JEDDAH/RAMALLAH, 3 September — Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller yesterday urged Gulf states to push the Palestinians to support a European peace plan “to create a momentum for peace.” Moeller spoke after talks with foreign ministers from the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states here on a Middle East swing to present his plan. “I introduced the peace road map which we have made in the European Union,” he told reporters after nearly two hours of talks.
“Of course the GCC want it to be more quick than three years,” Moeller admitted. “I can’t say I got support but I didn’t get the other thing because they now have to study it. I have left the plan with them. They supported the main lines of the initiative but of course not all the steps because they need time to analyze.”
Moeller also asked the GCC states to stump up more money to aid the Palestinians. “The important thing is the GCC and we both feel the donor situation must be better. We will call for a donor conference this autumn, I hope, and I appeal to the GCC countries to help the Palestinians, as we are going to do, and put pressure on the Palestinians to go into the process in order to create a peace momentum.”
Moeller said he had been encouraged during talks with Prince Abdullah, the regent, who won pan-Arab backing in March for his own peace plan, which offered Israel normal ties with the Arab world in return for a total pullout from occupied Arab land.
“Prince Abdullah said he would not work against it. He wished me good luck with it,” the Danish minister said. “We have the Arab peace plan, which is good. We have (US President George) Bush’s call for elections and we have tried to combine them so we have three stages,” Moeller explained.
The Palestinian Authority yesterday dismissed the Israeli Army’s plans to launch an investigation into the killings of Palestinian civilians as a propaganda ploy that would lead nowhere.
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer ordered a probe of operations over the weekend that killed 11 Palestinian civilians, including two children in a helicopter strike, and revived criticism of tactics used to combat a Palestinian uprising.
The deaths, described by Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as massacres, led Israeli President Moshe Katsav to call for an inquiry into accusations the army had become trigger happy. Arafat accused Israel of trying to sabotage steps to end the 23 months of bloodshed, and his chief military liaison with Israeli forces called for those behind the “state-sponsored terrorism” to be prosecuted.
Keeping up the criticism, senior Palestinian Authority Cabinet member Saeb Erekat predicted the Israeli probe would come to nothing. “The calls for an investigation are meant for media consumption because we have never heard of any result of these panels created after the killing of Palestinian civilians,” he told reporters. “We place full responsibility on the Israeli government for these crimes and this bloodletting.”
