Arab leaders meeting in Khartoum said yesterday they expected little change from Israeli elections in which Ehud Olmert claimed victory.
The interim prime minister pledges to retain parts of the occupied West Bank in which there are large Jewish settlement blocs, give up other areas and impose a border unilaterally on the Palestinians.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the election result would make no difference unless Olmert changed his policies.
"This result will not change [anything] as long as the agenda of Olmert himself does not change and he does not abandon the question of `unilateral agreements,'" Abbas told reporters in Khartoum, where he is attending the annual Arab summit.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said the victory of Olmert's Kadima party was expected and it was more important to see the shape of the coalition he would put together and "what its course would be -- peaceful or not."
"The ball is in the Israeli court because during these years since the launch of Madrid [the 1991 peace conference in Madrid], Israel with all its ruling parties has put obstacles in the way of attaining peace," he added.
Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said: "It's not comprehensible leaving the issue of Jerusalem or accepting unilateral withdrawals according to Israeli whims. This will not work but will only lead to worsening matters more and more."
"It is impossible to accept Israeli proposals that we have seen so far. Is there anything new the new Israeli government can come up with? Many Arabs don't think so, so the Arab world has to look at all the possibilities," he added.
The Arab summit, which ended yesterday, renewed an Arab offer of peace with Israel in exchange for withdrawal from territory occupied since the 1967 Middle East war. Israel has in the past rejected the offer.
The summit also opposed unilateral steps by Israel, calling for a return to multilateral peace negotiations under international supervision.
Arab leaders also agreed on a US$150-million aid package for cash-strapped African Union (AU) troops deployed in Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.
The move came after summit host Sudan sought to win backing for its opposition to plans for the dispatch of UN peacekeepers to Darfur, where war, disease and famine have cost up to 300,000 lives in three years.
Arab leaders stopped short of an outright rejection of wider international intervention in the conflict, but said any deployment of any other troops should have the approval of the government in Khartoum.
The leaders endorsed a resolution to allocate US$150 million to the African troops over the next six months and called on Arab countries to "provide financial and logistic support to the AU mission in Darfur to enable it to continue performing its tasks."
The resolution stressed that the AU should "continue its efforts and accomplish its mission to end the crisis of Darfur," mainly through peace talks being held in Abuja, according to a copy seen by the press.
Arab leaders also stipulated that the deployment of any other troops in the region required Sudan's "pre-approval" and called on "Arab African countries to strengthen their participation in the AU force."
But regional heavyweight Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview published yesterday he would not send troops to Darfur unless there was a peace agreement between rebels and Khartoum.
"Only then could Egypt take part in a peacekeeping force in this region," he told the weekly al-Mussawar.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS