Clinton: Palestinian leaders 'need world's help'

Former US President Bill Clinton called on the world to help the Palestinian leaders who will be chosen in elections next month make peace with Israel, build their economy and fight crime and terrorism.

“There are many extraordinary leaders among the Palestinians. But they are beginning a long journey and they need our support,” Clinton said today as regional and international leaders met to discuss the challenges facing the Middle East.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s death last month has been seized on by many observers as an opportunity to advance the long stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

The Americans – who along with the United Nations, the European Union and Russia are the main sponsors of a Middle East peace plan known as the road map – had argued they could not trust Arafat as a negotiating partner. The Israelis also had refused to deal with Arafat.

Clinton has close experience with the difficulties of Mideast peacemaking. He has said Arafat “missed an opportunity” for a settlement at Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that Clinton convened at Camp David in 2000.

In his key note speech today at the Arab Strategy Forum in Dubai, Clinton praised his successor President George Bush for helping pay for the January 9 Palestinian vote to choose Arafat’s successor.

Interim Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who has the support of the United States, was expected to win the Palestinian presidential elections.

In an example of the challenges to which Clinton referred, despite Abbas’s attempts to persuade militants to halt attacks on Israelis ahead of the elections, Palestinian militants yesterday detonated explosives under a fortified Israeli army outpost on the Egypt-Gaza border, killing five soldiers in the bloodiest attack since Arafat’s November 11 death.

The new Palestinian leaders “will have to establish rule of law. They will have to fight crime and terror, they will have to develop their economy, they will have to succeed in Gaza and they will have to continue to push until a final and complete peace agreement” is reached, Clinton said today.