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Solana prods Israel to accept peace plan
European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana urged Israel yesterday to endorse the "roadmap" peace plan, saying a changed postwar reality made it the best chance to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
- Reuters
- Published: 00:00 May 14, 2003
European Union foreign affairs chief Javier Solana urged Israel yesterday to endorse the "roadmap" peace plan, saying a changed postwar reality made it the best chance to revive stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
"We have to put all the pressure in order to have the Israelis accept in a clear manner the content of the road map," Solana told reporters in Amman.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stand against dismantling of Jewish colonies is a blow to the roadmap's call for curbs on settlement expansion and the disarming of Palestinian militants as first steps towards Palestinian statehood by 2005.
"We have a new possibility that we have to really get together to implement," said Solana. "The people in the region and in Palestine have to see that their lives begin to change, and the application of the roadmap would create hope that would create a determination by everybody to move forward."
Solana defended the peace proposal as a realistic and practical plan, unlike previous doomed Middle East initiatives.
"The roadmap is an agenda supported by everybody that has steps that commit both sides and a calendar that has very very precise things that everybody has to do, and when they have to do it," he added.
"There is a new situation in the world" since the end of the Iraq war, Solana said, and he called on all involved to "behave in a positive and constructive manner to see the road map implemented" in order to bring peace to the region.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who visited Amman earlier in the day, said the roadmap was the "only path" to peace, and that Washington had no intention of rewriting or renegotiating it at Israel's behest.
The new Palestinian government of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas has endorsed the roadmap and voiced dismay that Powell had not persuaded Sharon to do the same.
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