SPAIN: Euro Mediterranean Forum issues declaration aiming to revive the Middle East peace process

Mediterranean Foreign Ministers on Saturday (October 28) agreed a plan they hope will re-launch the Middle East peace process, calling for a new sense of urgency and commitment, a statement said after a two-day meeting. "We want to contribute with ideas and specific proposals to pull that region out from the fatalism, stagnation and the impossibility of achieving peace," Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos told a news conference after the meeting in the Spanish south-eastern city of Alicante. They called for the reactivation and revision of the Road Map to Middle East peace process, proposed by the quartet of international mediators in 2003, and the convening of an international peace conference. The "Declaration of Alicante" by Foreign Ministers of the Mediterranean Forum was the main subject of discussion for the group, which includes 11 north African and European countries. The document, which reiterated the idea of a Middle East peace conference, similar to that held in Madrid in 1991, was subscribed to by Foreign Ministers or their deputies from Algeria, Egypt, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and Tunisia. Libya was also present with observer status. The ministers warned that the new momentum given to the process by United Nations Security Council resolution 1701 might not last long. The ministers called for both short- and long-term steps towards peace. "To unblock the current situation with the release of the (Israeli) soldiers, to create and support the efforts of the Palestinian Authority to establish a Palestinian government that can be a speaker for the international community, to create an economic aid for the Palestinian Territories," Moratinos said. In the near-term, they called for confidence-building measures including the release of prisoners and the transfer of tax revenues; co-operative border management; the support of the Palestinian Authority; an end to violence, without making the process dependent on the security situation; and the restoration of dialogue. Moratinos told his country's parliament this week that the road map for peace in the Middle East was no longer adequate and that a major initiative, of the type of the 1991 Madrid conference, now appeared necessary. The October 1991 Madrid conference was attended by Israel and Arab states under the aegis of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union. It set out a framework for a Middle East peace process and opened the way to the 1993 Oslo accords on Palestinian self-rule.

ITN Source | October 29, 2006

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