Baker Urges Palestinians to Get on Board the Peace Bus : Mideast: A West Bank leader, in apparent response, rushes to Amman for a meeting with the U.S. secretary.

Scrambling to keep the anxious, balky Palestinians in the peace process, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Jordan’s King Hussein appealed Thursday to the Palestine Liberation Organization to endorse the Arab-Israeli peace conference Baker has been trying to arrange. Baker warned that if the Palestinians refuse, the negotiations might be held anyway.

In an apparent response, one of the Palestinian leaders who has met with Baker in the past rushed from the West Bank to Amman at dawn today to hold a previously unscheduled meeting with Baker.

The request for another meeting from Hanan Ashrawi, one of the three Palestinians who has met with Baker, appears to signal that the PLO was trying to keep its potential role in the peace conference alive. Ashrawi and the other Palestinian negotiators have said their meetings with Baker have all carried the explicit approval of the PLO.

The meeting this morning was significant because it represented a sudden reversal of position from the Palestinians, who had told Baker on Thursday that they would not be ready to meet with him again this week.

At a brief news conference before meeting with Baker, Ashrawi said the PLO leadership had authorized the meeting to seek “clarifications” on the conditions for Palestinian participation in a peace conference. Baker and Ashrawi began their meeting at 9:10 a.m. today.

Ashrawi held the talks one day after another of the Palestinian negotiators, Faisal Husseini, met with PLO officials in Tunis. PLO officials here said the two negotiators were coordinating their moves.

U.S. officials said they hoped Ashrawi was carrying a positive response to a letter of assurance, given to her Tuesday by Baker, which spelled out the conditions under which Palestinians would attend the peace conference. But her comments suggested the PLO was not ready to give a definitive answer.

They said they also hoped her visit will lead to an opening of substantive talks between the Palestinians and Jordanian officials toward forming a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation at the talks.

“I believe this is the best opportunity that has presented itself in a long, long time,” Baker had admonished the Palestinians on Thursday in a news conference at the king’s hilltop Basman Palace, where he met with Hussein for several hours. “It’s going to be a long, long time before this bus ever comes by again.”

“This opportunity may not come again--ever,” the king echoed. He said that if Palestinians and Israelis do not begin negotiating soon toward a settlement of their 43-year-long struggle, “the only alternative is disaster.”

Hussein is deeply involved in the attempt to bring the Palestinians to an international conference because his kingdom’s population is more than half Palestinian, and he has offered to sponsor a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation to the talks.

U.S. officials said the unusual joint appeal was made in part because of fears that the PLO, which most Palestinians consider their political representative, may refuse to allow any leading Arabs from the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to attend the peace conference.

A PLO official confirmed Thursday that the organization was badly torn over the issue, which is certain to touch off a major debate at the Palestine National Council, the Palestinians’ parliament in exile, when it meets next week in Algiers.

“The PLO leadership is having a difficult time deciding,” said the high-ranking Palestinian, who asked not to be identified. “They want to be part of the peace conference, but they are suspicious about the outcome.

“The PLO’s strategy is to wait until the last minute to try to commit the United States and the international community to something that can be offered to the Palestine National Council,” he said. “We need a signal from the United States that shows us that the peace conference will go in the right direction.

“We want to get on Mr. Baker’s bus--but we need a lift up into it,” he added.

Baker warned the Palestinians that if they refuse to join the talks, the United States might launch the negotiations without them. “If the Palestinians, once again, pass up an opportunity . . . there is nothing we can do about it,” he said.

But he said it is unclear whether Syria would attend a conference if the Palestinians refused.

Baker came to Amman hoping to meet again with one or more of the Palestinians he met in Israel earlier this week. But he was disappointed to learn that they had decided not to meet with him, officials said.

But at 2:30 a.m. today, Jordanian Prime Minister Taher Masri called the U.S. ambassador here to tell him that Ashrawi wanted to meet with him. Baker aide Margaret Tutwiler said she awakened Baker at 3 a.m. to tell him, and Baker instantly agreed.

She said the U.S. consul general in Jerusalem, Molly Williamson, drove Ashrawi from her home in the West Bank town of Ramallah to the western side of the Allenby Bridge, which crosses the Jordan River from the West Bank into Jordan.

Jordanian Prime Minister Masri sent a limousine to pick her up on the eastern side of the bridge, a small wooden span which most travelers cross on foot.

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat has said he is willing to endorse a peace conference but only if the PLO can approve the Palestinian negotiators and only if the purpose of the negotiations is to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel has rejected both of those demands.

In recent weeks, the PLO has quietly softened its conditions, asking for only a tacit role in approving the negotiators and dropping its demand that a Palestinian state be an explicit goal.

Still, the senior PLO official said, the Palestinian leaders want clear assurances from the United States that the negotiations will seek Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, will discuss the status of predominantly Arab East Jerusalem and could lead to a Palestinian state, perhaps in a confederation with Jordan.

Baker went part of the way toward those assurances in a meeting with Palestinian leaders in Jerusalem on Monday, but he did not go as far as the PLO would like.

His pledges to the Palestinians reportedly included affirmations that the United States believes that Israel should withdraw from some occupied Arab territory; that the United States considers the final status of Jerusalem open to negotiations and that it would not object to including Palestinian self-determination as an issue at the peace negotiations. Israel opposes all three U.S. positions.

The pledges were among dozens contained in lengthy “letters of assurance” that Baker has delivered to Israel, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians.

Baker had once hoped to win approval this week from Israel and the Arabs for the letters--the last major hurdle before the United States and the Soviet Union can issue formal invitations to a conference. But neither Israel nor the Arabs chose to approve his assurances on the spot.

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