Albright Predicts ‘Closure’ on Some Mideast Issues

GENEVA — After talks with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on Saturday, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said that “closure” on some issues stymieing Mideast peace negotiations could come soon and that she will meet again midmonth with the Palestinian leader and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

She then boarded a U.S. Air Force C-130 transport to fly back over the Alps for her second tete-a-tete with Netanyahu in Paris in as many days.

“She’s asked serious questions that need an answer and a decision,” one accompanying U.S. official said.

After meeting in this Swiss city with Arafat for three hours, Albright called for a “credible” withdrawal of Israeli forces from some of the Arab lands of the West Bank.

She told a joint news conference that she also stressed to Arafat that his police must do more to extinguish the threat of further attacks by Islamic extremists on Jews.

“There can be no complacency,” Albright said. “The terrorists are unrelenting, and so must the efforts against them be unrelenting.”

Arafat reiterated his support for a “peace of the brave” between Palestinians and Israelis, which he called a “strategic choice for the Palestinian people.”

His only demand of the Israelis, he said, is that they live up to their commitments in the 1993 and 1995 Oslo accords.

At their meeting Friday, Netanyahu appeared to rebuff Albright’s requests for a quick hand-over by his right-wing government of another swath of West Bank land to the Palestinians. Instead, he called publicly for a five-month probationary period, during which Israeli police and soldiers would gauge the sincerity and effectiveness of Palestinian anti-terrorist measures before withdrawing.

U.S. officials, however, asserted Saturday that chances for an agreement were not as bleak as they appeared. Albright said Netanyahu had not even mentioned the five-month idea to her.

“Where we are [now] is where we weren’t three weeks ago--we are into the nuts and bolts of further redeployment,” one American official asserted. “Now they [the Israelis] are saying, ‘Yes,’ in principle.”

Albright also called her talks with Arafat “serious and fruitful” and insisted that “I am telling it like it is.”

The secretary of State is scheduled to begin a weeklong trip to Africa this week but will meet Arafat and Netanyahu again separately in Europe in mid-December, probably around Dec. 18, a U.S. official said.

Albright said she told both leaders that “they have some work to do and some decisions to make.”

In some areas, she said, Israel and the Palestinian Authority “should be able to come to closure soon.” A U.S. official said she meant the demand of Palestinians for their own airport and for a strip of land that would link Gaza and part of the West Bank already in Palestinian hands.

In a separate meeting in Paris on Saturday, French President Jacques Chirac spoke to Netanyahu of his concern over the impasse in the peace process without hiding his pessimism, Chirac spokeswoman Catherine Colonna said.

The proposals by Israel “don’t seem to us to give the necessary push,” Chirac reportedly said.