LONDON, 19 October 2004 — Britain should play a more active role to help revive the Middle East peace process to compensate for the United States which is distracted by its upcoming presidential election, visiting Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said here yesterday.
“I don’t think the three coming months should just witness Palestinians being killed” until the next US president takes office in January, he said following talks with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. “I think something can be done by the Americans’ friends and allies, and I think Britain is very well situated to do that,” he noted.
Last month, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he would make the revival of the Middle East peace process his “personal priority” after the US presidential elections, although he did not spell out what he would do.
But political analysts said Britain will be in a key position to do so in 2005 when it holds the presidency of both the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations and, from July next year, the European Union.
Shaath restated the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to the Middle East peace road map and to a simultaneous cease fire by Israel and the Palestinians. “We would like very much to see the UK, with its important relations across the Atlantic, its permanent status in the Security Council and its influence in the (Middle East) Quartet, to help us pursue that,” he added.
The Middle East diplomatic quartet - the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia - is pressing for implementation of the road map, whose primary goal is the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
But that goal now seems elusive amid persistent settlement activity and raids by Israel in the occupied territories and attacks on civilian targets by Palestinian groups.
In an interview with the BBC Sunday, Shaath refused to openly take sides in the White House race, although he said a re-election of US President George W. Bush would be unlikely to bring progress to the Middle East peace process.
“If Mr. Bush is re-elected, he promised that he would reinvigorate the peace process, but with his team around, and with his views so far, it doesn’t look very promising,” Shaath told BBC television.
Shaath said victory for Democratic challenger John Kerry could signal a better outlook but that any progress would take time. “If Mr Kerry were to win, most likely some of (former US president Bill) Clinton’s team would come back. That is okay, but it might take them a year before firming up a policy (on the Middle East). We cannot wait that long.”
“Whenever there is an election campaign anywhere in the world, the candidates are preoccupied with winning the election and other things get put on the back burner,” Straw said. “It is just that, with US elections, they tend to have wider consequences than the election in a very small member state of the UN, not on the Security Council. There you are.”
But the British foreign secretary stressed that London was “pressing ahead as far and as fast as we can” to revive peace prospects. He again slammed as “disproportionate” recent Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets in Gaza.
Around 130 Palestinians were killed in a near three-week Israeli army blitz in northern Gaza that was wound up over the weekend, as Israeli MPs prepare to vote on a plan to withdraw from the territory.
