RIYADH, 3 July — The six-member Gulf Cooperation Council yesterday called on the United States to start implementing a Middle East peace plan unveiled by President George W. Bush last week, but insisted the Palestinians must be allowed to choose their leader.
The GCC, which groups Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, noted the “important contents” of the US president’s speech about peace in the Middle East, especially the establishment of a Palestinian state, and a halt to Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. The United States should work to “find the mechanisms necessary to start implementing President Bush’s vision for peace in the region through ending Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab territories,” up to the pre-June 1967 borders, the GCC said in a statement.
The statement denounced the continuing Israeli military campaign against unarmed Palestinian civilians, its reoccupation of Palestinian towns and destruction of Palestinian Authority infrastructure.
“The use of Israeli military might against the unarmed Palestinian people will not help the efforts to reinforce peace and stability in the region,” the statement said and urged Israel to have peaceful coexistence with its neighbors in the region.
The Palestinian people must be allowed to exercise their right to “self-determination and the establishment of their independent state with Jerusalem as its capital,” the statement said.
It upheld the Palestinians’ right to choose their leadership, saying this was “a purely internal Palestinian matter to be decided by the Palestinian people alone.”
The GCC statement reaffirmed the member states’ quest for a “comprehensive, just and lasting” peace based on a Saudi-sponsored peace plan endorsed by Arab leaders last March.
