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Condoleezza Rice to visit Russia and Middle East soon
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to the Middle East via Russia next week as part of a shuttle diplomacy trip ahead of a US-sponsored peace summit, the State Department said Wednesday.
The trip announcement came as Israeli and Palestinian leaders held a new round of talks in Jerusalem, meeting for the first time with their negotiating teams to try to bridge differences ahead of the summit.
"There is a lot more (work) to be done and part of that work is going to be the secretary going out next week to the Middle East," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.
He did not provide the full travel itinerary of Rice, who will be making her seventh trip to the region this year.
McCormack said she would first make a stopover in Moscow, where she will join Defense Secretary Robert Gates for face-to-face talks with their counterparts.
They will meet on October 12 in the wake of stalled negotiations on America`s planned missile defense system in central Europe, Russia`s foreign affairs ministry had reported earlier.
The meeting with their Russian counterparts in Moscow "cover a number of different issues, including missile defense," McCormack said.
He indicated that Rice was to shuttle between capitals in the Middle East to lay the groundwork for the peace summit this fall.
"There is going to be a lot of going back and forth among various parties in the region," he said.
"I think that the hard work has already begun but really the hard work is about to begin and we`ll see," McCormack said.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, meeting for the fourth time in less than two months, told aides on Wednesday to start work on a joint document to serve as a basis for peace talks.
It remained unclear if they were able to bridge their differences over how detailed the document should be.
Palestinian negotiating team member Saeb Erekat said following the Jerusalem meeting that Olmert and Abbas "instructed us to begin as of next week negotiations to achieve a joint document on the core issues with the intention of submitting it to the international conference."
The international meeting, which is expected to take place in November, "will witness the launching of the permanent status negotiations to achieve a peace treaty on all the core issues," Erekat said.
But a senior Israeli official briefing reporters after the encounter said the joint statement would be vague.
"The two sides understand that the timetable is such that it cannot allow reaching a permanent agreement before November. Therefore we cannot enter a minefield we know we will not be able to cross by November," he said.
"Our intention is to start open-ended talks on a permanent agreement after the November meeting."
The two sides have had widely diverging views on what they should agree on before November.
The Palestinians want a detailed agreement and a timeframe for implementing solutions to the thorniest problems of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- borders, refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
The Israelis favor a looser document -- a joint declaration or a declaration of interests are the terms that have appeared in the Israeli media -- ahead of the international meeting.
McCormack said Washington had not yet issued invitations to the summit or settled on a precise date or venue for the meeting.
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| 18.09.2017 |
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