Baker Presses Palestinians to Compromise on Talks

Secretary of State James A. Baker III pressed the Palestinians on Friday to come to terms with Israel’s demand for limits on who can represent them at a Middle East peace conference, and he later enlisted Jordan’s King Hussein to encourage the Palestinians to compromise.

During a meeting that lasted about four hours, Baker told three Palestinian leaders here that the other proposed participants in the peace conference have made concessions to help bring the talks about, and he appealed to the Palestinians to bend as well, U.S. officials said.

“I made a number of points and suggestions which they received and they will be giving consideration to,” Baker told reporters in Amman, Jordan, where he met with Hussein.

“In our view, Palestinians have more to gain from a viable and active peace process than do almost anyone else. In our view, at least, Palestinians have the most to lose if there is no process. . . . We are very hopeful that the Palestinians will determine that they want to be a part of this process.”

The Palestinians were noncommittal and responded with a memorandum outlining their stand, plus a short statement from the Palestine Liberation Organization wel coming talks “in principle” but setting out conditions for participation.

Nonetheless, they seemed to have grasped the thrust of Baker’s message. “I think he expects us to put up a delegation acceptable to everyone,” said Hanan Ashrawi, one of the leaders who met with Baker.

The key question remaining before the conference can be convened is the makeup of the Palestinian delegation at the talks. Israel insists that no residents of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem may attend, because that might imply that Israel is willing to negotiate over the status of the holy city.

The Palestinians are the only potential participants in the conference who have yet to formally agree to sign up, conditionally or otherwise; Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Israel are all lined up. Under Washington’s plan, the Palestinians and Jordanians will attend as part of a joint delegation.

On Thursday, following his own meeting with Baker, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir formally endorsed Israel’s attendance at the peace conference--although, he warned, Israel will still insist on restrictions on Palestinian representation. Palestinian leaders have said it is up to them to choose their own representatives.

Israel annexed Arab districts of Jerusalem after the 1967 Middle East War and regards its control of the entire city as non-negotiable. The Palestinians want the eastern half of Jerusalem to be the capital of their proposed state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. U.S. Middle East negotiators consider the issue the most intractable of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Washington, President Bush seemed to call for some give from both sides.

He said Friday that the United States and Soviet Union are “close to convening a conference this October that will launch direct talks among Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab states.” At a brief news conference before leaving to spend a weekend at Camp David, Md., he urged both Israel and the Palestinians to clear up any remaining obstacles to talks “and seize this truly historic opportunity for peace.”

Throughout his grueling Middle East diplomacy, Baker has carefully avoided putting forward a specific, detailed American proposal on these procedural issues. Baker believes such U.S. proposals “just give people something to shoot down,” an aide said.

Instead, Baker has offered each party options for narrowing their differences and suggested that they adopt one or another. He has then taken each party’s position to the other, and tried to use that back-and-forth movement to whipsaw them into reaching a compromise.

On the issue of limits on the Palestinian delegation, Baker is not telling the Palestinians that the United States wants them to accept Israel’s position as it stands, officials said. Instead, he is confronting the Palestinians with Israel’s position and suggesting ways to bridge the gap.

The shuttling secretary of state had not expected the Palestinians to sign on to the talks Friday, U.S. officials said, because of the touchy Jerusalem question. “It was not our view that we would conclude the representation issue at this meeting,” a senior U.S. official said.

The official indicated that there were sharp disagreements, but he described the Palestinians as constructive.

“We now know at least exactly where the issue rests,” he said, adding that U.S. diplomats would continue working on the issue. Baker himself is expected to be on the telephone to the various leaders during his vacation in Wyoming, which is scheduled to begin next week.

At a press conference after their meeting with Baker, the Palestinians would not say whether they would finally attend talks. Ashrawi ventured only that “the PLO has a positive inclination.”

Nonetheless, they pledged a response to the conference proposal “in days” and said it would come from the PLO. Although Israel has rejected a role for that organization, the PLO insists that it will make the important decisions and appoint a delegation.

The Palestinians anxiously probed Baker for guarantees on the agenda of the conference. They pressed for assurances that the talks, because they are based on United Nations resolutions, will result in Israeli withdrawal from all land it won in the 1967 Middle East War. The territory includes the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and annexed Arab districts of Jerusalem.

Baker parried the request with a “standard” American reply, a U.S. official said. The resolutions refer to Israeli withdrawal from “occupied territory,” which is language meant to leave open the possibility for a partial pullback that is subject to negotiations.

The Palestinians insisted that Israel has no right to veto members of their peace panel. Baker responded that the issue of Jerusalem is still on the talks agenda; longstanding U.S. policy holds that the final status of the city is to be worked out in negotiations.

“He told the Palestinians not to get hung up on a symbolic act,” said a U.S. official.

A PLO statement from the group’s base in exile, Tunisia, demanded withdrawal of Israel from “all” occupied land, a recognition of Palestinian “self-determination” (which is a code for statehood), a delegation chosen by the PLO without “interference,” inclusion of Jerusalemites and an end to Israeli settlement of the West Bank and Gaza.

The Palestinians want written guarantees from Washington, Ashrawi concluded. Another Palestinian representative, Faisal Husseini, blamed Israel for the impasse. Israeli officials have been blaming the Palestinians.

In Jordan, King Hussein joined Baker in gently cajoling the Palestinians toward a compromise.

“The time has come, hopefully, for the Palestinians to decide, in view of all the circumstances and the opportunities that the moment presents, on their participation in efforts toward a comprehensive settlement,” the king said in a news conference at his Hashmiyeh Palace on a hilltop outside Amman.

“We cannot, nor can anyone, represent the Palestinians. The Palestinians will have to be themselves responsible for their own representation,” he said.

In an apparent rebuff to the exiled PLO, Hussein said the Palestinians of the occupied territories deserve the greatest voice in the process. “Our concern is for the superpatriots . . . those who have endured all the difficulties,” he said.

For the first time, Hussein said clearly and publicly that Jordan would enter bilateral negotiations with Israel as part of the U.S.-proposed peace process.

“Within the context of a comprehensive settlement . . . indeed,” he said in response to a question. As recently as last month, Hussein had refused to answer when reporters asked if he would declare his willingness to enter bilateral talks.

Asked how a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation would negotiate on behalf of both the Palestinians and Jordan’s own interests, Hussein smiled slightly and said: “It’s still not very, very clear in my mind how we will be able to fit them together.”

But he said he expects that Palestinian members of the delegation would take the lead in negotiating Palestinian issues, and Jordanian members would take the lead in discussing specifically Jordanian issues.

Baker praised the diminutive monarch’s “courage” and “contributions . . . to the cause of peace” and thanked Hussein for declaring “a desire to actively participate in forming a delegation.”

As an apparent reward for its cooperation, Jordan may get back U.S. aid cut off when Jordan took the side of Iraq following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Baker said President Bush has “executed the determination . . . to make it possible to reinstitute some of the (aid) programs.”

Hussein expressed pleasure at this and said, “I hope we are on the way toward the kind of relationship that we had between the United States and Jordan in the 1960s.”

Aid to Jordan was frozen last fall by Congress with the stipulation that it could begin to flow again with a presidential determination.

In mid-June, the State Department announced that the Administration intended to provide $27 million in grant food aid to Jordan this year.

Friday’s comment by Baker, however, was the first announcement of a presidential determination necessary to reinstate some of the major suspended aid programs.

In the 1991 fiscal year, Jordan had been slated to receive $35 million in economic support, $20 million in arms sales and $1.6 million in training for Jordanian military officers in the United States. As of late Friday, the State Department was uncertain which and how much of these funds Bush had unfrozen.

Williams reported from Jerusalem and McManus from Amman. Times staff writer Alan C. Miller, in Washington, also contributed to this report.

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