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Moscow and Cairo discuss ways to unblock Middle East peace process
Yelizaveta Isakova | Dec 21, 2009 11:58 Moscow Time |
Unblocking the Middle East peace process is central to the agenda of the talks that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is holding in Cairo. Today he is due to meet the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa. Prospects for a Middle East settlement are still vague. Neither Israel, nor Palestine has made an effort to resume dialogue which broke off when Israel launched its Cast Lead military operation in the Gaza Strip late last year. A main roadblock on the way to dialogue resumption is the Binyamin Netanyahu government’s reluctance to put paid to Israel’s settlement-building. Unless Tel Aviv stops building Jewish settlements, the Palestinian leaders facing a major rift between their FATAH and HAMAS groups, will not hear of any return to the negotiating table. The uncertainty that has arisen serves to gear up regional instability. Russia and Egypt, aware of threats that the situation poses, coordinate efforts to rectify the situation and unblock the peace process. The Voice of Russia’s special correspondent Yelizaveta Isakova has this dispatch from Cairo:“Few are happy about the fact that the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue has reached a deadlock for the umpteenth time. What’s more, the short-sighted moves by the immediate parties to the conflict have entangled the situation so much that it will now take global-scale efforts to disentangle it. At least that was the idea that the Palestinian Foreign Minister put across during his recent visit to Moscow. The Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa supported the initiative yesterday by saying that the United Nations should play a leading role in a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict”. Nor does Moscow object in principle to the events following that kind of scenario, but it insists that Tel Aviv and Ramallah should resume talks. To begin with, it wouldn’t be bad to again call a meeting of the quartet of international mediators, namely Russia, the United States, the Untied Nations and the European Union, - to give an extra impulse to the quartet’s performance. But there’s more to Russia-Egypt interaction than a Middle East settlement. This is what the Russian Foreign Minister said about the foreign policy cooperation programme for 2010:“The interaction programme, Sergei Lavrov says, is comprehensive in character and covers both our bilateral projects in keeping with the decisions by the summit in June this year and international problems, namely the Near East, Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, disarmament, nonproliferation, the United Nations performance and the world economic situation”. Nor will Russia and Egypt ignore their economic cooperation. Russian-Egyptian trade has been growing energetically despite the crisis. This year’s trade turnover is expected to make up 4 billion dollars, and there’s room for further trade increase.
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