Clinton Hails Mideast Accord, Pledges Support

President Clinton, heralding a “shining moment of hope” for the people of the Middle East and the world, formally announced Friday that the United States will resume relations with the Palestine Liberation Organization and said that this country will take a leading role in carrying out the landmark accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

In a sun-splashed Rose Garden ceremony, Clinton hailed the declarations of mutual recognition from Israel and the PLO as a “historic and honorable compromise between two peoples who have been locked in a bloody struggle for almost a century.”

He pledged that the United States will be a “full and active partner” in the effort to transform the promising developments of the last few days into a true and lasting peace.

The White House and State Department immediately began a frenzy of preparations for an extravagant Monday morning ceremony to mark the signing of the Israeli and PLO declarations. Expected to attend, amid tight security and nonstop press coverage, are dignitaries from around the world, most of the U.S. Congress, several former Presidents and prominent Jewish- and Arab-Americans.

En route to an appearance in Sunnyvale, Calif., for an event to tout the Administration’s “reinventing government” plans, Clinton called four of his five predecessors to invite them. Clinton told former President George Bush that “you really should be proud of everything you did on this,” according to White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. Clinton invited former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to stay overnight at the White House as his guests.

Both Carter and Bush plan to attend Monday’s event, as well as Tuesday’s signing of two side agreements to the North American Free Trade Agreement that the Bush Administration negotiated with Canada and Mexico.

Former President Ronald Reagan, however, does not expect to attend, White House aides said. And former President Gerald R. Ford told Clinton that he could not attend the ceremony because of a commitment to give a speech to “a large group of Japanese businessmen” but will attend a White House dinner Monday night, Myers said.

Clinton was not able to reach former President Richard Nixon, White House aides said, but Nixon informed White House officials that he will not be able to attend.

For others, invitations to the ceremony and the dinner almost immediately became the most eagerly sought ticket in town. Everyone from former diplomats to campaign contributors to world leaders placed calls to Administration officials seeking a way in.

“Everyone, plus,” said one senior White House official when asked who was inquiring about invitations. “We’re getting calls from everyone we know and a lot of people who only think they know us.”

As a result, the size of the audience for the ceremony, initially pegged at 1,000, had grown to about 3,000 by late Friday, Administration officials said. The White House was trying to limit the dinner to “about 150” people, an aide said.

The television networks are building anchor booths on the South Lawn and plan to televise the entire ceremony live.

“We’re trying to err on the side of inclusivity,” another senior official said. “Obviously, there’s going to be tight security, but if people want to stand for three hours, we’re going to try to get them in.”

Officials said that particular emphasis will be placed on inviting prominent Jewish- and Arab-Americans. “American Jews and Arabs sitting together, that symbolizes what this means,” said an official involved in planning the ceremony. “That’s what makes America unique.”

Plans were being laid for a full day and evening of activities to memorialize a historical milestone. The 11 a.m. ceremony Monday will have deliberate echoes of the last Middle East breakthrough, the signing of the Camp David accords in 1978 by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, White House officials said.

The ceremony will take place behind the same desk used to sign the Camp David pact, officials said.

Clinton said Israel and the PLO will choose whom to send as emissaries. For a while Friday, officials were discounting the possibility that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat would travel to Washington for the ceremony. But by Friday evening, they appeared to leave open the possibility.

A senior U.S. official said late Friday that the PLO was pushing hard for a role for Arafat in the ceremony and that Clinton was taking the position that it is up to the PLO to choose its delegation.

“I would like to be there,” Arafat said in an interview with French state television. “It will depend on the invitations we will receive from the White House.”

If Rabin and Arafat do not come, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO official who supervised the negotiations, are expected to represent their respective sides.

Abbas, more commonly known as Abu Maazen, is the PLO’s director of international affairs.

“We are a sponsor of the peace process, and we understand that we must play a major role in trying to ensure its success,” Clinton said. But he added that the United States would not dictate who should attend from Israel and the PLO. “Whoever they decide will be here is fine with us, and we will welcome them,” he said.

Hakam Balawi, the PLO’s ambassador to Tunisia, received the official invitation to the ceremony Friday from the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Carol Stocker, and political officer Andrea Farsakh. The PLO has its headquarters in Tunis.

Their meeting marked the first U.S. diplomatic contact with the PLO since July, 1990.

The Israeli and PLO envoys will be joined at the signing table by Clinton, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev, representing the principal sponsors of the Middle East peace talks that began 22 months ago in Madrid and helped crack three decades of enmity between Israel and the Palestinians. Christopher personally called Kozyrev in Moscow to extend the invitation.

Clinton telephoned Syrian President Hafez Assad, Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and Lebanese President Elias Hrawi to brief them on the statement he had issued on Middle East peace. Clinton told Assad, “I believe these developments offer the promise of progress for all people of the Middle East,” Myers said.

The Syrian president agreed to send his ambassador to Washington as a representative to the signing ceremony, ending speculation that the Syrians, who have yet to reach a peace agreement with Israel, might boycott the session. Lebanon too will be represented by its ambassador to Washington, a White House official said.

Clinton tried to contact Jordan’s King Hussein, but he was traveling and the two leaders had not spoken by Friday evening.

The celebratory atmosphere at the White House on Friday was in marked contrast to the original announcement by the Reagan Administration that it would initiate direct talks with the PLO.

That news was delivered in a brief statement by then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz in December, 1988, in the final days of Reagan’s second term and after Congress had left Washington for the Christmas holiday.

Just three weeks earlier, Shultz had denied Arafat a visa to speak at the United Nations, characterizing him as an “accessory to terrorism.”

The brief and fitful series of U.S.-PLO talks was broken off by the United States in 1990 after a terrorist attack on Israel by a faction of the PLO.

Clinton’s announcement Friday came in front of the assembled leadership of Congress and on live national television. He received a standing ovation from lawmakers at the beginning and conclusion of his five-minute statement.

“Today marks the dawning of a new era,” an exhilarated Clinton said as Christopher stood erect and silent to his right.

“Now there is an opportunity to define the future of the Middle East in terms of reconciliation and coexistence and the opportunities that children growing up there will have, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian.”

In proclaiming the restoration of U.S. diplomatic contact with the PLO, Clinton said that Arafat had met longstanding U.S. demands by renouncing terrorism and accepting the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

“These PLO commitments justify a resumption of our dialogue,” Clinton said.

Amid the general euphoria, longstanding enmities appeared to be collapsing at every turn.

Friday afternoon, the American Jewish Congress and the National Assn. of Arab Americans announced that they will co-host a cocktail reception Monday night to celebrate the autonomy accord.

State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said the Administration will seek the repeal of a number of congressionally mandated restrictions on ties to the PLO, including limits on travel of PLO officials, on the opening of PLO offices in the United States and on U.S. contributions to international organizations that have programs that benefit the PLO.

Clinton said the United States will aid the process by soliciting money for carrying out the accord from the world’s wealthy nations, including European allies, Japan, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf nations.

House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.), after meeting with the President on Friday morning, said the United States will coordinate aid efforts “but it will by no means be providing the majority of the funds.”

Clinton was noncommittal on whether the United States will be willing to send peacekeeping troops to Gaza or the West Bank to enforce the agreement.

“That has to be worked out by the parties,” he said. “There will plainly be some peace guarantees. Through what mechanism, it’s not clear.”

But he noted that U.S. troops have been part of a U.N. peacekeeping operation in the Sinai since the signing of the Camp David accords more than a decade ago.

“We’ve not made a specific decision and it would be inappropriate for me to speculate about that now,” Clinton said.

Times staff writer Kim Murphy, in Tunis, contributed to this report.