International
Palestinians want peace-deal monitor

New York (PTI): Ahead of this week's Middle East peace conference in the US, Palestinians are reportedly pressing Washington to appoint a full time monitor tasked with assessing whether the two sides are living up to their promises on security and a freeze on Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

The reason, says Newsweek in its upcoming issue, is that Israelis and Palestinians have always been better at making peace-deal promises than following through on them.

Quoting a Palestinian official involved in the process, the magazine says Palestinians wrote the issue into an early draft of a document that was to be approved in Annapolis where the conference would be held.

"The US will monitor and judge the fulfillment of the commitments of both sides of the Roadmap (an American blueprint for reaching a peace deal between the Palestinian Authority and Israel)," the Palestinians wrote.

But Israel balked at the idea, at least initially -- just one of the disputes that prevented negotiators from agreeing on a joint declaration last week.

Some of the disputes were more substantive than others: One involved whether to call the declaration a "statement," as Israel wished, or a "document," which Palestinians preferred, the report said.

The Bush administration has not had a permanent envoy assigned to the conflict since it drafted the Roadmap in 2003, and the results, says the magazine, have been telling.

Although the plan called for a halt to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank -- the heart of the future Palestinian state -- the Jewish population there has since grown by nearly 20 per cent, the report said quoting Israeli government data.

In the past year, the number of West Bank settlers increased 5.8 per cent compared with Israel's overall population growth of 1.8 per cent.

On the Palestinian side, the magazine says, a monitor would help ensure that President Mahmoud Abbas makes a "genuine effort" to crack down on militants, and not just those from his political rival Hamas.

Israelis complain, for example, that while Palestinian security forces arrested members of Abbas's own Fatah group in September for plotting to assassinate Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the suspects were then released, only to be rearrested later under pressure from Israel.

"Unless the administration is prepared to get into the monitoring game and hold each side accountable, commitments will not be fulfilled," Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast negotiator who's now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was quoted as saying.

Miller says a monitor must have enough clout to be capable of humiliating both sides into compliance.

Asked by Newsweek recently whether the State Department would appoint a special envoy, a senior administration official said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice fills the role herself. But critics say she has too much on her plate to engage in real-time monitoring.

International

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