Clinton, Mubarak Discuss Stalled Peace Talks

Just two weeks before the deadline set by Israelis and Palestinians for negotiating a final peace deal, President Clinton and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met Tuesday to discuss how to help achieve that elusive goal.

Their talks, which lasted less than two hours, showed that the “Egyptians are prepared to do all that they can . . . to make sure that possibility [for a peace agreement] is realized,” said Dennis B. Ross, Clinton’s Middle East coordinator, after the meeting.

Mubarak, who met with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat over the weekend and with Israeli acting Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami earlier this month, expressed optimism that a framework for peace can be hammered out in the coming weeks.

“We hope to finish by September,” he said. “I think with the cooperation with the United States and their support . . . this will be reached,” Mubarak said before the meeting Tuesday at Cairo International Airport.

After a weekend visit to sub-Saharan Africa, Clinton stopped in Cairo for just three hours to speak with Mubarak ahead of the U.N. Millennium Summit, which begins next Wednesday. Mubarak is the only key player in the peace process who does not plan to attend that New York gathering.

The Clinton administration is hoping that the U.N. session will provide an opportunity to jump-start negotiations between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak that stalled in July.

A summit last month at Camp David, Md., attended by the two Mideast leaders and Clinton collapsed over the fate of Jerusalem, which both Palestinians and Israelis claim as their capital. Arafat rejected as insufficient Barak’s offer to allow a degree of power-sharing in the city.

“I think the time is short, and I think all the parties understand that without the involvement and leadership of Egypt, they will not be able to do it,” Clinton said. “President Mubarak has been critical to this process for nearly 20 years. . . . So we’re going to work together and see if we can find a way to help the parties get over this next big hump.”

The Sept. 13 deadline was set by the Israelis and Palestinians last year. Arafat has threatened to declare Palestinian statehood if the deadline is not met.

But Ross stressed that the parties are more focused on the substance of their negotiations than the deadline.

Later Tuesday, Ross flew to Israel to discuss the Cairo meeting with Barak. After the briefing, the Israeli leader sounded a pessimistic note. “We have yet to hear anything that would indicate openness or flexibility on Arafat’s part,” he said.

The prime minister’s office denied reports from a Palestinian official that Barak will meet directly with Arafat next week in New York. The Israeli media have been rife with speculation that the two leaders and Clinton would come together at the U.N. conference to announce the date for another peace summit.

Clinton has staked a great deal of prestige on the fate of the talks, personally engaging in the negotiations not only at the Camp David meetings but also in numerous sessions and countless telephone conversations in recent years.

The administration worries that progress made by the parties in recent months will be imperiled and that pressure from Israeli and Palestinian opponents of the peace process will grow irresistible if the process stalls too long.

“Whenever you’re in a situation where you make headway, if you can’t reach an agreement at a certain point there’s always a risk of erosion of the advances that you made,” Ross said. “And when that happens, you find yourself having to climb a much bigger mountain.”

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Times staff writer Mary Curtius in Jerusalem contributed to this report.