- BEIRUT (AFP) - Palestinian
leader Yasser Arafat issued a defiant message to Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon that he is not a "finished man," and called on the
international community to lobby for renewed peace talks.
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- Arafat also said, in an interview aired late Sunday on
Lebanese television station LBCI, that negotiations between Palestinian
parliament speaker Ahmed Qorei and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres
on the basis of future peace talks were only at the stage of "an exchange
of ideas".
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- Arafat took issue with the "statements by Sharon,
according to which I am a finished man," referring to a decision by
the Israeli cabinet earlier this month, after a wave of grisly suicide
bombings, to stop doing business with Arafat because he was "irrelevant".
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- Sharon was also quoted in a German newspaper at the same
time as saying the ageing Palestinian leader was "history".
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- Arafat said he wanted to remind Sharon that "many
before him predicted my end but I am still here because I represent the
Palestinian people".
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- He called on the international community to take advantage
of the ceasefire, which he declared on December 16, to lobby Tel Aviv to
relaunch the peace talks which have been abandoned amid the 15-month Palestinian
uprising.
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- "The international community must take advantage
of the truce which we have declared to try and relaunch the negotiations.
It is not the first time that the Palestinians have stopped the fighting,"
he said.
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- "In the past we have accepted, like in south Lebanon
in 1981, a ceasefire, but it is Ariel Sharon who broke it off and pursued
us to Beirut," he said, referring to the operations conducted by the
Israeli prime minister while he was defence minister two decades ago.
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- However, Arafat warned that "the patience of the
Palestinian people has limits".
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- "Almost all Palestinian cities and towns are under
seige and the people are suffering. Israel is holding back some 900 million
dollars it owes us in taxes and licences due to the Palestinian Authority.
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- "If Ariel Sharon is ready to change his attitude,
we will tell him he is welcome. But if he continues to only believe in
the language of force, in his tanks and his planes, and if he wants to
put us on our knees, we will tell him that history will settle the argument,"
he said.
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- He stressed that the hardline Islamic movements Hamas
and "a part of Islamic Jihad" had agreed to abide by his ceasefire
and said his security forces would "continue to fulfil its obligations
to enforce respect for the ceasefire will all the necessary firmness".
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- He also touched upon reports in the press and from Palestinian
officials that Peres and Qorei have been talking about a plan to create
a fast-track Palestinian state on land under full or partial Palestinian
control.
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- "For now there has only been an exchange of ideas.
We are ready to persevere on this path, but the problem is that Ariel Sharon
says that he rejects the ideas of Peres," Arafat said.
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- "We will therefore ask Shimon Peres if his ideas
are personal or those of the Israeli government," he said.
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- Earlier in the day, Peres was quoted as saying by cabinet
secretary Gideon Saar after a weekly ministerial meeting that the talks
he has been holding with Qorei were not political.
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- Sharon earlier this week also came out publicly against
the leaked details of the peace plan and said all contacts with Palestinian
officials can now only deal with questions related to stopping terrorism
and violence.
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- According to the reports, Peres had proposed that a Palestinian
state would initially cover 42 percent of the West Bank and 80 percent
of the Gaza Strip, with some sectors still under Israeli security and administrative
control.
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- The plan was also supposed to call for Israel to withdraw
its troops from stretches of land occupied since the outbreak of the Palestinian
uprising in September 2000.
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- © 2001 AFP
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