Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafik Hariri, is in Washington. Hariri, the first Arab in a stream of regional leaders who will be descending on the US capital over the next few weeks, arrived on Monday hoping to revive the Arab Peace Initiative, which has been overshadowed by the Palestinian-Israeli bloodbath.
According to officials accompanying Hariri on his Washington trip, which on Tuesday included meetings with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and acting Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Hariri has insisted that a temporary truce would not bring peace. A reduction in violence, he said, would have to go side-by-side with a programmed withdrawal from recently reoccupied areas, the pronouncement of a Palestinian state even if its boundaries were to be left for later and the restart of political negotiations that would allow the Arabs to put their own peace initiative on the table.
“There is no hope to recover confidence in the peace process without such a road map,” one source told The Daily Star. “It is important to rekindle hope.
“Desperate people do desperate things,” he warned, alluding to suicide bombings, which Sharon has cited as the direct reason for his onslaught and which Washington has likened to the attacks of Sept. 11.
As for tensions along the Lebanese border, Hariri insisted that the resistance was abiding by the rules of engagement, restricting its attacks to the Shebaa Farms, which Beirut regards as occupied territory an argument that Washington has rejected on the grounds the maps in the possession of the United Nations refer to the area as Syrian land.
More importantly, however, Hariri stressed that the exclusion of Syria and Lebanon from talks would be a mistake.
“The Middle East is in danger and needs intensive care, which only the United States can offer,” Hariri said.
Hariri offered a lukewarm reaction to Sharon’s proposals for an international conference, opining that complications attached to the preparations for such a parley would leave the region in turmoil for six to seven months, giving Sharon a grace period to wreak further havoc, and crush US credibility.
“The United States has a big responsibility” in the search for a political settlement, Hariri said. “Unfortunately, because of what we have seen in the West Bank … people are not talking about the peace plan.”
As for the civilian casualties on both sides, Hariri said, “there’s no difference between civilians killed by tank fire and those killed in suicide bombings. Civilian casualties on both sides have to stop.” (Albawaba.com)
