Jordan Times
Wednesday, December 22, 1999
Arafat concludes two-day visit after 'productive'
talks
By Saad G. Hattar
AMMAN — Palestinian President Yasser Arafat on Tuesday wound up a two-day visit to Jordan during which he held talks with His Majesty King Abdullah and high-ranking officials on peace negotiations with Israel and means to boost bilateral ties.
In remarks to the press following his talks with Prime Minister Abdur-Ra'uf S. Rawabdeh, Arafat lambasted Israel for failing to honour peace agreements with the Palestinian National Authority.
“There is nothing new so far with regards to our negotiations with Israel,” Arafat told reporters. “The negotiations did not yield any results. Even the encounters between me and (Prime Minister) Ehud Barak were the same.”
Barak postponed a scheduled meeting with Arafat last week, after his return from ground-breaking peace talks in Washington with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Sharaa.
The Palestinian president labelled his talks with King Abdullah and senior Jordanian officials as “very positive, important and productive.”
In his talks with Arafat, His Majesty stressed that the resumption of Syrian-Israeli negotiations should “support and complement” the peace process on all tracks.
Palestinian sources said on Tuesday that Arafat wanted King Abdullah to use his good offices with the Syrian leadership in an attempt to improve relations and initiate coordination between Damascus and the PNA.
“The Palestinians are seeking the minimum level of inter-Arab coordination in order to secure their minimum rights,” one official told the Jordan Times.
He said the PNA was in favour of holding a five-party summit grouping the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and the PNA.
Syrian President Hafez Assad, at odds with Arafat over many issues, is scheduled to meet his Egyptian counterpart soon.
During their talks at the prime ministry, Arafat and Rawabdeh decided to hold a meeting next week of Jordanian and Palestinian officials to discuss the prospects of boosting bilateral relations in the fields of trade, transport and telecommunications.
Jordan and the PNA have accused Israel of hindering the flow of Jordanian exports to the Palestinian market through red-tape, security and bureaucratic obstacles.
Officials say that Jordan used to export double the volume of goods to the West Bank before the PNA's 1993 self-rule accord with Israel.
Jordanian exports to the Palestinian territories were in the region of $25 million in 1998, as compared to nearly $2.5 billion the Israeli exports to the same market.
During his stay in Amman, Arafat underwent “routine” medical check-ups by his private physician, former health minister Ashraf Kurdi.
Kurdi gave Arafat a clean bill of health.
“Arafat enjoys very good health and the tremor in his lips is subsiding,” he said.
The physician added that “apart from the lip tremor, which is subsiding, I found Arafat to be in a very good health condition.”
Arafat, 70, undergoes routine physicals on almost all his visits to Jordan.
In his remarks to the press after his talks with Rawabdeh, Arafat explained that Kurdi had “insisted on checking my health and I told him go ahead.”