Madrid

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The Madrid Conference was hosted by the government of Spain and co-sponsored by the USA and the USSR. It convened on October 30 1991 and lasted for three days. It was an early attempt by the international community to start a peace process through negotiations involving Israel and the Arab countries including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, US President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker formulated the framework of objectives, and together with the Soviet Union extended a letter of invitation, dated October 30, 1991 to Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians.

The Palestinian team, due to Israeli objections, was initially formally a part of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian delegation and consisted of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza without open PLO association like Saeb Erekat, Faisal Husseini, Hanan Ashrawi and Haidar Abdel-Shafi, who were however in constant communication with the PLO leadership in Tunis.

The purpose of the conference was to serve as an opening forum for the participants and had no power to impose solutions or veto agreements. It inaugurated negotiations on both bilateral tracks and on multilateral tracks that also involved the international community. The Syrian and Lebanese negotiators agreed on a common strategy.

The first-ever public bilateral talks between Israel and its neigbbors (except Egypt) were aimed at achieving peace treaties between the 3 Arab states and Israel, while the talks with the Palestinians were based on a 2-stage formula, the first consisting of negotiating interim self-government arrangements, to be followed by permanent status negotiations. (This formula was essentially followed in the later Oslo process.) They opened immediately following the conference on November 3 1991 in Madrid, and were followed by over a dozen formal rounds in Washington, DC from December 9 1991 to January 24 1994[1][2]

The multilateral negotiations which opened in Moscow on January 28 1992 were held in 5 separate forums each focused on a major issue - water, environment, arms control, refugees and economic development, and were later held, until November 1993 throughout the world including European capitals and the Middle East. At first, Israel refused to take part in the refugee and economic meetings as Palestinians from outside the West Bank and Gaza were present. Syria and Lebanon refused to take part in multilateral meetings as long as there was no concrete progress on the bilateral level.

Formal talks in the multilateral track, which had been frozen for several years, resumed on January 31 2000 with a meeting of the Steering Committee in Moscow, to be followed by meetings of the working groups.[3]

The Israeli-Jordan negotiations eventually led to a peace treaty signed in 1994, while the Israeli-Syrian ones led to several series of negotiations, which came quite close on some reports, but did not result in a peace treaty.

The bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were upstaged and eventually replaced by initially secret negotiations that finally led to the exchange of letters of 9 and 10 September 1993 and the subsequent 13 September 1993 signing on the lawn of the White House of the Declaration of Principles, which however were essentially based on terms which the Madrid round Palestinian negotiators had earlier rejected.

Israel cites as a major benefit of the conference and the process, the greatly increased number of countries which recognize and have some degree of diplomatic relations with it - nearly doubling - in particular citing the major powers of China and India and some even in the Arab world, like Oman, Qatar, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania, along with the decline of the Arab boycott and economic relations with some of the Arab countries.[4]

[edit] Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy and treaties

[edit] External links

[edit] References

fr:Conférence de Madrid de 1991 gl:Conferencia de Madrid he:ועידת השלום במדריד (1991)

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