UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was in Egypt Friday on the second leg of a Middle East tour amid a flurry of diplomatic activity in the region aimed at re-energising the peace process. Ban, who arrived from Baghdad, was expected to meet Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit on Friday, foreign ministry sources told AFP.
During his two-day visit, he was also to hold talks with President Hosni Mubarak and Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa. The UN chief will leave Egypt for Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan. He is then to address the opening session of an Arab summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Wednesday before travelling on to Lebanon.
Ban sees "a renewed dynamism in diplomacy in the Arab world" and wants to "express his support to ongoing efforts to re-energise the Middle East peace process", UN spokeswoman Michele Montas said Monday.
His visit comes on the eve of a new Middle East tour by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who arrives in Egypt Saturday for talks with foreign ministers of regional allies Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - the so-called Arab Quartet.
Ban is to meet Rice in Jerusalem on Sunday, UN officials said. The flurry of diplomacy comes after Israeli officials expressed renewed interest in a five-year-old Arab peace plan first drafted by Saudi Arabia advocating full normalisation of relations in return for a full withdrawal from occupied Arab land.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Thursday that the plan "could certainly form a convenient basis for future talks between us and moderate Arab elements". "The Saudi initiative is interesting and contains many parts I would be ready to accept ... not all of them," he added.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has highlighted two clauses in the Arab peace plan that pose problems for Israel - one calling for the right of return of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 Middle East war and another ruling out their permanent settlement in neighbouring Arab states where they have found refuge. Rice will try to persuade moderate Arab leaders to amend the plan to take into account the Israeli misgivings, a senior US official said.
But it is likely to be a hard sell after the Egyptian foreign minister made clear the plan was a comprehensive blueprint that could not be cherrypicked. Ban's visit also comes after the formation of a new Palestinian unity government embracing the secular Fatah faction as well as the Hamas sparked a spate of Western contacts with Palestinian ministers for the first time in a year.
The Quartet of major players in the Middle East peace process - the European Union, Russia and the United States as well as the United Nations - announced Wednesday that they would maintain the crippling aid freeze they imposed when Hamas first formed a government in March last year.
But EU, UN and US officials have all met non-Hamas members of the new cabinet while non-EU Norway went further meeting prime minister Ismail Haniya of Hamas. The Quartet agreed the new administration should "not be judged solely on its "composition and platform, but also its actions".
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