Powell urges Arabs to help contain Iraq

11:00 AM


CAIRO - US Secretary of State Colin Powell has urged Arabs to help contain Iraq, but met an apparent rebuff from Egypt which said it felt no threat from Baghdad.

Powell offered no comfort on what most Arabs outside the Gulf see as a far more direct menace from Israel, the next stop on the US official's whirlwind Middle East tour.

"The message I plan to give to all the leaders I meet with and the Arab public is that the cause of this problem that we have is in Baghdad," Powell told reporters after meeting visiting Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Cairo.

"It's (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein, who refuses to abandon his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction," he said.

"He threatens not the United States, he threatens this region, he threatens the Arab people, he threatens the children of Egypt, the children of Saudi Arabia, the children of Kuwait with these weapons," Powell declared.

But uppermost in Arab minds are the Palestinian children killed or wounded by Israeli troops in the last five months of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than 400 people have died in the unrest, most of them Palestinians.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, who has supervised a warming of trade and other ties with Iraq in recent months, said Cairo did not perceive a danger from Baghdad.

"For us, I don't see that threat," Moussa told a joint news conference with Powell. "But if you ask the Gulf region, some countries over there, they would continue to feel that (threat) and they say it publicly," he said.

He stopped short of calling for sanctions to be lifted, but said they should be reconsidered, arguing that in their present form they were hurting Iraq's people, not its leadership.

Powell said after his talks with President Hosni Mubarak that the Egyptian leader had accepted an invitation to meet Bush in Washington on April 2.

Palestinians, furious at the latest U.S. air attacks on Iraq, fear the Bush administration will side with Israeli Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon's demand that a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation end before peace negotiations resume.

Powell said it was vital to put a lid on the violence, restore dialogue, revive economic activity and resume security cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.

"So this is the time for all of us to not point fingers at one another but doing everything we can to reduce the level of violence, because if the level of violence remains high, we have trouble getting the negotiations going again," he said.

He denied that the Bush administration saw Iraq as a higher priority than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying it was "trying to look at the whole region as a priority".

Moussa made clear that Egypt's top concern was Middle East peace. "No amount of developments in any other place would distract us from...the Palestinian-Israeli track and the peace process in general, the Syrian-Israeli track and so on."

Palestinian President Yasser Arafat visited the West Bank for the first time this year, flying by helicopter from Jordan to Ramallah, where he plans to host Powell tomorrow.

Asked what he expected from Bush, Arafat said: "The most important thing is the new US administration should take a strong position, as the peace process was first launched in Madrid under the sponsorship of (the first) President Bush."

"As (the new) President Bush told me recently, he will pursue what his father and President Clinton started."

In the West Bank village of al-Khader, near Bethlehem, Israeli soldiers shot and wounded nine Palestinians in clashes that erupted after the funeral of a Palestinian killed by troops on Friday. About 5,000 mourners cried out for revenge.

In the West Bank city of Nablus, hundreds of Palestinians attended a pro-Iraq rally, burning photographs of Bush and Powell and chanting "Stop the British and American aggression", a reference to the latest air raids near Baghdad.

In Jenin, also in the West Bank, pro-Iraqi protesters set fire to pictures of Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinians carrying pictures of Arafat and Saddam staged a rally in Beirut against US Middle East policy. "We are here to ask Powell to listen to the people, not the leaders," said Mouin Bashour, a protest organiser. "The people's message is obvious: 'No' to the bombing of Iraq and 'No' to US support for the Israeli crackdown on Palestinians."

Iraq said on Saturday it would insist on a total lifting of the U.N. embargo, rejecting US -British ideas of switching to "smart sanctions" that would focus on monitoring arms imports.

"Whether they are smart or stupid sanctions, we will reject them," Trade Minister Mohammed Mehdi Saleh declared in Baghdad.

Arab support for the UN sanctions system has greatly diminished in the 10 years since the United States led an Arab and Western coalition to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

Powell is due also to meet Israel's caretaker prime minister, Ehud Barak later today, in the second stop of a four-day tour that includes Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

His meetings with Sharon and Arafat tomorrow may yield the first real clue to Bush's policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Arab leaders are likely to urge Powell to persuade Israel to comply with UN resolutions on withdrawal from Gaza, the West Bank and Syria's Golan Heights as the only path to peace.

- REUTERS

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