Middle East (Hansard, 13 March 1991)

§ 14. Sir David Steel
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what discussions he has had about the establishment of a comprehensive middle east peace conference.

§ Mr. Hurd
Since the ceasefire in the Gulf, I have talked to the Americans, the French, the Twelve and most recently with the Israeli Foreign Minister on 5 March. We are also in touch with other countries in the region. We remain committed to an international conference on the Arab-Israel problem at the right time, but there is a great deal of preparation to be done first.

§ Sir David Steel
While I entirely accept both that answer and what the Foreign Secretary said earlier this afternoon about the authority of the PLO leadership having been weakened, will the right hon. Gentleman accept as a basic principle of such a conference that no other participants can be allowed to dictate who should represent the Palestinians, and that they themselves are entitled to choose their representatives?

§ Mr. Hurd
Indeed that is right, and the representatives must be representative, or there is no point in having a conference; but equally, everyone else has to attend Israel has to attend—if it is to be worth while. That is what I mean when I say that a good deal of preparation must be done first. However, that preparation is in hand. There is now a visible effort by the United States, by the troika of the Twelve and to some extent also by the parties to make some real progress.

§ Mr. Cormack
Does my right hon. Friend agree that there is no question of a comprehensive conference of this sort while Saddam Hussein remains in power in Iraq? It is essential that Iraq be represented at any conference, and that evil man cannot represent his country at this sort of conference.

§ Mr. Hurd
I think that is right. Iraq is not of course a main party to this dispute, although Saddam Hussein thrust himself forward as if it were. That claim has now been rejected by everybody, and by events, so I do not think that the search for justice for the Palestinians and security for Israel need wait on events in Iraq.

§ Mr. Galloway
The Secretary of State said earlier that the Palestinian representatives must be representative. He is not seriously suggesting that the position of the PLO has been weakened within the ranks of the Palestinian population, is he? We may disagree, as his Government certainly do, with what the PLO said—I thought that he caricatured the PLO position on Saddam Hussein's aggression—but he cannot seriously be saying that the PLO no longer represents both the two thirds of Palestinians who live outside Palestine and 99.99 per cent. of the Palestinians who live inside. Let us not turn the page back to all those years when the Secretary of State was forced to pretend that the PLO does not comprise the people we should talk to. It is indispensable to the peace process, and the Foreign Secretary should say that to the Americans, who are listening to what the British Foreign Office says.

§ Mr. Hurd
I did not caricature the PLO attitude. There was no need. Many of us have seen Mr. Arafat creating that attitude on television. There is no doubt about that. The hon. Member is right to say that the PLO continues to enjoy very wide support in the occupied territories and among Palestinians dispersed across the world, as was illustrated again at Mr. Baker's meeting; the difficulty is that what they have weakened is their acceptability to those with whom they must talk, who include some of the most important of their former Arab friends.