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| Arab League revives peace plan |
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Thursday, March 29, 2007
RIYADH: Arab leaders meeting in Riyadh on Wednesday unanimously decided to revive a five-year-old plan for peace with Israel and launch a diplomatic offensive to resolve the Middle East conflict.
A resolution reaffirming their commitment to the Saudi-inspired peace plan was adopted by the Arab League heads of state on the first day of their annual summit in the Saudi capital, ministers said.
The blueprint offers Israel full normalisation of relations if it withdraws from all land occupied in the 1967 war and allows the creation of a Palestinian state and the return of Palestinian refugees.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit confirmed to AFP that the heads of state adopted all resolutions submitted by their foreign ministers, including re-launching the peace plan. In the resolution, a copy of which was seen by AFP, the Arab leaders “reaffirm the commitment of all Arab states to the Arab peace initiative as approved at the Beirut summit in 2002 in all its elements”.
They also “reaffirm their call to the government of Israel and all Israelis to accept the Arab peace initiative and seize the opportunity to resume the process of direct and serious negotiations on all tracks”.
But the appeal met only a guarded welcome from Israel, which recalled that there were elements of the peace blueprint, for instance on the right of return of Palestinian refugees, that were unacceptable to the Jewish state.
“We need to take our time studying what has happened at this summit before taking an official position,” an aide of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told AFP. “We are studying the text of this initiative in detail to establish if there is anything new, if there are any changes, and when we’ve done that, we will react officially,” said Olmert’s spokeswoman Miri Eisin.
The opening of the two-day summit was marked by a strident attack by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia against the “illegitimate foreign occupation” of neighbouring Iraq. A White House spokesman swiftly responded with a rare rebuff of the close US ally. “The United States is in Iraq at the request of the Iraqis and under a United Nations mandate. Any suggestion to the contrary is wrong,” said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
Several world figures, including UN chief Ban Ki-moon and EU foreign policy envoy Javier Solana, attended the opening session in Riyadh, where security was tight as police blocked roads and military helicopters patrolled the skies. Only Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi has boycotted the summit.
However Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal warned in an interview with a British newspaper that Israel should not expect any further diplomatic overtures. “If Israel refuses (the plan), that means it doesn’t want peace and it places everything back in the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war.”
Despite strong criticism from Iraq’s Kurdish foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari of what he called “Arab diktat”, heads of state agreed to call for amendments to the Iraqi constitution to give more power to the ousted Sunni Arab elite.
The Saudi monarch also appealed for an end to the “crippling” political crisis in Lebanon, where divisions were highlighted by the presence at the summit of rival pro- and anti-Syrian delegations.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
