Palestinians’ Meeting with Arafat Irrelevant, State Department Says

The United States and Israel are looking the other way at a meeting Palestinian leaders from the administered territories had this week with Yasir Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman.

When asked about the meeting, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said the United States had the same reaction as Israel.

She then quoted a spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as saying the meeting was “irrelevant” to the 6-month-old Middle East peace process.

The Israelis, she said, “pointed out in their statement the importance of the peace process. We couldn’t agree more.”

Arafat was in Cairo recovering from an airplane crash in the Libyan desert last week.

Among the Palestinians who met with him Wednesday were Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi, who are not part of the peace talks but who do meet regularly with Secretary of State James Baker.

The delegation apparently did not include any Palestinians who are part of the official delegation to the bilateral talks with Israel, which resume April 27 in Washington.

Tutwiler said the fact that Husseini and Ashrawi met with Arafat would not affect Baker’s future dealings with them.

“The PLO, as you well know, is not part of these negotiations, and it is not relevant to us who the Palestinians do or don’t meet with,” Tutwiler told reporters.

“And the PLO, furthermore, as you know, is not an intermediary. They don’t have a role. We don’t have a dialogue with them,” she said.

Tutwiler recalled that six months ago in Madrid, when the Arab-Israeli peace talks began, there were hundreds of PLO members there who met with Palestinians attending the talks.

“That’s not any different in this instance, in my mind, than what has been going on” this week in Cairo, Tutwiler added. “We do not control who people do or do not talk to.”