so we will do this after I get re-elected. That would have been the easiest thing for him to do. If it was an election issue for him and if anyone on the Arab or Israeli side thinks that somehow President Bush will be distracted or delayed closer to the elections and won't be able to do anything, they're wrong. The president has committed to do something, he decided to get involved -- and he knew if he started now we'll still be at it when we got closer to the elections in five to six months, or a year from now. This is not a problem that will be solved overnight. I suspect this is a problem we will be working on through the remainder of this administration and after the president is certainly re-elected. We will continue to work on it in his second term. Hopefully, we will have made a lot more progress than we have made so far. The president looked at the situation here and the situation in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Now that Iraq has been dealt with he realised that he had made a commitment to the world, especially to the Arab world -- President Mubarak, Crown Prince Abdullah, King Abdullah, Prime Minister Sharon, the Palestinian leaders and the Palestinian people. Since he [the president] calls for a transformed Palestinian leadership, he asked the Palestinian people to look at where Yasser Arafat had taken them and said, "Is that where we want to be or do you want a new leadership?" And so the Palestinians did what we asked them to do. And the president is going to do what he said he would do, no matter when the elections are. Though it's been a long time since the declaration of the roadmap, you have not been able to convince the Israelis to accept it until now. This, despite your very close and very special relations. You ask the Palestinians to stop violence. Why don't you ask Israel to stop the occupation, to stop killing, to stop assassinations and stop bombing Palestinian houses? Every issue that you just talked about we have discussed with the Israelis. And I think you will find that in the days ahead a number of the steps that they are taking, which have yet to be publicised, will be taken, and they will start to move in the directions that we want them to in order to create a better atmosphere. But the better atmosphere won't remain this way if the terror continues. If I were able to get the Israelis to release the hold that they have over every village and city and occupied area; if I could get them to release every road- block and check-point, and that produced a wave of new violence, what would the Israelis do the day after? They would put it all back in. So it does not stand that they have to take steps and they will slowly release their grip. I am confident that grip will be released, in parallel with the ability of the Palestinian authorities to exercise control over those areas from which suicide bombers come, and from which violence originates. Violence that is driven, to a large extent, by organisations that have no desire to live in peace with Israel. And violence that also, I am quite sure and I don't doubt, reflects the frustration and the anger and the difficult circumstances under which the Palestinian people live. These young people, who commit suicide in the context of these acts, reflect the deep anger that exists within the Palestinian community. What I hope we will be able to do now is to start to move forward with steps taken by the Israeli side. The president will call for more steps, as we can demonstrate to the world, and as the Palestinian side can demonstrate to the Israeli side that something is being done about terrorist organisations, that the new leadership under Prime Minister Abbas is making a 100 per cent effort and shows a 100 per cent intent to bring terror under control. That strengthens our hand to apply greater pressure and give more encouragement to the Israelis so that they open up more and more. It isn't going to happen overnight and you have to understand that while there is anger and desire in the Palestinian community for a state of their own and an end to this terrible situation, there is also anger and fear within the Israeli community, for the bombs that have taken so many lives. Too many lives have been lost on both sides. So we have to get started and I don't know where to start but at the beginning. The situation -- the cards that we have been dealt now -- the siege situation in West Bank towns that destroyed the Palestinian economy, that made it difficult for Palestinians to live a normal life, has created a 60 per cent unemployment rate. That is terrible. We have to get that siege lifted. The siege is there because of the terror and the terrorist actions that were coming out of these places and so what we have to do is get that terror ended. And, as terror ends and we can get the Israelis to recognise that, then they lose any reason they have to do the kinds of things that are of such concern to you. Can the roadmap meet the 2005 timetable for a Palestinian state? It remains our goal. It becomes more difficult the more time passes without movement down the road. But the president still sticks to that goal. I hope we can now get started. Can we move it back? We don't want to move it, we want to hold that goal. But you can watch the calendar as easily as I can. Let's not lose sight of that goal right now. What about international monitors? The United States has said for two years that we would provide monitors to watch both sides and to serve as adjudicator as problems come along. Monitors, yes. This has been on record for two years. US monitors, not UN ones. The president made a commitment at the G-8 Summit two years ago in Genoa that we would be willing to do this. Not armed troops to come in as a force between the two sides, but monitors to monitor agreements made by the two sides. So that when disputes arise or where there are concerns or where there is tension in a particular area, the monitors would be there to calm the situation and try to resolve the issue. What about previous monitors from the CIA and other US government agencies? The CIA and other people there were trying to help them [the Palestinians] form their security presence. There is one area, I forget which city it was, where there were some [monitors]. But it wasn't really [about] monitoring the agreement between the two sides. Let's talk about the roadmap. We start down the roadmap, let's say that security is established in the north zone, the north part of Gaza and the Israelis pull out of everywhere around there -- it is now all Palestinian. This is a place where you might have some monitors who could be there to make sure that is the way it remains [Palestinian] and if any problems arise, the monitors would be there to assist the two sides in resolving it, or at least be an independent judge of what has taken place. I have a comment and a question. I have noticed that you are insisting on isolating Arafat. In my opinion this is going to weaken Abbas' hand in the situation in Palestine, and I think it is not in the interest of the peace process to weaken Abbas. The question is, in my opinion, very important: the new vision, which President Bush recently declared about the free trade zone which will be established within 10 years and the partnership, where democracy and political reforms and education will be introduced -- what is it all about? How are you going to do this? I haven't heard about any kind of consultation between you and any of the Arab countries, how are you going to do all these things? Are you going to impose it? On Arafat, we made a decision last year, when the president gave his vision speech, that we couldn't achieve that vision by working with Chairman Arafat because he had many opportunities over the years to achieve the vision and he failed. My own experience with Arafat was unfortunate and difficult. When I was here a year ago and he was surrounded in the Muqata'a, I said to him: We will work to break the siege in the Muqata'a and the siege of Bethlehem, but then you have to act. You have to act against terror; you have to act against violence. I said to him, unless you change, unless you really start leading your people in a better direction this will be the last time I am able to talk to you, because you are not leading your people in the right direction. We broke the siege of the Muqata'a. He came out and we saw no change once he was out, he was acting in the same way. And so we made a decision that we had to wait for new leadership and that is what we did, we waited. And the Palestinian people have produced that new leadership; with Prime Minister Abbas. Arafat is still receiving delegations. The Greek Foreign Minister will be seeing him in a couple of days. Javier Solana, (the European Union's foreign policy chief) will be seeing him and [Joschka] Fischer saw him (the German foreign minister) not too long ago. It is not as if he is unable to get his message out and I know that he is the elected leader of the Palestinian people. I also know the regard he is held in by the Palestinian people for the struggle that he has represented all these years. But we believe that he has missed an opportunity and that he has failed to move the Palestinian people one step closer to a Palestinian state. Now with respect to your second question, we have a number of initiatives underway. The Middle East Partnership Initiative you made reference to, which is what I gave a speech on a few months ago, is a way to work towards developing political and educational initiatives. [We are working on] teacher training and a number of other efforts with Arab nations on social, political, educational and economic development to help make people better able to participate in the 21st century's globalising world. The president added to that on Friday when he gave a speech in South Carolina [and] talked about a free trade area in the Middle East. The president believes in free trade as a way of bettering the lives of people. So we have a free trade agreement with Jordan, we want to begin discussions on a free trade accord with Egypt, we have free trade agreements with nations around the world. We are going to have a free trade area of Central America in the near future and then we want to have the whole hemisphere, North and South and Central America in one great free trade agreement. Last week, in Washington, we signed a free trade agreement with Singapore. We believe free trade agreements are good for the world. And so why not have one for this part of the world? Why not have a free trade agreement that links all of the nations of this region with the United States in open trading? And so the bottom line to your question is, are we going to impose it? How can we impose it? We have been in consultation with our Arab friends in the region; they know what we think about democracy and what we think about education and what we think about infrastructure. We have briefed all the nations in the region on what the elements of the Middle East Partnership Initiative are. Democracy is something that we present to the world, we share with the world, and each nation makes it own judgement as to how it wishes to proceed. Egypt is a sovereign nation that's had a legislature for a hundred years and has had a representative form of government for many years in different iterations. And so we offer these tools to help Egypt and to help other nations in the world move forward. Not in the spirit of, "here you've got to do it our way," but in the spirit of "look, here are some things that we believe can help you. Here is a menu, here is a buffet table, and how can we help you? And if you don't want the help, don't take it." Interview by Mahfouz El-Ansary, Salama Ahmed Salama and Kamel Abdel-Raouf
