MIDDLE EAST:Peace is still possible between Israel and Palestinians, former US president Jimmy Carter tells Deaglán de Bréadún
A round of "pre-mediation" contacts with interested parties should be launched in the Middle East in an effort to bring about peace there, former US president Jimmy Carter told The Irish Times in Dublin yesterday.
He was highly critical of the Bush administration for failing to make a diplomatic effort, as he saw it, and he accused the European Union of playing a "subservient" role to the US and Israel on the issue.
He also sharply attacked Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank which he said was worse, in some ways, than the former apartheid regime in South Africa. He criticised Tony Blair's role in the Iraq war but praised the British prime minister's work on the Northern Ireland peace process.
Speaking at the State guesthouse in Farmleigh, Mr Carter looked fit and fresh despite having travelled from Nepal, where he is also involved in efforts to secure peace and stability.
He addresses the ninth annual forum on human rights organised by the Department of Foreign Affairs at Croke Park today.
Commenting on the violent conflict between the Palestinian factions, he said that, "the root problem is that the election victory of Hamas has never been acknowledged by the outside world or by the leaders of Fatah. So that's created this altercation.
"As you know the United States has been providing weapons and encouragement to Fatah to try to prevail over Hamas in Gaza and that has not worked. My hope is that the influence of the Saudis and other Arabs might be adequate to re-establish peace talks and accommodation within the Palestinian community."
Asked if he felt president Bush had been sufficiently active in the search for peace, he said: "I don't know that he has done anything yet.
"He endorsed the 'road map' in very general terms but the only way you can implement the road map is to have very forceful and substantive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians and since president Clinton left office there has not been a single day of effort to have any peace talks."
Mr Carter was involved in monitoring the Palestinian elections in January last year and when he returned to the US, he called to see Mr Bush. "[ Mr Bush] told me that it would be a high priority of Condoleezza Rice," Mr Carter said. "She has said that the Arab League declaration is a basis for her effort but there are very strong voices in Washington that are not supporting what secretary of state Rice has espoused verbally.
"America has a great deal of influence in Israel if they want to exert it. George Bush Snr withheld US aid funds to Israel and forced them to stop building Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
"The US does have some leverage, it's limited but it's substantive." But, he added, this leverage had not been used by the current administration.
Mr Carter does not favour the idea of having a major international peace conference at this stage because the participants would only be "appealing to the most radical news media back home". He argues instead for a round of "pre-mediation" contacts in order to prepare "a complete analysis of what the different parties are actually willing to do". But he was unwilling to be drawn as to the identity of the intermediaries in such a process.
The former president has written 23 books and the latest, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, has aroused considerable controversy in the US, not least because its title compares the situation in the West Bank to the former racist regime in South Africa.
"I wrote every word in the book and I wrote the title," he says. "I was trying to be accurate and I thought it was time to start a debate. If I had said, 'A New Look at the Mid-East' or something like that in the title and had the same text, it's obvious that it wouldn't have been so widely debated and discussed. But apartheid, if you look at it in the dictionary, it's when two peoples are occupying the same land, forcefully segregated and one dominating the other, persecuting the other, that's what's going on in Palestine."
Asked if he was quoted accurately as saying the situation in the West Bank was worse than South African apartheid, he replies: "In some ways it is worse, yes. Inside Palestine you've got enclaves of exclusively Israeli people. The Palestinians are excluded.
"You've got roadblocks so that any movement anywhere in the West Bank is impeded by a roadblock. You've got a wall that's been built that goes deep within the West Bank to carve out additional property that belongs to the Palestinians and put it on the Israeli side. They can't get to their own fields. You never had a wall built in South Africa. So in some ways it's worse and the Palestinians are looked upon as pariahs, as terrorists in their own land."
However, he would not favour an academic, cultural or trade boycott of Israel. "I never have thought boycotts were a good idea," he says.
Asked if he believed the EU could do anything to promote Middle East peace, at its summit this week, he replied: "They could, but the EU has been subservient, accommodating to the policies of Israel and the US in persecuting the Palestinian people because of the way they voted in January of last year."
After the Hamas election victory, Mr Carter travelled to London where he met members of the Quartet for Middle East peace - the US, EU, Russia and United Nations - and pleaded with them not to cut off aid to Palestinians "just because of the way they voted". But his pleas were largely ignored. "The EU went along with it. Russia is the only entity within the International Quartet that held back on that."
He remains highly critical of the Iraq war as "unwarranted and an unjust invasion from the very beginning" and stands by his comments last month on the BBC where he criticised Tony Blair's "blind, apparently subservient" role in the situation.
The British prime minister should have insisted on a post-invasion plan from president Bush. "Tony Blair should have required a clear understanding as to 'what are we going to do after Saddam Hussein is deposed?' But instead of doing that he just accepted the Bush ideas which were certainly ephemeral to say the least and indecipherable."
But Mr Carter is generous in his praise of Mr Blair's performance on Northern Ireland. Describing the peace process as "an example for the rest of the world", he adds that the British prime minister "deserves a great deal of credit for it".
This is the former president's second visit to Ireland. He was here before on a flyfishing trip with two of his grandchildren when they finished high school. "My ancestors were Irish, but also mixed, they weren't pure Irish," he says.
As for the delicate question of which candidate he will support in the presidential election of 2008, he replies simply, "a Democrat".