Arab League (AL) Secretary General Amr Moussa Sunday said that Bush-proposed international peace conference on Middle East peace should focus on the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the basis of the Arab peace initiative.
The AL chief made the remarks in a statement one day before Arab foreign ministers is to hold an emergency meeting to discuss U.S. President George W. Bush's overture to convene an international peace conference in Autumn to tackle important issues in the Middle East region.
"We urged the international Quartet (the UN, the EU, the United States and Russia) to take the initiative to hold an international conference for peace," Moussa said, dismissing the idea of a conference to exchange salutes and greetings.
He added that Bush's call was a response to an early AL suggestion that an international peace conference in the Middle East region should be held on how to achieve a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The AL chief underlined that the main task at present is how to find an Arab-U.S. common ground for peace as long as the two sides spoke about an international framework for reviving Middle East peace process.
To promote the Arab peace initiative, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and his Jordanian counterpart Abdel Ilah Khatib on Wednesday paid a visit to Israel upon an assignment by the AL's follow-up committee in implementation of the resolution adopted by 19th Arab summit in March in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Intensive diplomatic efforts on Mideast peace will soon be witnessed in Egypt as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates is scheduled to meet with the Arab foreign ministers in the Egyptian Red Sea resort Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday to rally support for Bush's proposed conference.
Source: Xinhua
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