One of Yasir Arafat’s closest aides within the Palestine Liberation Organization, Bassam Abu Sharif, met here Friday with senior Belgian Foreign Ministry officials, informed sources said.
It was the first such meeting since the PLO launched its diplomatic initiative last November.
Abu Sharif was in Brussels to address a seminar on the prospects for peace in the Middle East, along with David Susskind, a leader of the Belgian Jewish community who is active in trying to further Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.
Arafat’s aide, who is considered the architect of the PLO’s new moderate diplomatic strategy, met with the political director general of the Belgian Foreign Ministry and Belgian Foreign Minister Leo Tindeman’s chief of staff.
Abu Sharif, a member of the Palestine National Council, also met with a senior official of the European Executive Commission.
At the seminar, organized by the Center for European Policy Studies and attended mainly by diplomats, Abu Sharif called on world Jewry to convince Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that “his rejectionist attitude is destructive not only for the Palestinians but also for the Israelis.”
“The message we want to pass on is that an independent state of Palestine will be the factor of stability in the Middle East and a factor of security for Israel, if not the sole one,” he said.
Answering a remark by Susskind over renewed attempts by Palestinian commandos to attack Israel from southern Lebanon, Abu Sharif stressed that the PLO cannot ask the Palestinians to stop their “self-defense” in southern Lebanon while at the same time “Israel is daily raiding by sea and air the Palestinian camps there.”
“However, we are in favor of a cease-fire agreement in the area, so that some actions could not be used as a justification for reactions,” he added.
Asked about the Shamir proposal to hold elections in the administered territories, Abu Sharif called them “old ideas to solve a problem which is very dynamic.”
“The Palestinian people wants self-determination, independence and not autonomy,” he added, a reference to Shamir’s call to provide limited autonomy for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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