POLITICS: Is UN a New Factor in Middle East Peace Talks?

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 17 2000 (IPS) - The United Nations, which is usually shut out of US-brokered Middle East peace talks, has played a pivotal role in bringing the Palestinians and the Israelis to the bargaining table at Monday’s summit meeting in the Red Sea port of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.

Perhaps in the eyes of the two warring parties, a UN spokesman told IPS Monday, the United Nations looks more credible and even-handed than the United States.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was shuttling between the Israelis and the Palestinians during the height of the violence in the West Bank and Gaza last week, was largely responsible for convincing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat to start talking.

Although Monday’s summit meeting – where US President Bill Clinton was also a participant – may not produce positive results, it could help provide a role for the UN in future Middle East peace negotiations.

In an editorial Monday, the New York Times admitted that Annan “deserves credit for helping to bring the parties together.

“Though a relatively new factor in Mideast diplomacy, he has thus far been a constructive one,” it said. “The Palestinians hope that he might be sympathetic to their concerns. But Israel is also open to greater UN involvement.”

When Israel and Egypt negotiated the Camp David peace accord under US auspices in March 1979, the United Nations was not invited.

In July 1994, the United States also brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan from which the United Nations was shut out once again.

And more recently, in October 1998, the United States brought the Israelis and the Palestinians to the negotiating table for a limited peace agreement under the so-called Wye River Memorandum. But the United Nations was nowhere in sight.

Surprisingly, at the last round of talks between Barak and Arafat last month, Clinton tried to break the deadlock by proposing that Jerusalem be brought under UN control as part of a durable, long-term peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.

Dore Gold, who heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, says that every Israeli ambassador to the United Nations has been under clear instructions to keep the United Nations away from the issue of Jerusalem.

Gold, himself a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, says that it came as a surprise “that both Israeli and American diplomats have been considering placing the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), the most sensitive religious site in Jerusalem, under the control of the UN Security Council”.

To anyone familiar with the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, says Gold, “it looked as if Mr. Arafat was seeking to provoke immediate UN intervention in order to erode Israel’s diplomatic standing in the Jerusalem negotiations.

“Alert American diplomacy on the Security Council will now be required to keep the UN out of the Jerusalem issue,” he argues.

At a press conference in Geneva early this month, Annan was asked why the United Nations has traditionally remained marginalised in the Middle East conflict.

“For every crisis, you can only have one mediator,” Annan said referring to the United States. “If you have a multiplicity of mediators, you can muddy the waters. But that should not be interpreted as meaning the United Nations or the Secretary-General were shirking responsibilities,” he added.

Annan said “there is a mediator, and we are working with the mediator and the parties concerned … My own other hope is that this crisis should not derail the peace process. In fact, they should give us another incentive, yet another reason, if needed, to press ahead with the peace process.”

Annan also pointed out that the United Nations has played a critical role in the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.

“We worked together to ensure that the situation remained calm. We are following very closely and very intimately the Palestinian track and bring whatever effort I can to help the parties to move forward.”

On a broader level, the world body has also remained helpless since most of the resolutions on the Arab-Israeli issue adopted both by the General Assembly and the Security Council have remained unimplemented.

The United Nations, however, has four peacekeeping missions in the Middle East: the UN Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) in Jerusalem since 1948, the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDPF) in the Golan Heights since 1974, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) since 1978, and the UN Iraq- Kuwait Observer Mission (UNIKOM) on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border since 1991.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians continue to insist on an international commission of inquiry into the violence in the West Bank and Gaza which has claimed the lives of over 90 Palestinians over a two week period.

The Palestinians have insisted that the United Nations should have a “heavy role” in the proposed commission. But the Israelis are opposed to it, demanding that the United States, not the United Nations, should take the lead role.