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?"