Last update - 00:00 22/09/2006
Saudi FM: 'Significant' Arab consensus to renew stalled ME peace process
By The Associated Press
Arab countries have reached a "very significant" consensus after the recent war in Lebanon that there must be a new start with fresh ideas to the Middle East peace process, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said Thursday.
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, in separate interviews with The Associated Press around the meeting of the UN General Assembly, spoke of the urgency for an "end game" in the Middle East to resurrect the process which has been bogged down for three years.
At a Security Council meeting later Thursday, Bahrain's Foreign Minister Shaikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa called for initial negotiation between the two sides, with a concrete timeframe, as well as a report from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the best way to hold those negotiations.
He reiterated the long-standing Arab demands that a final settlement include Israel's full withdrawal from the Palestinian territory, resolving the problem of Palestinian refugees, and the creation of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem.
"We have in the past witnessed the horrors of war, however our peoples are today determined not to see such horrors anymore," Shaikh Khalid said. "We have a good chance now to obtain peace and should not allow it to slip away."
Lavrov said the sentiment is not limited to Arab countries. He said agreement is also growing among Russians as well as other power brokers overseeing the peace process, that it must be re-energized to prevent further conflicts.
The solution lies in working for a comprehensive pact that would cover differences between Israel and the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Lebanese, he said.
Unless the world acts quickly to increase hope among Arab youth, Lavrov warned, it could lose a whole generation in the region to extremism.
"We have found, probably for the first time, a very significant consensus over the need to renew the peace process," al-Faisal told AP, wearing traditional Arab robes and headdress, and speaking in a hotel suite overlooking Park Avenue.
His emphasis on consensus was the strongest statement yet by an Arab nation on the need to revive efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, and was echoed by the foreign ministers who attended the ministerial meeting of the Security Council.
Several ministers backed a promise from Israeli and Palestinian leaders to re-engage in dialogue and open a permanent channel for possible talks.
"We continue to urge all parties to foster a positive and hopeful atmosphere in which those talks might take place," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
However, in a sign of continued divisions, the 15 nations comprising the Security Council were too divided to agree on a unified stance that could be presented in a formal statement.
Since the end of Israeli-Hezbollah fighting in Lebanon on Aug. 14, the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Syria have been saying that in order to prevent further conflicts, the time for a new push in the peace process is now.
The Arab League viewpoint is that any revitalized talks should "concentrate on the important issues, rather than the process itself - in other words, the final status negotiation elements like the border, Jerusalem, Palestinian rights and so forth," al-Faisal said.
The Saudi foreign minister said he was encouraged that U.S. President George W. Bush is showing a "new concentration" on the Middle East peace process. But he said Washington is not yet viewed as an honest broker within the Arab world.
"There is perceived inclination on the part of the U.S. to forgive everything that Israel does and take to task anything that the Palestinians do," he said. But he looked forward to the day when attitudes toward the United States would soften.
"There is, particularly during this session of the United Nations, no lack of interest on the part of the president about the Middle East peace process. His whole speech, as a matter of fact, was on the Middle East," he said, referring to Bush's speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday. "And I think that shows a new concentration on not only the process but I hope substance of peace."
Washington is increasingly adopting the view that peace between Palestinians and Israelis will help its other interests in the region, including fighting terrorism, he added.
Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister who was interviewed in a room just off the General Assembly hall, said he regards the timing of the Arab initiative as "very important," coming shortly after the eruption of war between Israel and the Hezbollah guerrilla movement in Lebanon in July, and at a moment when the trends elsewhere in the region were "worrying."
"The war in Lebanon clearly showed that force cannot resolve problems in the Middle East and force always gets a forceful answer," Lavrov said.
However, Lavrov pointed out that getting any process started again would be difficult, in part because of Israel's need to achieve the release of soldiers abducted by Hamas and Hezbollah fighters in July. The incidents that sparked a new round of Arab-Israeli fighting in both Lebanon and Gaza and killed more than 1,000 people in four weeks of heavy fighting.
"It is a very emotional issue for them," Lavrov said, referring to Israel's concern for the missing soldiers. "It is an issue which is in the center of their domestic politics."
He said that ways were being discussed to resolve the problem, and that those ways might also "pave the way to better conditions for political dialogue."
Action should not be delayed, Lavrov said.
"We are risking the loss of a generation in the Middle East," he said. "A couple of years more, and I am afraid this generation would be totally disappointed in any promises of peace and would be much more susceptible to another way of thinking and acting," he warned.