Secretary of State George Shultz will travel to the Middle East June 3 for his fourth trip to the region this year, the State Department announced Monday.
The Mideast swing, which will come after the summit in Moscow between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, includes meetings in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel.
It would end in time for Shultz to meet in Madrid June 9 to 10 with foreign ministers of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Department spokesman Charles Redman said Shultz is returning to the Mideast because there are “underlying problems in the region which remain unresolved. And the secretary has said many times the status quo is not tenable.”
He said Saudi Arabia is not included in the itinerary, because it is “not one of the countries actively involved in the peace process, in the sense that they are not a negotiating partner for the Israelis, in terms of a comprehensive settlement.”
“The United States has advanced a realistic and a workable plan to bring about negotiations,” Redman said. “So the secretary is prepared to continue his intensive effort to try to bring about negotiations on a comprehensive peace.”
Redman acknowledged that the peace plan’s original timetable has not been met. It called for an international peace conference to be held in mid-April and for negotiations on autonomy measures for Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip to start in early May.
“Those days have passed,” Redman said. “We need to get this under way as soon as possible ??? that’s the objective in all of this.”
He said the peace plan is still “workable. In fact it is the only workable alternative” to no peace effort in the Middle East.
Shultz’s plan has divided Israel’s national unity government, with Labor supporting it and Likud opposed, particularly to the idea of an international conference. Foreign Minister Shimon Peres indicated that he will make the proposal a major issue in the this year’s Knesset elections.
JORDAN SAID TO OPPOSE CONFERENCE
Meanwhile, The New York Times reported Monday that Jordanian officials oppose the international conference as envisioned by Shultz, a meeting that would set the stage for negotiations between Israel and a Jordanian-Palestinian delegation.
Hussein, who has demanded that the conference be an “umbrella” for negotiations with Israel, stressed Saturday at a news conference in Amman that Jordan will not now represent the Palestinians, even if the Palestine Liberation Organization asked it to do so, the Times reported. “We would certainly say that they represent themselves,” Hussein was quoted as saying.
Israel and the United States are adamant against any PLO representation in negotiations. But both countries have said that Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip should participate, ideally in a joint delegation with Jordan.
In another matter, Redman said Shultz “dispatched a message — a personal message” to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir Monday calling for Israel to grant full judicial guarantees to Mubarak Awad, a U.S. citizen in Israel who was ordered deported May 6.
“If you take a look at some of the things that the Israeli Supreme Court has done just today, for example, in terms of staying the deportation, it would seem to me that there are some concerns about whether or not he would get the full and public judicial process to which we feel he is entitled,” Redman said.
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