The foreign minister of Belgium, Mark Eyskens, is ready and willing to receive Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat should he come to Brussels for political or social reasons, the Belgian press reported over the weekend.
Local newspapers quoted an interview with Eyskens that appeared in the semi-official Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. A Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed the story.
Eyskens met Arafat in December during a visit to Tunis, where the PLO is headquartered.
He was quoted as telling Al-Ahram, “I confirm to you without hesitation that we would receive Arafat in Brussels if he comes here on the occasion of a political or social forum.
“There is nothing in our polities that can prevent such a visit,” he added.
An official visit to Brussels would be a publicity coup for Arafat, who has been largely shunned in Western capitals. The PLO chief did make an official visit to France last year and made an appearance at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman said Arafat would be welcome in Belgium “because of the concessions made these last years, such as the recognition of Israel’s right to exist.”
He was referring to statements made by Arafat at the November 1988 meeting of the Palestine National Council in Algiers and at a special session of the U.N. General Assembly in Geneva the following month.
The spokesman said there is no official invitation to Arafat from Belgium at the moment. But the foreign minister would meet him if the PLO leader happened to attend “a colloquium or something else” here.
The PLO representative in Belgium, Shawki Armali, said any invitation to Arafat to come to Brussels, where the European Community is head quartered, “must be at a high level.”
He explained it had to come from a government, not from sympathizers or an organization, because Arafat “is the president of the state of Palestine.”
Political sources said the government is studying the possibility of raising the status of the PLO’s representation here.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
