WASHINGTON Ñ The U.S. State Department has reassured Arab regimes that
despite President George Bush's call for "the Palestinian people to elect new leaders,"
the U.S. will continue to deal with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat.
U.S. diplomats and officials said many Arab leaders were stunned by what they felt was a call by Bush to
overthrow Arafat as well as other regimes deemed as undemocratic. The president's speech also seems to have shocked his own State Department which has refrained from advocating democratic reforms in the Middle East.
"Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born," Bush said in his speech. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror."
U.S. officials said Bush's call to link Palestinian statehood to democracy remains a vision rather than policy, Middle East Newsline reported. They said
Washington will work with Arafat and is prepared for the prospect that he
will be reelected.
"We will remain in touch with the Palestinian leaders." Secretary of
State Colin Powell said on Tuesday in an interview with the Arabic-language
Radio Sawa. "We are in touch with different Palestinian leaders as recently as yesterday, before the
president's speech as well as after."
But some U.S. officials said the administration appears divided over whether Bush's
speech on Palestinian democracy can be translated into policy. They said
Vice President Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld want
such a vision to apply to other Arab regimes in the Middle East,
particularly Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns is expected to tour the
Middle East next week to explain the Bush speech to Arab allies. Officials
said Burns will also urge Israel to launch confidence-building measures
toward the Palestinians.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell does not plan
to meet Arafat . But Boucher did not rule this out in the future.
A senior administration official said the Palestinian Authority must
overcome several hurdles in meeting Bush's demands. This includes the
dismantling of Palestinian groups deemed as terrorist, the elimination of
armed militias as well as financial reform and transparency.
"The president has always believed that new institutions and new
processes and more democracy in the Palestinian
political space would lead to a new leadership that was willing and able to
take on these tasks," the official said.
For his part, Arafat has told the United States and the European Union
that Palestinian elections would be held in January and March of 2003.
Palestinian officials said Arafat would not object to Bush's call for
democracy as long as he can control events.
"If we're not talking about an engineered coup d'etat, which would be
totally anti-democratic, we are talking about independent elections
monitored by hundreds of monitors in the world," PA International
Cooperation Minister Nabil Shaath told a news conference in Washington.
"This is a democratic process that we can live with."
