06 May 2004 09:37
Middle East peace feasible, but the will must be there - Russian minister
Moscow, 6 May: Russian principles for a Middle East settlement propose the creation of a Palestinian state that will
be a viable entity and that will live with equal rights side by side and in peace with Israel.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has stated this. He believes that "with the will, with the political will
on both sides, and particularly with the political will of the mediators, the main parameters of a settlement will be
registered within two to three years". Undoubtedly, he added, "a fairly long period will then be required for
this to become irreversible".
To attain this aim, the head of the Foreign Ministry said in an interview to Centre TV, the Palestinians need to take
steps to halt the activities of terrorist organizations on their territory and to eliminate their infrastructures. There
should not be illegal armed groups there "that deliver problems to many parts of the world, and not only in
Palestine".
For its part, the minister noted, Israel is obliged to stop the disproportionate use of force and to confirm its
intentions to freeze settlement activity.
Talking about the results of the meeting in New York of the quartet [of mediators] on the Middle East (Russia, the
USA, the UN and the European Union), Sergey Lavrov noted that "the American delegation took on board all the
arguments of Russia, the European Union and [UN Secretary-General] Kofi Annan, arguments in favour of the fact that we
now do not have the right and cannot change the main rules for a settlement that have been approved by the [UN] Security
Council".
In the words of the head of the Foreign Ministry, the meeting "managed to adopt such a document that not only
confirms all existing decisions of the Security Council on the principles of a settlement, which not only says that any
unilateral steps are welcome if they go in the direction of a full implementation of the road map. More than that, this
statement says that the decisions of the Security Council and the decisions of the Madrid conference, where the
principle of "land in exchange for oil" was fixed, retain their force in full measure.
[ITAR-TASS news agency] |
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