U.S. pushes 5-nation Arab summit about Barak

CAIRO -- Yemen has approved efforts apparently backed by the United States to convene an Arab summit to form strategy in the wake of the election of Ehud Barak as Israel's new prime minister.

A senior official made the assertion during a meeting on Thursday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. Yemeni Prime Minister Abdul Karim Iryani handed a letter to Mubarak from President Ali Abdullah Saleh that concerned bilateral and Arab relations.

In Paris, U.S. President Bill Clinton said the United States expects Barak's government to resume negotiations on all tracks of Middle East peace efforts. This would include talks with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

"I believe when the new government takes office, if what we see and the press reports is right about the composition of this broad-based coalition government, I believe that there will be a vigorous pursuit of all channels of the peace process,'' Clinton said.

The United States and France are urging Morocco's King Hassan II to help convene the summit, according to a report Wednesday in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Zaman. The report said U.S. President Bill Clinton and French President Jacques Chirac spoke separately to Hassan and urged him to expand his role in Middle East peace efforts. They also praised Hassan's as-yet-unannounced peace plan for the resumption of negotiations.

A five nation summit -- Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and the Palestinians -- was cancelled earlier this month after Syrian President Hafez Al Assad refused to participate because of his strained relations with Arafat.

The newspaper said Hassan began to prepare his plan in April and discussed it with Clinton and Chirac. The plan calls for Israel to implement the Wye River accords signed in October and which call for an Israeli handover of 18.1 percent of the West Bank to full or Palestinian control.

The Hassan plan also calls for the resumption of Israeli-Syrian negotiations over the future of the Golan Heights at the point where the talks were halted in 1996. Syria claims that Israel agreed in principle to a full withdrawal from the Golan. Israel has denied this.

After Israel fulfills these conditions, the Arabs would begin to normalize relations with the Jewish state, according to the Hassan plan. At the same time, final status talks between Israel and the Palestinians would begin.

On Wednesday, PA International Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath was quoted by the official Egyptian Middle East News Agency as saying that Clinton will convene a summit in December with Barak and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Arafat is said to be supportive of Hassan's Middle East efforts.