Posted on 07/26/2003 2:18:26 AM PDT by yonif
Mahmoud Abbas, on his first trip to Washington as Palestinian Authority prime minister, on Thursday pledged allegiance to PA Chairman Yasser Arafat despite Washington's and Israel's insistence that Arafat is a hindrance to progress in the peace negotiations.
Abbas, who is to meet with US President George W. Bush on Friday to discuss the road map for a two-state solution, told members of the House International Relations Committee during a closed session Thursday: "The road map does not say anything about isolating Arafat. Nobody really asked us to do so."
He then added somewhat cryptically, according to one person present: "It's not my government that accepted the road map. It was the previous one of Arafat that accepted it."
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who asked Abbas about his pledges to continue working with Arafat, told The Jerusalem Post she found Abbas's comments "very disturbing."
"I would not say that he greatly impressed too many people in the audience," she said. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-California) called the session "interesting" and "constructive," despite Abbas's rebuff of Lantos's invitation to visit the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
During an April visit to Ramallah, Lantos asked Abbas to accompany him to the Holocaust museum during his next visit to Washington. The invitation was extended in light of Abbas's two-decade-old doctoral dissertation in which he estimated the Nazis may have killed "only a few hundred thousand" Jews.
Abbas initially accepted the invitation. But in a letter sent to Lantos on Wednesday, Abbas wrote that his current visit was too crammed to visit the museum.
"Unfortunately, I will not be able to visit the Holocaust Museum during this visit, despite my earlier intention to do so. On my next trip to Washington, I will work it in the schedule and look forward to you escorting me."
Abbas was advised that a visit to the Holocaust museum would hurt him politically back home, Lantos said.
Abbas, who spoke through a State Department-appointed interpreter during the hearing, was accompanied by PA Security Minister Muhammad Dahlan, Palestine Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Qurei, Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath, and Finance Minister Salaam Fayad.
Also on Thursday, he and Dahlan held separate meetings with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and with American Jewish leaders.
Dahlan told Rice the US should set a timetable for Israel to implement the road map and that Israel should end its confinement of Arafat to Ramallah, sources close to Dahlan were quoted as saying.
One Jewish leader said ahead of the meeting with Abbas, "One of the areas of concern is obviously the question of the terrorist organizations dismantling and disarming them and comments he has made of this being off the table."
Lantos urged Abbas to destroy the terrorist organizations, warning, "Otherwise the process will collapse and you will prove to be a failure." Lantos also told Abbas that he should not expect Palestinian prisoners "with blood on their hands" to be released by Israel.
In a separate meeting with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Abbas criticized Congress's "blind support" for Israel.
"If Congress continues blindly to support Israel without considering Palestinian concerns, then President Bush's vision will not be attainable," a Palestinian official quoted Abbas as saying.
Abbas told reporters afterward that he would tell Bush during their meeting Friday "it is key" that Israel release all Palestinian prisoners. Israel plans to announce that it will release a small fraction around 400 during Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's visit here next week, an Israeli official said this week.
Bush plans to ask Abbas to do as much as he can to crack down on Palestinian terrorist organizations, but will stop short of exerting public pressure on the Palestinian leader that Washington is hoping to prop up as much as possible, American sources said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday it is the US "objective to enhance [Abbas's] position."
"What we are trying to do is to show to the Palestinian people that this man is a leader who can take them to the goal... the creation of a Palestinian state," Powell said.
Powell said he knows "much more work has to be done with respect to rooting out any capability for terrorism." And he acknowledged Palestinian concerns about Israel's construction of a security fence an issue that could top the agenda when Bush meets with Sharon on Tuesday.
In an interview with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday, Powell doubted that a Palestinian state could be achieved by a US-set deadline of 2005, saying, "I think it would be difficult, but I think it's still possible." He suggested, as well, that Hamas and Islamic Jihad could become full-fledged political parties if they abandon terrorism.
On Thursday, he expounded on the idea. "Any organization that has a terrorist component to it and supports that kind of terrorist activity cannot have a place in the peace process. Now, if an organization that has a terrorist component to it, a terrorist wing to it, totally abandons that, gives it up and there's no question in anyone's mind that that is part of its past, then that is a different organization," Powell said.
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