Rice sees hope in Mideast truce but urges patience
Source: Reuters
By Sue Pleming DEAD SEA, Jordan, Dec 1 (Reuters) - On her seventh visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories in under two years, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came away with no tangible results on Friday but said she saw promise in a Gaza truce. "This is the kind of thing that takes time," she told reporters late on Thursday after meeting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Jericho in the West Bank and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem. "You don't expect great leaps forward," she added. But Rice said she saw a "little opening" for reviving a moribund peace process after a truce was struck last weekend in Gaza and she was also optimistic following a "positive" speech by Olmert in which he reached out for peace if certain conditions were met. The top U.S. diplomat pushed both sides to consolidate the ceasefire in Gaza and expand it to the West Bank, but cautioned that the truce was very fragile. Arab nations and others have criticised Washington for doing little to push-start stalled Arab-Israeli peace talks. Some say it must be tackled at the same time as the United States, which overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, grapples to stabilise Iraq. U.S. President George W. Bush said in September that he planned a new push on the Arab-Israeli front and said it would be a priority of his final years in office. Rice has also used her trip to seek more Arab support for the struggling government in Iraq, which is being ripped apart by sectarian violence and bloodshed. Rice, who saw Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki while in Jordan along with Bush, met ministers from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Jordan and Egypt at the Dead Sea resort where both issues were at the top of the agenda. Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said afterwards that the Palestinian issue could no longer be avoided. "The Palestinian issue is a core issue and affects all the pockets of tensions in the region," he said. After her meeting, Rice said she was encouraged by support voiced by the GCC countries, Egypt and Jordan to helping Maliki's government, but she did not provide details. "The political support of groups like this is extremely important to an Arab state like Iraq," said Rice. Rice is set to see many of those ministers again on Friday at a conference at the Dead Sea that is aimed at boosting democracy and development in the Middle East. Called "Forum for the Future", the meeting is jointly hosted by Jordan and Russia, itself a target of strong U.S. criticism over human rights abuses, restrictions on the media and nongovernmental organizations. Rice visited Russia last month and told Moscow firmly that it needed to improve its human rights record, particularly after a prominent investigative reporter was gunned down. As a sign of solidarity, she met the reporter's editor and son at her hotel. "I feel very strongly that the Kremlin is too powerful at the expense of other countervailing institutions," Rice said when asked if she saw any irony in the fact that Russia was co-hosting the Jordan conference. But she argued it would be wrong to isolate Russia from such international events as the Dead Sea conference, which was proposed by G8 countries as a way of promoting democracy in the broader Middle East. "We are using this international forum to push for political change. It doesn't mean that everyone sitting around the table is a perfect example of democratic development," she said.
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