Agence France-Presse,
PARIS: Delegations from the world's powers meet in Paris on Monday to agree on an aid package worth billions of dollars to stabilise the Palestinian economy and give political impetus to the newly relaunched peace process with Israel.
Ninety international delegations are attending the one-day Conference of Donors for a Palestinian State, the biggest of its kind since 1996, which aims to shore up the process jumpstarted in the US city of Annapolis last month.
Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas hopes to win pledges for 5.6 billion dollars (3.85 billion euros), the sum he says is needed to underwrite a Palestinian state and stave off severe hardship in the territories.
The amount the Palestinians needed for 2008 was “around 1.6 to 1.7 billion,” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told journalists accompanying her on the plane to Paris.
Sources in her delegation said the United States was prepared to shoulder one third of the financial burden in 2008 by forking up 550 million dollars. The German government, meanwhile, promised 200 million dollars by 2010.
“This is an historically large figure. I think this is the largest assistance package that we have ever done for the Palestinians,” a senior US official told journalists on condition of anonymity.
Among the delegates gathering at a conference centre by the Arc de Triomphe are UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and former British prime minister Tony Blair.
Blair, the international envoy for the Middle East Quartet, said in an interview published Monday in The Financial Times that he was “reasonably confident” that Palestinian requests for aid would be met at the donor conference.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni represents Israel, which is under pressure to lift restrictions on freedom of movement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to allow the Palestinian Authority's plan to take shape.
Speaking to AFP on the eve of the meeting, Livni said that “the creation of a Palestinian state and the modernisation of the Palestinian economy are in the interests of Israel, just as stopping terrorism is in the interests of the Palestinians.”
French President Nicolas Sarkozy will open the proceedings, at Abbas' side, with a speech at 9:30 am (0830 GMT), before handing over to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner for the rest of the day.
“It is urgent to stabilise the Palestinian economy and implement measures on the ground that will improve the daily lives of Palestinians,” said Sarkozy's spokesman David Martinon.
At the US-sponsored meeting in Annapolis, Maryland last month, Israel and the Palestinians pledged to seek a peace deal by the end of next year, relaunching negotiations frozen for seven years.
The pledges will be in support of a plan draw up by Salam Fayyad, the economist whom Abbas appointed as Palestinian prime minister when the Hamas radical Islamist group seized armed control of the Gaza Strip.
In an interview with AFP, Fayyad said his government had undertaken important economic reforms which should reassure donors that their money will not be wasted.
“The reforms are not abstract slogans but concrete actions which he have taken. I can say with certainty that Palestinian financial management is no longer a cause for concern,” he said.
Some 70 percent of pledged funds will go to stabilising the Palestinian budget, and the rest on development projects.
The United States praised Abbas's government before the opening of the conference.
“You have the best Palestinian government since Oslo. This is not only the best Palestinian government, it is also the most moderate in the Arab world,” said the senior US official.
Conference members are expected to urge Israel — which operates 550 checkpoints in the West Bank — to gradually lift restrictions on movement between Palestinian towns and villages, while asking the Palestinians for a big push to improve security conditions.
“The two have to move forwards in tandem,” said a French diplomat.
The senior US official said Rice may also publicly push Israel to halt construction of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
“We may say something publicly. … Settlement activity is one of the central concerns everybody has.”
