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Palestinian Foreign Minister Farouk Kaddoumi has urged the United States to re-activate its role in the Middle East and save the roadmap it had given to reach a settlement between Palestine and Israel.
Speaking at a news conference here on Monday along with Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, Kaddoumi said that Israel was a "rogue state and is responsible for the terrorism it has unleashed against unarmed Palestinians".
Besides US, which launched the 'Road Map for Peace', there were other countries, like Russia, who were involved and he wanted all those countries to take a renewed interest and stop Israeli prime minister, Sharon, from killing the peace process.
Kaddoumi is leading a three-man delegation at the invitation of his Pakistani counterpart, and joined Kasuri to say they had discussed bilateral relations and measures to enlarge their areas of co-operation.
He thanked Pakistan for offering to train Palestinians to prepare them to assume the responsibilities of full statehood, and said that Islamabad had always supported and helped the cause of Palestine and often "suffered because of it".
"We are brothers, and the two sides have thus discussed strengthening of these relations by extending mutual support," Kaddoumi said and added that they also discussed the problem of Jammu and Kashmir.
The Palestinians, he said, "support the people of Jammu and Kashmir and want them to live in peace".
He commended the support given by President Pervez Musharraf to the people of Palestine and also the concern of Pakistani people for his compatriots for which they were grateful to "our brethren here".
His countrymen, Kaddoumi said, are determined to continue their "resistance until the State of Palestine is born and all of us assemble at Al Aqsa in Jerusalem to pray, God willing".
In his written statement introducing the Palestinian delegation, Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri re-iterated Pakistan's "unequivocal support to the Palestinian cause, with its fundamental element being the withdrawal of Israel from all occupied countries".
He said Pakistan wanted the restoration of the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination leading to an independent, viable and a sovereign homeland.
He also supported the peace plan of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, the Quartet Road Map and Islamabad's commitment to two-state solution in which Palestine and Israel live in peace with each other.
Among other topics discussed by the two sides were the situation in South Asia and the need to resolve the outstanding issue of Jammu and Kashmir for normalisation of relations between Pakistan and India.
Kaddoumi commended the role Pakistan had played in supporting the cause of Palestine at every international forum and also the United Nations, to which Kasuri said his country would continue this policy.
Kaddoumi deflected a question about suggestions that Pakistan should recognise the state of Israel, saying that it was a "conditional and hypothetical" question.
Kasuri intervened at this stage to explain that the policy of President Musharraf and the Jamali Administration favoured a two-state solution in the Middle East, and what the President had said earlier on the point was that any action in this regard was subject to the achievement of this end. However, they had no objection to a discussion on the point in the newspapers at a time when the things seemed to move according to the Peace Plan and Road Map and even Hamas had declared a cease-fire.
Answering another question, Kaddoumi said Palestinians supported the current peace process in South Asia with the "good condition" that the negotiations would succeed and bring the much-needed peace in the region.
He said that he did not consider the movements and struggle for liberation as "terrorism" and the Americans were the only people in the world who considered it as such.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2004

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