Moscow Times - 10.01.2002

 

The Moscow Times

Sharon Talks Iraq, Palestinians

By Steve Weizman, Associated Press

(AP) President Vladimir Putin on Monday praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's lifting of a 10-day siege on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's headquarters and repeated calls for Israeli troops to leave Palestinian cities and for the Palestinians to punish attacks against Israel. 

Speaking at the start of talks with Sharon in the Kremlin, Putin said Russia supports the U.S.-led coalition against terror and views Israel as an important member of that alliance. 

"We keenly welcome your decision to lift the siege of Yasser Arafat's headquarters," Putin told Sharon. "I believe this decision was difficult to take." 

The blockade, aborted under intense U.S. pressure, was deeply criticized by the Israeli media and members of Sharon's own government, who say he seriously underestimated Washington's opposition to the operation. 

Sharon met Putin at the start of two days of talks with Russian officials on security concerns including alleged Iraqi and Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. 

Israeli officials believe that the technology for such arms could come from Russia, with or without official sanction from Moscow. 

Putin called for a speedy return of UN weapons inspectors to Baghdad but said a solution to the Iraqi issue must be found by the Security Council. 

On Israel's conflict with the Palestinians, Putin said Russia backed last week's UN resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian centers. The resolution also demands that the Palestinian Authority arrest and try "those responsible for terrorist acts." 

Sharon, accompanied by Israeli National Security Council head Ephraim Halevy, was to meet later Monday with leaders of Russia's Jewish community. Halevy, until recently the head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, is considered one of Sharon's key foreign policy advisers. 

On Tuesday, Sharon is to meet with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. 

Izvestia reported that the Israeli delegation brought files proving links between Palestinian militants and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The documents show that Palestinians helped Saddam violate UN-imposed restrictions on oil sales and used their share of the proceeds to buy arms from Iran, the paper said. 

But Ivanov, who took part in the talks, later said told Russian television "no kind of concrete documents were passed along, but the prime minister expressed the deep anxiety of the Israeli leadership concerning the possible presence of weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

Russia is one of the so-called quartet of Middle East peacemakers, with the United States, the European Union and the United Nations. 

Israel considers the EU and the United Nations biased in favor of the Palestinians and hopes that Russia, fighting its own battle against mainly Muslim insurgents in Chechnya, might take a more sympathetic view of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians. 

Sharon brought three Russian-born survivors of a June 2001 Tel Aviv disco bombing in which a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 people, many of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union. 

"The message is to say to people that we who emigrated from Russia still suffer from terrorism as the Russians do from Chechen terror," 20-year-old Faik Khuliev, wounded in the bombing, told reporters on Sharon's aircraft. 

Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, is also due to visit Moscow this week for talks with Ivanov and other officials. Abbas is due to arrive on Tuesday but is not expected to meet Sharon, Palestinian officials said. 

According to Israeli officials, Sharon will ask Russia to use its traditional influence with Syria to ask that Damascus stop the radical Islamic Hezbollah militia from attacking Israel from neighboring Lebanon, where Syria is the main power broker.

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