Posted on 14-6-2002
U.S.
Said to Weigh Provisional State for Palestinians
By TODD S. PURDUM, NY Times, photo shows Colin L. Powell at
a Group of 8
meeting on Wednesday
WHISTLER, British Columbia, June 12 — Secretary of State Colin
L. Powell
said today that the Bush administration was considering backing
the
formation of a Palestinian state even before its borders and
other details
are agreed on, but he emphasized that the idea was only one
of several
still under review.
No final decision has been made, Secretary Powell said in an
interview
published today in Al Hayat, the London-based Arabic-language
newspaper,
and later to reporters. But he said that President Bush had
not backed away
from his goal of establishing a Palestinian state, and that
the question
was how best to do so. "He knows that to get to that vision,
it may be
necessary to have a provisional state, an interim step; it may
take several
steps to get there," Secretary Powell said in the Al Hayat interview,
conducted on Monday. He added, "I think almost everybody has
come to the
agreement that there is a need for provisional or interim steps;
the
question is for how long should that be the case, and how does
one get to
the comprehensive solution at the end." Secretary Powell made
his comments
to reporters today while aboard his plane on the way to a meeting
here of
the foreign ministers of eight leading industrial nations. Even
before he
had landed, the White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer,
seemed to
minimize Secretary Powell's statements in the Al Hayat interview.
"The
secretary, from time to time, will reflect on the advice that
he gets and
do so publicly, which is his prerogative, of course," Mr. Fleischer
said.
"If the president has anything further to indicate, he will."
In recent days, Mr. Bush has sounded skeptical about prospects
for a Middle
East peace conference or a concrete timeline for progress, while
Secretary
Powell has spoken optimistically. The shifting tone has sown
some confusion
among Arab and European allies about the administration's future
plans. As
Mr. Powell did in his interview with the Arabic-language newspaper,
Mr.
Bush spoke forcefully about the determination for a Palestinian
state in
his meeting last weekend with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt
at Camp
David. He was less upbeat after his meeting on Monday in Washington
with
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel. Administration officials
insist that
the differences in tone reflect Mr. Bush's determination to
finish
consultations with foreign leaders and his advisers before revealing
the
administration's plans, not a reluctance to move forward.
Secretary Powell and aides traveling with him underscored that
discussions
within the administration were still under way and that no decisions
had
yet been made. On his plane, Secretary Powell said senior administration
officials would be conducting a last set of internal discussions
before the
president announced his plans. "It's not something far in the
future," he
said. "Our consultation process is pretty much winding up."
Secretary
Powell and his advisers also took pains to play down any suggestion
that
the Bush administration was necessarily preparing to make the
idea of an
interim state a centerpiece of its approach. But they acknowledged
its
potential appeal as a means to bridge differences. "Everybody
in the region
knows this is one of the ideas out there," one senior State
Department
official said. "In and of itself, it doesn't solve any of the
big
questions, but it's kind of a point of intersection of a lot
of ideas."
Mr. Sharon of Israel and Mr. Mubarak of Egypt are among those
who have
suggested varying degrees of openness to declaring a Palestinian
state
whose precise borders would be negotiated later, though they
have differed
sharply on timetables, conditions and motives for doing so.
Some in the
Arab world support the idea as a means of speeding the process
of
negotiations on a final settlement, while Mr. Sharon seems to
see it as a
way to slow negotiations down. Indeed, Secretary Powell made
his initial
comments after the Al Hayat interviewer suggested that Mr. Sharon
wanted
only "interim measures" toward a settlement. Speaking to reporters
on his
plane, Secretary Powell acknowledged that "there are some who
are concerned
that if you just state a provisional state idea, you may never
get to the
end state." He repeatedly said it was premature to talk about
who would
lead such a state, what its borders or capital would be, or
whether it
would be viable on land already under Palestinian control. All
are
questions that could lead to a breakdown in negotiations, as
ultimately
happened when the parties reached agreement on broad outlines
for peace in
the 1993 Oslo accords, then foundered on details. But he noted:
"If it's
going to be a state, it will have to have some structure. It
will have to
have something that looks like territory, even though it may
not be
perfectly defined forever. And it will have to have institutions
within it
to be a state."
Mr. Bush is to meet on Thursday with the Saudi foreign minister,
Prince
Saud al-Faisal. And Nabil Shaath, Yasir Arafat's planning minister
and one
of his closest political aides, is scheduled to meet with Secretary
Powell
on Friday, according to Palestinian officials in Washington.
"These are the
kinds of issues that we are working through," Secretary Powell
told
reporters on his plane, referring to the path to Palestinian
statehood.
"They are tough issues, and the kinds of issues that we'll be
examining in
the days ahead."
In the Al Hayat interview, Mr. Powell repeated that he still
planned to
lead an international conference of foreign ministers on the
Middle East
this summer, "and it's not the last conference." He added: "It
will be one,
I think, of a number of conferences that we hold in the future
to move
forward. It will be a conference that is intended to talk politics
in a
very open kind of way, and talk things like security in a very
definitive
kind of way."
Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian negotiator, responded coolly
to Secretary
Powell's suggestion of a provisional or interim state. "I don't
know what
he means by that," Mr. Erekat said. "The main thing here is
to end the
Israeli occupation and to have Israel withdraw" to its old borders,
he
said. Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League,
said Secretary
Powell's statement was important but vague. He asked: "What
does
provisional mean? Does this mean that we take some of the land
now and keep
it temporarily or provisionally?"
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