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Bush stands by road map { May 20 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12964-2003May19.html?nav=hptop_tbhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12964-2003May19.html?nav=hptop_tb
Bush: Peace Bid Will Go Forward
President Says 'Road Map' Stands Despite Latest Attacks
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 20, 2003; Page A01
President Bush yesterday denounced the new wave of terrorist bombings in Israel, but said it would not deter his commitment to move the Middle East peace process forward.
"The road map still stands," he said of the U.S.-backed peace initiative begun early this month. "We're still on the road to peace, it's just going to be a bumpy road, and I'm not going to get off the road until we achieve the vision" of side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states.
Senior officials said the administration is urging Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who canceled a White House meeting set for today after a weekend of suicide bombings, to reschedule his U.S. visit for next week. Bush is due to leave for a lengthy European trip on May 29, and administration officials feared that momentum would be lost if the Sharon visit were delayed until his return.
After five bombings within 48 hours that killed 12 Israelis, the administration took pains to balance its condemnation of terrorism and its insistence that the Palestinian leadership take forceful action against it, with reassurance that the peace plan would go forward. "We do not see these bombings as a cosmic event," one administration official said.
But there was clear concern, both within the administration and outside it, that continued violence would undercut hopes of progress, and worry that any delay in Bush's meeting with Sharon would risk lessening the president's zeal for pressuring Israel to make its own moves toward peace.
The "road map," a step-by-step blueprint that begins with confidence-building measures and moves toward a final Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, was formally presented to the two sides on May 1 by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia. Although the new Palestinian government headed by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas immediately announced its acceptance, Israel has balked at some elements of the document.
Supporters of the peace plan have said that only Bush can force Sharon to act. "I don't think anything is going to happen unless the president cracks the whip on Sharon," a senior Arab official said yesterday. "He has to do it in the Oval Office. There is a lot of doubt about the president's willingness to do so."
The plan's other authors have also urged pressure on Sharon, although yesterday Bush indirectly chastised them for undercutting the Abbas government by continuing to recognize the authority of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. "Europe must work with us to do everything we can to discourage the terrorist activities that derail a process toward peace," Bush said.
Abbas's installation as prime minister followed strong pressure on the Palestinians to come up with a leader other than Arafat, accused by Israel and the United States of involvement with the militant groups responsible for terrorist bombings. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell pointedly avoided crossing paths with Arafat when he visited Abbas in the West Bank last week, but European leaders have not shunned him. In an emergency cabinet meeting yesterday, Israel said that no foreign visitor who meets with Arafat will be accorded a meeting with Israeli government officials.
Despite their agreement on the "road map," the United States and fellow authors of the plan often have starkly different views of events in the Middle East. While denouncing the terrorist attacks and noting that Abbas is obligated under the first phase of the plan to "bring those involved in planning and carrying out those attacks to justice," Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. special coordinator for the peace process, told the U.N. Security Council yesterday that support from Israel is necessary to carry out the task.
Roed-Larsen noted that the plan bars Israel from punitive attacks on civilians and demolition of Palestinian homes, yet "only hours after the presentation of the road map on 1 May," Israeli military operations in Gaza City left 13 Palestinians dead and "destruction of property continued."
A senior administration official sharply rejected any suggestion that the suicide bombings were a response to the Israeli attacks. "We don't believe that," the official said. Instead, the bombings repeated a pattern of terrorist attacks "every time there's some tiny bit of movement" in the peace process.
Bush is under domestic pressure from his political base to reject the road map. Senior Republican congressional leaders have said the document is flawed and would undercut Israeli security with its call for parallel steps by Israel to ease its military occupation of Palestinian territories even as it demands that the Palestinians move to end terrorist violence. Yesterday, a group of conservative Christian and Jewish groups released a letter telling Bush that the road map "could lead to a disaster." The letter, organized by conservative Christian activist Gary Bauer, said that any attempt to be "evenhanded" between "democratic Israel" and the "terrorist-infested Palestinian infrastructure" would be "morally reprehensible."
Although U.S. officials said a meeting last Saturday night between Sharon and Abbas was a sign of progress, internal accounts from Israeli and Arab sources described the talks as frustrating and inconclusive. "The only thing they ask for is formal acceptance of the road map," one Israeli official said of the Palestinians.
Israel rejects the document's reference to negotiations over the right of Palestinian refugees to return to Israeli territory from which they or their ancestors were ejected, as well as its positive reference to a proposal made last year by Saudi Arabia. That proposal cited the "right of return" and the final status of Jerusalem as subjects for negotiation. Neither would be accepted by Sharon's carefully balanced cabinet, the Israeli official said.
Israel offered to withdraw its own troops from those areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip where the Palestinians could ensure security, the official said, but the Palestinians offered no response. "They said . . . 'We don't have a plan yet,' " said the official, who suggested the Palestinians were "banking on international pressure on Israel."
For its part, Abbas's delegation told Sharon they found his arguments about internal political pressure unconvincing, sources said. In response to Israel's offer of security withdrawals, said one source with access to Palestinian notes from the meeting, the Palestinians said "they would accept such goodwill gestures, but not as implementation of the road map, since Israel has not accepted it."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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