Among the bilaterals Mme. Secretary held yesterday were her meetings
with Jordan's King Abdullah, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas. Here is a snip from a senior State Department official's
briefing on those meetings.
Background
Briefing on the Secretary's Bilateral Meetings With Jordanian King
Abdullah II and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas
Special Briefing
Senior State Department Official
Waldorf Astoria Hotel
New York City
September 26, 2012
MODERATOR: All
right, everybody. Thank you for hanging with us for the late hour. We
have with us [Senior State Department Official], hereafter Senior State
Department Official, to talk to you both about the working lunch that
the Secretary had with Jordanian King Abdullah, and also about the
meeting that she just had with the President of the Palestinian
Authority, Mr. Abbas. Take it away, [Senior State Department Official].
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL:
Okay. Well, thank you very much, and good evening. We might start with
the working lunch that the Secretary had. It lasted about an hour. It
was preceded by, oh, I don’t know, about 15-20 minutes of one-on-one
time as well. It was over at the King’s Hotel at the Mandarin Oriental.
And the participants in the lunch were, on our side, in addition to the
Secretary, Acting Assistant Secretary Beth Jones, Special Envoy David
Hale, (inaudible) the Policy Planning Chief, Jake Sullivan, on our side.
And on their side it was the Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, the King’s
Chief of Staff Imad Fakhoury, and their Ambassador to Washington Alia
Bouran.
As you know, the relationship between Jordan and the
United States is one of – it’s very, very close, and between the King
and the Secretary and our leadership similarly one very close. So this
was a good opportunity to compare notes about developments across the
region that we and the King are both focused on.
I’d
say that it really boiled down to three topics. One was Middle East
peace and the Israeli-Palestinian set of issues. The second related to
Syria, which of course is a major challenge for Jordan. And third, the
internal reform agenda of the King and the people of Jordan.
On
Middle East peace, the King has been a leader on this from the
beginning. Most recently in January, he devoted a lot of time and energy
and effort and showed great leadership and skill in bringing the
parties together at a level below that of the leaders for a set of
talks. He has been someone, along with the Foreign Minister, who has
been in very close coordination with us on the way forward. We talked a
bit about that, and certainly we understood that we can count on Jordan
and his leadership when we need to, and we often do, to try to overcome
the obstacles that are blocking the parties right now.
On Syria, I
think that there was very lengthy discussion about the terrible
situation there and the options to try to reverse that and change it.
The humanitarian situation, which weighs very heavily on Jordan, was
also a major theme – the refugee flows and the danger that there will be
more to come into Jordan and the challenges and burdens that that poses
on that country with its limited resources. The Secretary talked about
what we could do to help the Jordanians bear that burden and to work
with the international community and the UN and others to make sure that
the resources were available for them to do that.
There was also a
discussion, obviously, of the political situation there and how we
would work together and work – and try to encourage the Syrian
opposition to work together on a unity plan. And there was an agreement
that we would be working and talking more about this on Friday when
there is a Friends of the Syrian Opposition Ad Hoc meeting. So this is
something that we’re both very much focused on. And of course, the
Secretary made very clear our position on President Assad and the fact
that he must go.
On the set of reform issues, the King was very
upbeat and very optimistic about the direction things are going in and
the pace at which they’re going in. Secretary Clinton welcomed the
progress that has been made so far to broaden and deepen participation
in the political process for all Jordanians, by all Jordanians, and
expressed our support for pursuing that in the way that he described.
That, in a nutshell, was the discussion with the Jordanians, so I move
onto the Palestinians.
We had a meeting there with – at his hotel
at the Grand Hyatt – that lasted for about half an hour, and then they
had another 10 minutes or so one-on-one. In the larger meeting,
participation on our side was Ambassador Susan Rice, Under Secretary of
State Sherman, Michael Ratney, our Consul General in Jerusalem who came
here for the meeting, Acting Assistant Secretary Beth Jones from the
Near East Bureau, Special Envoy David Hale, and Policy Planning Director
Jake Sullivan. On the Palestinian side the participants were their lead
negotiator Saeb Erekat and key advisors to the President, Akram
Haniyeh, Nabil Aburudainah, and their representative – the PLO
representative in Washington, Maen Areikat.
The discussion also,
as always I think with Abu Mazen, covered a whole range of issues. He is
watching the region very closely and he has been a leader of the
Palestinian people for a very long time, and his insights and
observations are of great interest to us, and he shared them. They
compared notes on really everything you could think of – Syria
certainly, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, Egypt, and all the changes going on
around the Palestinians. And certainly, we recognize that these events
reflect on the Palestinians and the choices that they have as they look
at the future.
The Secretary also asked him about the situation in the West Bank and
expressed her concern for what we’ve seen in terms of the financial and
economic pressures and challenges that the Palestinian people are
enduring and the Palestinian Authority trying to address. He went on at
some length about that and about the difficulties.
We indicated
that we are looking at every means we can to help the Palestinian
Authority meet these financial challenges. There was a major event that
we hold twice a year earlier this week. The Ad Hoc Liaison Committee
met, chaired by the Norwegians and co-chaired by the United States and
the EU, in which all the donors involved with the Palestinians came
together and talked about ways in which they could help make a
difference.
The Secretary also talked about our own
assistance and the status of that as we work with our Congress to – the
assistance package is now with the Hill, and her efforts to work with
Congress so we could get that money to the Palestinian Authority,
including a crucial $200 million in budget – direct budget support. And
we also talked about what could be done on the ground, in the here and
now, as Prime Minister Fayyad often calls it, to help overcome the
difficulties.
We also, of course, turned to the Middle East peace
process and the efforts that we’ve been working on to try to overcome
the differences separating the parties, exchanged ideas on how to do
that. And we certainly plan to continue our intensive work in that
direction.
I think I’ll stop there....
