REYKJAVIK, KUWAIT CITY (Agencies)
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday chided former U.S. President Jimmy Carter for meeting with Hamas, as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Carter failed in his attempt to talk Hamas into accepting a future two-state peace deal with Israel.
"Carter gave them (Hamas) the right advice," Abbas told reporters in Iceland, where he made a stopover en route to talks with U.S. President George W. Bush in the United States.
"He urged Hamas to accept a two-state solution and accept past Palestinian agreements with Israel, but unfortunately he failed to convince them and his visit did not end up with positive results."
Announcing the results of his mission on Monday, Carter described Hamas's conditional agreement to go along with an accord to create a state in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as a "departure from long-standing Hamas doctrine that refused to recognize two states".
Hamas, whose international isolation deepened after it routed Abbas's forces to take over Gaza last June, welcomed Carter's efforts to engage it.
And in Kuwait, Rice told reporters that U.S. officials had told Carter that talks with Hamas would not help the peace process.
“We counseled President Carter against going to the region, in particular against having contact with Hamas," Rice told journalists on the sidelines of a conference about Iraq in Kuwait City.
"We wanted to make sure there would be no confusion and there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow party to peace negotiations," Rice said, recalling the advice to Carter from U.S. State Department officials.
Rice stressed that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority were the sole party to the peace talks launched with Israel last November in the United States, repeating there should be no confusion about that.
"The United States is not going to deal with Hamas, and we certainly told president Carter that we didn't think meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians who (are) actually devoted to peace" Rice said. |
