Baker Sees ‘Potential’ Mideast Progress

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, emerging from an extraordinary 90-minute meeting with the foreign ministers of Israel and Egypt, said Thursday he sees “some potential for progress” in the deadlocked Middle East peace process.

Baker and Egyptian Foreign Minister Esmet Abdel Meguid both tried to convince Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Arens that Egypt’s 10-point peace initiative--which has the apparent backing of the Palestine Liberation Organization and gained the public endorsement of France earlier in the day--is consistent with Israel’s own proposal for Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and may be the only way to revive the Israeli plan.

Baker said the meeting, attended by the three men without any aides present, concentrated on “how we could take practical pragmatic steps to make that (Israeli election plan) work.”

He made it clear that he believes the 10 points put forward by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak are the only steps currently under discussion that could move the Israeli plan forward.

The Mubarak initiative is a subject of a growing controversy in Israel. The rightist Likud Party of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Arens, rejects the Egyptian proposals, but the centrist Labor Party of Finance Minister Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin accepts it. The Israeli Cabinet will debate the issue Wednesday.

Baker refused to speculate on the outcome of the Cabinet meeting. But he emphasized that he saw no reason why Shamir, Arens and others should be suspicious of the Egyptian plan.

“What is clear from our discussions today is that the United States does not see it (the Egyptian suggestions) as a competing proposal and Egypt does not see it as a competing proposal,” Baker said. Meguid said in a separate telephone interview that the Egyptian plan “is not an alternative but a clarification” of the Israeli proposal.

“There is a debate in Israel about whether to pursue the (peace) process at all,” Baker said. He did not spell out the implications of his remark, but it seemed to be intended to put additional pressure on the Likud to drop its opposition to Mubarak’s plan.

President Francois Mitterrand of France gave his endorsement to Mubarak’s initiative Thursday. The Egyptian president stopped off in France on his way to the United States. He is scheduled to address the U.N. General Assembly today and will also meet with Arens.

Mitterrand said Mubarak’s proposals are “solid and useful” because they “avoid setting incompatible preconditions,” Reuters news agency reported.

A few hours before he met Baker and Meguid, Arens huddled for an hour and 15 minutes with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, urging Moscow to support Israel’s West Bank and Gaza elections plan. Shevardnadze said the Soviet Union might do just that--but only if Israel opened the process to the PLO, something no mainstream faction in Israel is willing to do.

“We did not exclude as an interim measure this idea of elections,” Shevardnadze said. “There was one very important point which I mentioned to the foreign minister. If the PLO is ignored in the process of settlement, then the settlement will never take place. The PLO is a real force.”

The Soviet foreign minister said he offered to arrange a meeting between Israeli officials and representatives of the PLO in the Soviet Union. Israel is not likely to accept the Soviet initiative. If Israel wanted to talk to the PLO--which up to now it has not--it would have no difficulty finding a meeting place.

Shevardnadze also urged Israel to accept at least parts of the Egyptian initiative.

“We noted that there are reasonable elements in the proposal put forward by Prime Minister Shamir, and there are many interesting elements in the proposals put forward by President Mubarak,” Shevardnadze said. “I do believe we have to look for reasonable elements in both plans.”