PLO Offers to Compromise on Makeup of Talks Team

A spokesman for Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat said Sunday that the PLO is willing to compromise on the key issue of who can represent the Palestinians at peace talks with Israel but insisted that the PLO must approve any Palestinian negotiating team.

“We are ready to attend the peace conference,” said Bassam Abu Sharif, a senior adviser to Arafat who frequently acts as the PLO chief’s spokesman. “We say to President Bush, yes, we regard this as a historical opportunity--and we will do our best not to drop it because we want to establish real peace.”

Abu Sharif’s comments, the most flexible offer yet by a PLO official, came as the Palestinian organization launched an all-fronts “charm” offensive to try to deal itself back into the game of Middle East negotiations.

The PLO aide rushed from his office in Tunis to a beachfront hotel to meet with American reporters accompanying Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who is on a tour of North African Arab countries to drum up support for the peace conference.

Arafat himself has preceded Baker across the region like an unwanted advance man, meeting with the king of Morocco and the presidents of Tunisia and Algeria a day or two ahead of the secretary of state. In a flurry of interviews, Arafat has proclaimed his approval of Bush’s peace initiative and demanded that the PLO be included.

“We demand the application of international legitimacy and the points of the initiative of President Bush,” he told Britain’s Reuters news agency Sunday.

“We have adopted a positive attitude toward them,” he said of the Americans. “They have not done the same.”

The PLO leader remained steadfast on the question of a Palestinian capital in Jerusalem.

“Do you expect me to sell or cede Jerusalem?” he asked Reuters rhetorically. “By God, even if one put the sun to my right and moon to my left, I would not commit that.”

Arafat, like Abu Sharif, has overflowed with improbably effusive praise for Baker and President Bush--a telling sign of the PLO’s desperation to be included in an increasingly successful negotiation process that so far has left them largely on the sidelines.

“We welcome the announcement made by President Bush in Moscow that invitations will be tendered for a peace conference to be held in October, and we are waiting for our invitation,” Abu Sharif said.

The irony is that this is one kind of support Bush and Baker do not appear to want, for the prospect of overt participation in the talks by the PLO would almost surely cause a political uproar in Israel, which views the PLO as a terrorist group.

Asked about the conciliatory PLO statements, Baker--who has refused to meet with any of the organization’s officials--replied carefully, without mentioning the organization by name: “We are hopeful that people everywhere will support this process and will support this proposal because for too long, this region has been without peace.”

The Bush Administration carried on an official dialogue with the PLO for 18 months until June, 1990. The contacts were broken off after one of the PLO’s factions launched an abortive terrorist raid against Israel and Arafat ignored U.S. demands that he discipline the group’s leader. And the rift widened when Arafat supported Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War.

Abu Sharif, who has often floated moderate “trial balloons” for Arafat to see how they will play in the Arab world and the West, endorsed a possible compromise solution to one of the main problems now blocking the conference: the question of whether Palestinians from Jerusalem can participate in the talks.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has insisted that no Arabs from Jerusalem can attend because their presence might be taken to imply that Israel’s annexation of the city’s eastern half in 1967 is open to negotiation.

Abu Sharif said the PLO is willing to consider a compromise under which the talks would not include Palestinian residents of Jerusalem but could include Jordanian citizens who were born in the Holy City. Some Israeli officials have suggested such a compromise to meet their government’s demand.

“I think there is room for a formula that will facilitate the peace process,” he said. “Look, I carry a Jordanian passport, (and) I was born in Jerusalem,” he added.

However, it was not immediately clear whether Abu Sharif’s suggestion represented an official position of the PLO. In the past, he has sometimes taken deliberately moderate positions, only to see them repudiated later by the organization.

Moreover, he insisted--as Arafat has--that the PLO and the Palestinians will submit to no Israeli veto over their negotiating team’s membership.

“The PLO will designate a Palestinian delegation that is representative of the Palestinian people and that is acceptable to all parties that want peace,” including Israel, he said. “But . . . we can’t possibly accept any Israeli interference in the formation of the Palestinian delegation.”

Abu Sharif said the PLO has “exchanged opinions before with Mr. Baker through third parties on the best way the PLO can help facilitate the peace process, including the formation of the Palestinian delegation.” He did not elaborate.

U.S. officials say they are not dealing directly with the PLO, but they acknowledge that many of the Arab parties they are talking to--including Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a close U.S. ally--confer frequently with PLO officials.

Abu Sharif also said the PLO wants the peace conference to work according to principles “(that) President Bush has defined as a basis . . . the formula (of) land for peace, the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and security for all states of the region, including the security of Israel.”

Part of Baker’s strategy has been to avoid defining the terms of the conference concretely--especially the idea of Israel trading “land for peace,” which, even though it has long been implicit in U.S. policy, is anathema to Shamir.

Pressed by an Arab reporter during a brief news conference here to say whether the United States had any concern for “the rights of the Palestinian people,” for example, Baker noted that past U.S. policies have recognized Palestinian rights, “and those policy positions are not going to change.”

Baker also met for several hours with Tunisian President Zine Abidine ben Ali to enlist his help in pushing the PLO toward compromise, to seek Tunisia’s participation in the peace conference and to discuss a U.S.-Tunisian relationship that has been chilly ever since Ben Ali opposed the U.S.-led military campaign against Iraq.

As a result of Ben Ali’s stand during the Persian Gulf War, U.S. aid to Tunisia was slashed from $81 million in fiscal 1990 to $19.5 million in 1991.

“The United States would like . . . to put the past behind us,” Baker said.

He said he hopes Tunisia will join the peace conference in its second stage, when Israel and a broad range of Middle Eastern countries join for multilateral talks “on issues affecting the region, such as arms control, the environment and water.”

But Ben Ali made no immediate commitment, and Tunisian officials indicated that they may want to wait to be sure that the issue of Palestinian participation in the talks can be worked out to their satisfaction.

Asked to describe their talks on the issue, Tunisian Foreign Minister Habib Benyahia resorted to a poetic--and deliberately imprecise--image.

“The president (Ben Ali) offered the secretary a dove with a Tunisian olive branch, and now we are trying to make it fly,” Benyahia said.