Backing Arafat

With the siege of Arafat lifted, Cairo's diplomatic efforts are focusing on asserting his leadership, Soha Abdelaty reports
When Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher and Political Adviser to President Hosni Mubarak Osama El-Baz visited Ramallah last Sunday they had a rare chance to coordinate a common diplomatic strategy with the Palestinian leadership at close quarters.
This has not been the first time that Egypt dispatches its foreign minister to the occupied Palestinian territories over the course of the five-month long siege. Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher met with President Yasser Arafat last month while the Palestinian leader was under siege in his Ramallah headquarters.
Egyptian officials have also been in close contact with Saudi, Jordanian and Moroccan officials who visited Washington recently, with the aim of settling on a unified message to present the US administration. This, against a background of what Egyptian officials say is an Israeli campaign directed at doing away altogether with the severely degraded peace process.
While these meetings were taking place, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon arrived in Washington with his own agenda. Reports indicated that his briefcase contained a 100-page long "Arafat dossier" accusing the Palestinian leader of being responsible for all the "terrorist" acts that have taken place in the past few months. The idea behind this report was to show US officials the necessity of replacing Arafat with a leader that the Israelis can negotiate with.
"We know the positions of the Israeli government and we reject them," Maher told reporters after meeting with Arafat in Ramallah. "We believe that they go against all honest instincts for achieving peace. We imagine that the US, which bears the responsibility for achieving peace, cannot accept the Israeli government's ideas," he continued.
Getting an accurate reading on how exactly the US administration feels about Arafat has proven elusive. US officials have steered clear of supporting the Israeli proposal to remove Arafat but, should they continue to support the Palestinian leader, they expect him and Arab leaders to fulfil certain conditions. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday "it serves us all better if we continue to work with all Palestinian leaders and to recognise who the Palestinian people look to as their leader."
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice was less diplomatic. Although "the White House position is that we're not going to try to choose leaders for the Palestinian people... he [Arafat] does have responsibilities that he has not been meeting, and we are going to press him," Rice stated on Sunday. "We are going to call on Arab allies, the Europeans and others to press him and we are going to be very clear that the Palestinian leadership that is there now, the Authority, is not the kind of leadership that can lead to the kind of Palestinian state that we need," Rice said, "it has to reform."
Cairo acknowledges the need to rebuild the Palestinian infrastructure that the Israeli government destroyed but has been quiet, so far, about the prospect of "reforming" the Palestinian leadership.
Following a two-hour meeting with Arafat, Egyptian officials emphasised that both sides see eye-to-eye on all matters. El-Baz told reporters in Jordan, on his way back to Cairo, that Egyptian officials found "Arafat to be determined to consolidate the Palestinian Authority and its infrastructure." Maher was quick to add that "there can be no doubts about the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat's presidency." Maher also rejected statements by US officials that seem to refute these principles. "I would prefer to call them a slip of the tongue, as in previous incidents, especially since they come at a time when the US government is confirming that President Arafat is the necessary partner in any effort which aims at building peace," he said on Tuesday.
The other issue being discussed is the convening of an international peace conference early this summer. Given that the venue, time, participants and exact purpose remain unclear, Egyptian officials are cautious about taking a clear position on such an ambiguous proposition. "We cannot say that we are against any specific structure for the conference because nothing has been proposed," El- Baz told reporters in Ramallah. What Egyptian officials are sure of is that there are certain conditions that have to be met before the conference can be convened, aside from the multitude of other issues that will come up once the conference gets under way. "There is complete Egyptian-Palestinian agreement about this issue and we have previously stated that the first step [towards that conference] has to be Israeli withdrawal from recently occupied territories.... furthermore, there have to be guarantees that there will not be a reoccupation of these territories," Maher stated.
El-Baz outlined four specific conditions that the conference or meeting has to fulfil. First of all, the conference has to include all the parties involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Maher said that these include the Palestinians, the Israelis and the Americans, but also Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon, as well as international players such as the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. The Palestinians are to be represented by the Palestinian Authority and its leader, Yasser Arafat; a demand that the Israelis have rejected and one that US officials have tried to work around by downgrading the meeting to ministerial level.
Just as important, according to El-Baz, the conference has to set itself the goal of establishing a comprehensive and lasting peace. This will best be achieved through focusing on final-status issues. "It cannot be a temporary stop-gap measure, offering a sedative while in its shadows looms the violence and suppression that the Palestinian people are being exposed to," he said.
Finally, Egyptian officials are determined that the conference builds upon pre-existing premises, ranging from Security Council resolutions to the conclusions reached by previous conferences and the outline of the recently launched Arab peace initiative. Unless these conditions are met, there can be no support for the idea of the conference by Arab officials. Egyptian Ambassador to the US Nabil Fahmy warned on Sunday that Arab governments were unwilling to engage in "negotiations about negotiations again." He said, "If the conference is a useful tool, it is something people will all gather around. If we go back to focusing on procedure rather than solutions, it will not fulfil its expectations and win their support."
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