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Clinton meets Mubarak in quest for Mideast peace |
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August 30, 2000
CAIRO (AP) - Despite a "very active effort" by Mideast players to move the Israeli-Palestinian track forward, there were no signs of a breakthrough following a meeting Tuesday between U.S. President Bill Clinton and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But the Americans and the Egyptians, the two key mediators in Mideast peacemaking, stressed they will continue their drive to achieve peace. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is visiting Cairo on Wednesday as part of that effort. Clinton stopped in Cairo on his way back to Washington following a three-day trip to Africa. He said he visited Mubarak because the Egyptian leader was not planning to attend next month's United Nations Millennium summit in New York, where Clinton is to make a broad push to renew Israeli-Palestinian talks. The meeting was an opportunity to shore up relations between Egypt and the United States following tensions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian summit at the U.S. presidential retreat Camp David. The negotiations failed over the future of Jerusalem, which both sides want as their capital. U.S. officials have reportedly have complained that Egypt didn't do enough to persuade the Palestinians to come to an agreement with the Israelis at those talks. Egyptians bristled they hadn't realized that the price of billions in U.S. aid over the years was to take U.S. orders on foreign policy. Arafat got firm backing Monday from the foreign ministers of 16 Muslim nations, who said Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state and called for world recognition of a Palestinian state. The Jerusalem committee of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, meeting in the Moroccan coastal city of Agadir on Monday, also appealed to the United States not to transfer its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Clinton had said he might do so to reward Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak for what he called his flexibility at Camp David. Before beginning his discussions with Mubarak, Clinton made a point of praising Egypt's role in Mideast peacemaking, saying, "all the parties understand that without the involvement and leadership and support of Egypt, they won't be able to do it." "President Mubarak has been critical to this process for 20 years now, certainly all the time that I've been here," added Clinton.
The two leaders met for an hour and a half at a lavish reception room at Cairo airport, but made no remarks after their talks. Dennis Ross, U.S. envoy to the Middle East, said the two leaders reviewed the flurry of peacemaking meetings that followed the Camp David talks. "There's a very active effort being made by the parties with us, with the Egyptians to try to find ways to over come differences," Ross told reporters. "The differences that are there are real, but there's also an intention to try to find ways to overcome them," added Ross. "Whether we can do that I can't yet say, that we think it's possible, I can say." Ross said the two presidents felt that their discussions "increased the level of our understanding in terms of how we working together can try to be helpful to them." Amr Moussa, Mubarak's foreign minister, said Clinton brought no new plan, "but there are ways and proposals and ideas" that could allow Israelis and Palestinians to move closer together in the next few days. "But this will require a great effort," Moussa said. |
