RAMALLAH, 24 November 2004 — Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestine Liberation Organization chief, pledged to follow in the footsteps of Yasser Arafat yesterday after he was picked by the dominant Fatah faction as its candidate to succeed the late Palestinian leader.
“We promise that we will continue on the same path that you (Arafat) have paved to achieve the dream that has always lived with you... establishing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital,” Abbas told a special session of Parliament to honor the late leader.
“We will not fall silent until our right of return is exercised and the plight of the refugees is solved,” he added.
The quartet, the main international sponsors of the road map, a peace plan endorsed by Israel and the Palestinians last year that aims to create a Palestinian state in 2005, met in Egypt yesterday on the sidelines of an international conference on Iraq as part of a flurry of diplomatic activity.
“We are all encouraged. We reaffirmed our determination to work with the Palestinian leadership to support the election” for a successor to Arafat, UN chief Kofi Annan told reporters.
“We must give them all the necessary support. There is an opportunity to ... move ahead with the road map.”
US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who also attended the summit, reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to the blue print as the only peace plan on the table.
“The road map now is... the single plan that is being used by both parties as well as the international community to achieve a two-state settlement,” he said.
Abbas was unanimously adopted by Fatah’s decision-making central committee late Monday, a move which is to be rubber-stamped by the Revolutionary Council tomorrow.
He is now the overwhelming favorite to win the Jan. 9 election to succeed Arafat as president of the Palestinian Authority, especially as Hamas has decided to boycott the poll.
Abbas, a former prime minister, took over from Arafat as head of the PLO in the immediate aftermath of his death on Nov. 11.
Arafat’s death and the emergence of the moderate Abbas as his likely successor have encouraged hopes of a revival of the moribund Middle East peace process.
But his insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled their homes when Israel was created in 1948 illustrates the scale of the task facing the peace process.
Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei told MPs that “the enormous loss” of Arafat “must not de-motivate us, and our grief must not blunt our capacity to seize the initiative.”
Powell also spoke highly of Palestinian reform efforts since the death of Arafat, whom the United States and Israel had boycotted for the last three years as an obstacle to peace.
“I think that new opportunities have been created for the Palestinians to reform their leadership and I am very impressed with the way they have gone about it.”
The brief meeting attended by members of the so-called quartet — the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States — came a day after Powell held talks separately with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on his first trip to the region in 18 months.
