Planned British-PLO Talks Called Off at Last Minute

In what British officials described as a significant setback to the Mideast peace process, the first scheduled talks between members of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the British government collapsed in disagreement here Monday, just hours before they were to have begun.

Officials at the British Foreign Office blamed the Palestinians for the debacle, saying that they refused at the last minute to support a previously agreed-upon joint statement that included recognition of Israel’s right to exist. But a PLO official in London insisted that the talks failed to take place because Britain tried to insert such a reference at the last minute.

Whoever was to blame, it was apparent that heightened emotions resulting from last week’s terrorist hijacking of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro had added to the already strong pressures opposing the talks both in Britain and among hard-line Palestinians.

The PLO representatives, here as part of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation, had received death threats from Palestinian radicals if they took part in the meeting. At the same time, many members of Parliament belonging to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party had urged her to abandon plans to talk to the Palestinians.

Israel had denounced the planned meeting and charged that both PLO representatives involved have been involved in terrorist activities.

The failure of the planned talks, scheduled between British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and the Jordanian-Palestinian delegation with the aim of reviving the stalled, 8-month-old Middle East peace initiative of Jordan’s King Hussein, constitutes a serious setback for Hussein and an embarrassment for Thatcher.

The scheduled talks were viewed as a risk by both leaders from the moment Thatcher first announced them during her visit to Jordan last month. Hussein’s plan calls for eventual direct talks between Israel and a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation and an international conference of all parties involved in the crisis, including the United States and the Soviet Union, to guarantee a settlement.

Thatcher, like U.S. leaders, had always before refused to deal with the PLO. She made a policy reversal by agreeing to the talks. The two PLO representatives who came here for the meeting are Mohammed Milhem, the former mayor of Halhoul in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Elia Khouri, the exiled Anglican suffragan bishop of Jerusalem.

Thatcher had praised the two men, considered PLO moderates, as men of peace and had told colleagues within her party that she had become convinced that peace in the Middle East is possible only if support is given to Palestinians who renounce violence and support negotiations.

She also talked of the need to back such moderate Arab leaders as King Hussein. The announcement that the talks would not be held came one day after Jordan agreed to purchase $360 million worth of British military equipment.

British officials said earlier that the Reagan Administration’s initial coolness to the talks had given way to full support. They said Secretary of State George P. Shultz told Howe last week that the proposed meeting “could only do good.”

During the past summer, Jordanian-Palestinian delegations visited Rome, Paris and Bonn in an effort to boost the plan’s credibility, but no direct contact had been made with either Britain or the United States.

It is believed that Britain had hoped to win significant concessions from the Palestinians as a way to encourage direct U.S. contact with the delegation.

No high-ranking member of the PLO has ever formally conceded Israel’s right to exist, and any such reference in a joint statement issued here would have been a significant breakthrough.

Palestinians Absent

Foreign Office sources said that a statement including this concession was agreed to in Amman last Thursday by John Coles, the British ambassador there, and Jordanian leaders. The Palestinians were reportedly not present in last week’s discussions. However, according to British sources, the Jordanian leaders provided assurances that the Palestinians gave their consent to the statement.

The statement reportedly included a renunciation of violence, a commitment to negotiations, acknowledgement of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and the right of Israel to exist. Thatcher had reportedly insisted on such a strong, unequivocal document as a prerequisite for the talks.

“This was supposed to be a clear, simple, statement, not the word-crawling type of thing that comes from the U.N.,” a Foreign Office official said. “It would have been a major development and it was intended to be.”

But he indicated that pressure arising in the wake of the ship hijacking may have made it impossible for the Palestinians to make concessions of any kind. “In difficult circumstances, we and Jordan kept our nerve and the Palestinians lost theirs,” he said.

However, some Mideast experts here accused the Thatcher government of being naive for having expected such a breakthrough and speculated that Britain may have tried to force unacceptable conditions on the Palestinians as a tactic to avoid the talks in the present highly charged atmosphere.

Thatcher had come under pressure from the press and from many Conservative members of Parliament to cancel the talks in light of the Achille Lauro hijacking and the murder of an American passenger by the hijackers.

Later Monday, Howe met with the two Jordanian members of the delegation, but aides described the session as a sad, empty occasion. Howe called the failure a “deep disappointment.”