PALESTINE-UN: Arafat Presses Case for Independence by May

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Sep 28 1998 (IPS) - Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat Monday renewed his push for areas under Palestinian self-rule to become independent as early as next May and the United States indicated its willingness to throw its weight behind the sluggish Middle East peace process.

For weeks, Arafat’s aides have been hinting that, unless further progress is made in peace talks with Israel by next May, the Palestinian president will declare independence for Gaza and the unconnected West Bank towns over which his government now rules.

Arafat stepped up the pace Monday, hours after meeting U.S. President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the White House, by arguing at the United Nations that “an independent Palestinian state must be established”.

“Our people demand of us to shoulder our responsibility and they wait for the establishment of their independent state,” Arafat told the U.N. General Assembly. But the Palestinian leader stopped short of any announcement on declaring Palestine’s independence after warnings by U.S. and Israeli leaders that such a statement would hurt the peace process.

Instead, Arafat praised Clinton, saying that the president “graciously took an important step to save the peace process by convening a meeting at the White House between the Israeli and Palestinian delegations…We have not lost hope in the peace process, and we will continue to honour our existing obligations.”

“I believe that we all agree that we have made progress on the path to peace,” Clinton said after the White House meeting Monday.

“There has been a significant gnarrowing of the gaps between the two parties” following face-to-face meetings between Arafat and Netanyahu in New York Sunday and Washington Monday, he added, noting that the meetings were the first between the two leaders in a year. “Because I am convinced that the two leaders and the people they represent want peace, I have asked them to come back to the United States in mid-October with their teams to do the intensive work necessary to see if we can conclude this deal.”

At the same time, he was wary of becoming involved in the thorny question of whether Palestine should ever become an independent state, saying only that there are “things that I said before I was president and the broker of the process that I can no longer say”.

U.S. first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton drew scorn from the Republican opposition and Jewish leaders earlier this year, when she voiced the idea that eventually both Israel and Palestine could be independent states. Clinton Monday said of his wife’s ocomments, “She’s not the president, and she is not trying to manage this peace process. That’s a different thing.”

Netanyahu voiced optimism over the prospects for a deal, telling a gathering of Jewish leaders Sunday that he hoped to hold final settlement talks with the Palestinians soon. But he added that he expected the talks to involve a tricky balancing act: “One need is the Palestinians’ requirement for self-rule. The other need is Israel’s need to protect its vital interests, chief of which is security.”

Behind the prime minister’s declared security concerns, however, is his warning to Arafat not to declare an independent Palestinian state by next May, when the interim agreement signed in 1993 between the Palestinian leader and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin expires.

“The Oslo accords are not about meeting deadlines,” Netanyahu said in a speech to the General Assembly last week. He warned, “An arbitrary, unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state, in disregard of this purpose, would constitute a fundamental violation of the Oslo accords. It would cause the complete collapse of the process … Such actions will inevitably prompt universal responses on our part.”

Netanyahu, in talks with reporters here this week, threatened to consider Israeli annexation of parts of the West Bank if Arafat were to declare those parts of the West Bank and Gaza under Palestinian rule independent by May.

“The agreement on the transitional period expires on May 4, 1999, and … any decision taken by the Palestinian leadership according to its responsibilities at the time, regardless of the nature of this decision, cannot be considered a unilateral act,” countered Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinians’ U.N. representative.

Any blame for not meeting the Oslo deadlines should fall on Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government, he said.

Nevertheless, after months of stalling, all sides are gearing up to avoid a worsening of Israeli-Palestinian tensions. Washington is anxious to forestall any open rupture between the two sides just before this November’s U.S. legislative elections, and has tried to cajole Netanyahu into turning over some 13 percent of West Bank territory to Palestinian self-rule in coming months.

The United States had threatened both sides several months ago to accept the 13 percent figure within a short time-frame, but let all deadlines lapse when it became clear that Netanyahu would not go along with the proposal. (The Palestinians accepted on condition that the 13 percent figure would not be negotiated downward.)

Instead, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met the Israeli and Palestinian leaders twice over the weekend before the White House talks, to hammer out an agreement in which Israel would turn over 10 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians directly and designate another 3 percent as a “nature preserve” on which no Palestinian construction or habitation would be allowed.

In return, Israel is asking for several measures to ensure that the Palestinian Authority will clamp down on anti-Israeli actions and arrest suspected terrorists.

“We are very close on a number of subjects,” Albright said Monday, including the land tranfer dispute. Albright and special envoy Dennis Ross are to meet Arafat and Netanyahu over the next few weeks before both leaders are to return to Washington to hold joint talks in the White House with Clinton.