MUNICH, Germany, 9 February 2004 — Jordan’s King Abdallah called yesterday for a broad international alliance for peace to help end the Middle East conflict, after a new US push and German proposals to bring stability to the region.
“Neither the parties, nor their neighbors, nor the region can do it alone,” the king told a gathering of defense luminaries in Munich, southern Germany. “It requires a collective international alliance for peace.”
His call came after Germany urged the United States and the European Union to pool their resources to rescue the Middle East from a “crisis of modernization” that was fostering terrorism and instability.
The United States, through US Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar, urged NATO to become involved in the “Greater Middle East” to fight terrorist networks and control the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
King Abdallah said that a key regional challenge was to bring economic development and an end to poverty, which he said was the major destabilizing factor.
“When young people lose hope they can turn to apathy and violence,” he said on the final day of the Munich security conference. “When the international community supports those of us engaged in reform ... it creates hope.”
While he acknowledged the destabilizing effects of the war in Iraq, he said the world should focus on the Middle East conflict. “No matter how successful you are in Iraq ... the core issue in everybody’s mind is still the Israeli-Palestinian problem,” he said.
“It is the number one battleground for international extremism,” he went on. “Unless we solve this problem it will be used as an excuse for other countries not to reform.”
In a speech to the same audience on Saturday, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer proposed that the European Union, NATO and Mediterranean countries begin a joint process on a common future for the entire Middle East.
“It is in our interests that the people of the Middle East are able to share in the benefits of globalization,” Fischer said. “If we fail, we will have a high price to pay and we will also have to pay it collectively.”
“In order to be successful, the EU and the United States and Canada must pool their resources to produce a new perspective for the Middle East,” he went on, saying stability and a long-term perspective was needed to succeed.
Sen. Lugar, in a speech following King Abdallah’s, said that NATO’s decision-making process should be realigned to look toward the Middle East and beyond. “I believe that NATO must become more fully engaged in this area, using both its military and its political strength,” he said.
Israeli Security Council chief Giora Eiland said Israel remained committed to the “road map” two-state solution — an independent Palestine alongside a secure Israel — to the conflict but he sounded a warning.
“In the absence of any real prospect for a negotiated settlement we face two choices today: we can either permit the current deadlock and bloodshed to continue or take action, unilateral if necessary, to try and produce a new and better reality.”
Shaath, for his part, called on the EU to start providing incentives in the region and said he approved of Fischer’s plan and for NATO to conditionally play a role, perhaps in peacekeeping. “We have no problem with NATO,” Shaath said but “we want this first in a United Nations resolution.”
