Downing Street Says » Middle East

Asked what the Prime Minister was hoping to achieve on his shortly expected trip to the Middle East, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that the Prime Minister had set out his thinking on this in his speech in Los Angeles. The Prime Minister was aware that the immediate focus was still on resolving the outcomes of the recent conflict and no doubt part of any visit would be to deal with such issues, for example the blockade. However, he fundamentally believed that people also needed to address the fundamental issues of the future of Lebanon and Palestine.

The process of re-engagement needed to begin again. Yes, at the moment there was anger and mistrust on all sides, but equally the Prime Minister believed that underlying that there was a recognition that we needed to fundamentally resolve this problem. This meant in the case of Palestine getting back to the road map. We had no illusions that this trip would be about starting negotiations now. It would be about starting a process of re-engagement with the process of negotiation. No matter how angry both sides were about recent events, no matter how much they mistrusted each other or others like ourselves we had to get people on all sides to recognise that they had to get back to the process of negotiation and start taking those first steps. This forthcoming trip would not be about big agreements. It would be about getting the process of people thinking how to restart the peace process.

Asked why the Prime Minister thought he was able to act as an honest broker, the PMOS said that if journalists reflected on what we had briefed on throughout the conflict they would recall the conversations that the Prime Minister had had, not just with the Israelis, but also with others in the Arab world, in particularly with the Lebanese Prime Minister. The Prime Minister believed that there was a desire to try and find a way back to the peace process and from his conversations with all sides he believed they thought it would be helpful if someone from the outside helped talk through the process of how to begin that process of re-engagement. Asked whether the Prime Minister was regarded as someone from the outside, the PMOS said that this was best answered by those in the region and those people that the Prime Minister had spoken to had said that it would be helpful to have someone like him help to try and restart the political process and we should respect the opinion of those people.

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» Wednesday, September 6, 2006

Middle East

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