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Arafat Agrees to Meet Clinton in Washington: Palestinian Official
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has accepted U.S. President Bill Clinton's invitation to meet with him in Washington for talks on the current Mideast crisis, a senior Palestinian official said on Thursday.
Nabil Shaath, Palestinian planning and international cooperation minister, told Cairo-based Voice of Arab radio by telephone from Gaza Strip that Arafat has briefed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on his acceptance of the invitation, hinting the possibility of holding a Palestinian-U.S. summit within a week.
The Palestinian official said, however, that Arafat has rejected a tripartite meeting that will group him and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak with Clinton.
Shaath warned that the Palestinian National Authority will by no means deal with the Jewish state if Barak forms a national emergency government with hardline Likud leader Ariel Sharon, whose trip to a disputed holy sites in East Jerusalem on September 28 triggered the present mayhem.
In almost a month, at least 130 Palestinians were killed and 4,000 others wounded in the bloody clashes with Israeli security forces in the Palestinian territories.
Shaath said that the name of the proposed Israeli emergency government "would be that of war," consequently, "no dealings will be made with it" by the Palestinian side as it "aims at escalating confrontations in the Palestinian lands."
A White House spokesman said Tuesday evening that Clinton had proposed to invite Arafat and Barak for separate talks if the two leaders carry out their pledge made at the October 17 summit held in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh.
At the summit, Arafat and Barak agreed to take concrete steps to stop the violence, investigate the cause of the clashes, and return to the negotiating table to salvage the faltering peace process.
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