An international conference in Berlin tomorrow will seek to help Palestinians create their own state through grassroots security measures like putting policemen on the beat and building courthouses.
But the one-day conference, attended by 41 countries and expected to be followed in the evening by a meeting of the Middle East Quartet a week after a truce between Israel and Hamas, will focus only on helping the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and will not cover the Gaza Strip.
The Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million people, has been subject to a near-total Israeli blockade since the seizure of power a year ago by Hamas, which the international community refuses to talk to until it renounces violence and recognizes Israel’s right to exist.
The EU Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS), set up in 2005 to train the Palestinian police force, will call on donor countries gathered in Berlin to earmark US$187 million to help the PA.
The cash, which comes out of a total of US$7 billion pledged to the PA in Paris in December, is not aimed at tackling militants, but at building up the basic infrastructure needed for a functioning state, organizers said.
The projects include training criminal and traffic police and building police stations, prisons and courts, as well as a forensics lab.
The conference’s “key aim is to emphasize the commitment of the international community to the development of policing and justice” in the PA, said Colin Smith, a retired British officer who heads the EU training mission.
“The Palestinian police are a capable police force that has a great deal of skills. What they lack is capacity, equipment and infrastructure,” he said in Ramallah, political capital of the occupied West Bank, on Tuesday.
“They do a remarkable job with very little,” he said.
A German foreign ministry spokesman said Berlin was confident the conference would produce “substantial results” both in terms of financing and in expanding EUPOL COPPS and widening its scope of activities into the justice sector.
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad will head the Palestinian delegation while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will attend.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mussa and Quartet envoy Tony Blair will also attend.
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