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CNN Live At Daybreak

Powell Has Been Meeting With Sharon This Morning

Aired April 12, 2002 - 05:01   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: Before he arrived in Israel, Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Jordan, where he met with King Abdullah.

CNN's Gary Tuchman profiles the Arab leader, who describes Powell's mission as a make it or break it trip.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): He is the son of the late King Hussein and has proclaimed to be the 43rd generation direct descendent of the prophet Muhammad. King Abdullah has now been the ruler of Jordan for over three years following the death of his father.

He was educated in Oxford in England and at Georgetown in the United States. So it's not surprising that his England is excellent, as he showed when he met with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington this past January.

KING ABDULLAH, JORDAN: At the end of the day, let's forget about the politics and the leadership. The peoples, I believe the majority of Israelis and Palestinians are just sick and tired of the cycle of violence and want a way out.

TUCHMAN: The U.S. government regards King Abdullah as a trustworthy and pragmatic partner for peace in the Middle East.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: It is always a pleasure to receive, if I may say, my good friend, His Majesty King Abdullah.

RAGHIDA DERGHAM, "AL-HAYAT" NEWSPAPER: King Abdullah has shown quite a remarkable statesmanship. He is well in his skin as a king as well as he is able to stand up when necessary and be counted, such as at the time of the terrorist attack September 11.

TUCHMAN: Politically the king, who recently turned 40, has to tread carefully. His country has a population that is between 60 and 70 percent Palestinian. The anger on the streets has resulted in many demonstrations, including this one in Amman this week led by his wife, Queen Rania, who is of Palestinian origin herself.

QUEEN RANIA, JORDAN: I think what we're trying to do here is highlight the flagrant violations of human rights in the occupied territories. And we want the international community to put pressure on Israel to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law.

TUCHMAN: The king says he's frustrated, angry and dispirited over the bloodshed and is under pressure from many in the Arab world to renounce the peace treaty King Hussein signed with Israel in 1994. but the former attack pilot in the Royal Jordanian Air Force has given no indication he will retreat from the commitment his father made to peace.

Gary Tuchman, CNN.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: And now on to Jerusalem. Colin Powell has been meeting with Ariel Sharon this morning. Soon they will talk to the world.

CNN's Andrea Koppel is traveling with the secretary of state. She joins us live by phone from Jerusalem -- how long have they been meeting, Andrea?

ANDREA KOPPEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning.

Well, they've been meeting for about, let's see, about two and a half hours. They will be meeting for three hours by the time they come out to meet with us roughly in half an hour and this has been a much anticipated meeting. Obviously the United States and the international community have sent some very strong messages to Prime Minister Sharon to withdraw immediately from West Bank towns and cities. On the eve of Powell's arrival there was what the Israelis describe as the partial withdrawal from some towns and villages. But quite frankly the United States is not satisfied.

There was a little photo opportunity a short time ago in which the prime minister and Secretary Powell and their aides came out. It looked fairly amicable. There was not a lot of tension in the air. The two men shook hands and smiled. But I think it's fair to assume that behind-the-scenes it was not nearly that amicable.

There has been quite a bit of tension in the air, to say the very least, with the Bush administration being very public in its displeasure of the Sharon government thus far. President Bush making a rather unusual public demand for Ariel Sharon to withdraw the troops and really until now, Carol, that has not, that has not been listened to by the Sharon government.

Tomorrow, Secretary Powell will go off to, again, against the better wishes of the Sharon government, to visit the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah headquarters. Mr. Arafat has been essentially penned in under siege now for almost two weeks and Secretary Powell's mission, really, U.S. officials say, is not to achieve a cease-fire. They don't think that's realistic. What they do hope to achieve, however, is to at the very least improve the atmosphere and hopefully get Israeli troops, they say, to begin a consistent withdrawal from the West Bank -- Carol. COSTELLO: I can only imagine the security over there, Andrea.

KOPPEL: Yes, it's very tight. Security in Israel is always thorough but it's even more so right now. They're scrutinizing literally everything that you might have in your pocket or every battery that you have in a beeper and the streets are cordoned off right now around the prime minister's residence, where Powell and Prime Minister Sharon are meeting. And you can say that there's a lot, a lot of security around town right now.

COSTELLO: Oh, yes.

Andrea Koppel, thank you, reporting live for us by phone from Jerusalem this morning.

And we want to get some insight now on the talks between the Secretary of State Powell and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Joining us from Jerusalem, too, is David Horovitz with the "Jerusalem Report." Good morning, David.

DAVID HOROVITZ, "JERUSALEM REPORT": Good morning.

COSTELLO: First off, what do you think Colin Powell and Ariel Sharon are saying to each other this morning?

HOROVITZ: I imagine that Ariel Sharon is getting very upset, actually, with the secretary of state, and saying to him that we thought that after September the 11th your administration had told the world that there were good guys and bad guys, there were terrorists and those who fought the terrorists. My government, as a really desperate last resort, has now moved into Palestinian territory to try to stop the people who were orchestrating suicide bombings against Israeli civilians. And far from getting the wholehearted support we would have expected from the Bush administration, we are told publicly to pull out. If we were to do so, of course, we would merely be inviting further attacks. Where is the principal that you are supposed to be following? This seems to be a double standard.

COSTELLO: But...

HOROVITZ: And I'm sure that Secretary Powell is responding and saying there are other interests at stake here. You know we're trying to carry out various policies against Iraq that will serve your interests. We don't want to stoke up opposition in the Arab world.

Therefore it's a pretty tense kind of environment that these two men are meeting in.

COSTELLO: Do you think there's any hope that they will come to some sort of agreement to quell the violence there?

HOROVITZ: To be honest, I don't, because I think the Israeli perception is very strongly that if they are to pull the troops back out, all they would be doing is facilitating more of the kind of bombings that prompted the incursions in the first place. I mean Israel has been castigated at the moment for what happened in Jenin. The Israeli government and the vast majority of the Israeli people believe that what happened in Jenin is part of the war on terrorism, that the hard core of the intifada was based in Jenin refugee camp, that these people never thought the Israeli Army would come and touch them there, thought they were immune and Israel really with no alternative went in after begging Yasser Arafat to try and stop these people who, you know, in the month of March alone killed 126 Israelis.

So Israel is looking to the Americans to pressure Yasser Arafat. As long as Israel feels that the Americans are pressuring them, I don't think there's much prospect of much progress.

COSTELLO: Yes, and from Ariel Sharon's perspective, too, the Israeli population seems to be on his side more and more. When the military operation began, his approval rating was, what, about 35 percent? And now it's going up.

HOROVITZ: Yes. He's becoming increasingly popular. There's overwhelming support in Israel for this operation. But at the same time, and this reflects the complexity here, at the same time the majority of Israelis in an opinion poll published just today said they supported the Saudi initiative. The Saudi initiative, of course, calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from all territory in the West Bank and Gaza and so on.

So Israelis on the one hand back this operation as really a desperate last resort effort to try and prevent the suicide bombings but they're also saying they want a compromise. And really at the root of that apparent contradiction is the fact that they've lost all faith with this Palestinian leadership.

They believe Yasser Arafat has whipped up the Palestinian people, manipulated them, failed to tell them that Israel really wanted peace and that as soon as an alternative Palestinian leadership emerges, one that genuinely preaches conciliation with Israel, Israelis are basically saying they will want their government to reengage with it, to start negotiating with it.

COSTELLO: OK, David Horovitz, thanks for your insight. We'll get back to you a little later on in our DAYBREAK show.

Right now we want to talk about the human toll that's now being added up in this Israeli operation. Today the Israeli Army is estimating hundreds of Palestinian casualties in the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp.

We turn now to our Jerrold Kessel, also in Jerusalem, for the latest on some conflicting numbers -- good morning to you.

JERROLD KESSEL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Carol.

And I think you're absolutely right, it is a question of the human toll. But that, a human toll and the conflicting arguments about the human toll are playing very much into this diplomatic battle that is just unfolding now. You heard the reports from Andrea and the comments from David Horovitz there about the secretary of state's mission.

Now, Mr. Powell has, the mission has been called formidable, Herculean task, mission impossible, and all those adjectives, all those descriptions are perhaps not sufficient because it's so formidable that even as it started out, you saw the obstacles that were hitting the secretary of state right slap in the face as he went into these talks with Prime Minister Sharon.

We heard him as he came out and went on from the on to one meeting to meet on the larger committee between the Israelis and Americans that the, that is going on now, saying the talks are going well. But really they're coming under the major shadow of this question of just what happened in the Jenin refugee camp, the place where the fiercest battles took place, the stiffest resistance to the Israeli incursions took place and those casualty figures.

The Israeli Army is revising its figures upward this morning in the form of a statement from the chief army spokesman, who said that hundreds of Palestinians had been killed or wounded in those battles. And in the wake of that, Palestinian spokesmen in the form of the chief Palestinian negotiator saying very firmly, they say, more than 500 Palestinians were killed in the battle for the Jenin camp.

They say this was a massacre. The Palestinian spokesman, Saeb Erakat, is calling Ariel Sharon a war criminal, saying this was like the killings in the Sabra and Chatila camps back in Beirut back in the 1980 Lebanon war and that Israel is culpable to the extent that the Palestinians will push for Mr. Sharon and for the army commanders to be tried in international war tribunals.

Now, that kind of statement is significant. The charges and counter charges are significant. The Israelis are calling Mr. Erakat's allegations a crude lie, an attempt to continue with incitement. But it has a political resonance simply because the Palestinians are saying, Palestinian officials are saying how can we possibly talk cease-fire when without this massacre of our people being addressed?

Now, that's comparable to what the Israelis had been saying before the meetings between Mr. Sharon and Mr. Powell. They were saying we can't discuss cease-fire until we've completed our battle against terror.

So the secretary of state in the middle of that, having to find a way even to begin talks on cease-fire with these two strikes against him, both sides saying they don't want to talk cease-fire until their demands and their issues are addressed. More than a problematic situation for the secretary of state as he starts his mission -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Yes, stay with us, Jerrold. We want to show some pictures of the beginning of Colin Powell's meeting with Ariel Sharon. This is where the news conference will be after they're done speaking. Now, this could hit at any time and of course we'll go there live.

Jerrold, do you think there's any chance that Colin Powell will travel to Jenin to see for himself what happened there?

KESSEL: Now, that's a very, very, very interesting question. In fact, Saeb Erakat, in the statement that he gave us just about a half an hour or an hour ago here on CNN, the Palestinian chief negotiator, he called, as he said, as he described this as a massacre, as he called Ariel Sharon a war criminal, as he said the Palestinians will pursue those responsible to international tribunals, said Colin Powell must go -- or he appealed to him, he didn't say must go -- but he said he appealed to him to go to Jenin to see for himself what had happened. So as, he said, to enable the people to bury their dead, their wives, their husbands, their children, as he put it, who had been killed in what he called this massacre.

Now, if Mr. Powell does go there, that would be more than carrying a hot potato.

Now, on the other hand, the Israelis had been telling us in advance of these meetings that they hope that Mr. Powell might go to the Park Hotel in Netanya. Now, that's the place on the Israeli coastal resort where the major suicide bombing took place on Wednesday two weeks ago, 16 days ago on the eve of the Israeli, the beginning of the Israeli celebration of the Passover holiday, when 28 people were killed by a suicide bomber.

Now, the Israelis say they wanted Mr. Powell to go there to see the extent of what had happened in that suicide bombing and, of course, it was that suicide bombing that has triggered these, this two weeks of the massive Israeli offensive. So whether Mr. Powell goes into either of those two places, that's a very big question and it might really influence the shape of his mediation mission.

COSTELLO: Well, but don't you think, Jerrold, that Israel will be controlling where Colin Powell goes?

KESSEL: Well, yea, to some degree. But I mean he does have to agree to want to go to any of those places. But Mr. Sharon had said quite bluntly he didn't believe that a meeting between Mr. Powell and Yasser Arafat was a wise thing. In fact, he called it a tragic mistake. But in the end, once the secretary of state said I'm going to Ramallah, well, of course, the Israelis fell into line with that and now we wait to see how far they'll pull their tanks back from Mr. Arafat's headquarters, where, of course, he's been held almost in total isolation with a break or two over the last 16 days.

But Colin Powell, once he said I'm going to Ramallah, of course the Israelis are going to facilitate that happening -- Carol.

COSTELLO: Well, let's talk a little bit about that, because Colin Powell will meet with Yasser Arafat on Saturday. What do you think that he will say to Yasser Arafat?

KESSEL: Well, you know, that really is the big question because the Palestinians are saying and everybody is saying well, this morning's important meeting between Powell and Sharon because the Palestinians are demanding that the Israelis end immediately that, the incursions. The United States had until yesterday been saying very flatly it must end, in the president's words, right away, without delay, in haste.

But that seems to have gone away for the moment and the question was not so much of what Powell and Sharon would be talking about, but more what would come out of that meeting between Mr. Powell and Yasser Arafat, because let's not forget, in the American position, there was a double barreled demand of the president as he laid it out last Thursday afternoon of the announcing of this mission.

On the one hand, that the Israelis must wind up their military offensive, as they called it, to root out the source of terror. On the other hand, he's been demanding, President Bush and Mr. Powell consistently, that the Palestinians speak out absolutely about suicide bombers and about terror. And so far that hasn't happened.

The question is what will be the demand of Mr. Powell that Mr. Arafat go first.

Now, what we've heard today from the Palestinians suggests, they say we can't talk about that when we've got our massacre, the massacre of our people to be addressed. So very, very complex situation for the secretary of state, to say the least.

COSTELLO: No wonder they're calling is mission impossible.

Thank you, Jerrold Kessel. We'll get back to you a little later on on DAYBREAK.

Jerrold Kessel reporting live from Jerusalem.

Both sides in the Middle East conflict have been burying their dead.

Our Chris Burns reports on the emotional farewell for a young Israeli woman killed Wednesday in a suicide bomb attack on a bus near the city of Haifa.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS BURNS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Outside her family's apartment, the sight of Noah Schlomo's (ph) coffin unleashes a wave of grief. At 18, she was the youngest of three daughters. Her mother Fanny (ph) is a nurse. Her father Joseph, the manager of a truck parts warehouse.

The intense grief wells up again at Noah's gravesite. Hundreds of townspeople, relatives, friends and fellow soldiers join to bid her good-bye. Noah and a close friend, Karen Franco (ph), were on their way to work as border guards at Allenby Bridge when a suicide bomber blew himself up in their bus, killing them and six others.

Noah's uncle, Israeli's ambassador to the United Nations, says his sister had long worried about Noah's safety. She told him...

YAHUDA LANCRY, UNCLE: I fear a suicide bombing in her car. So it happened, unfortunately, and my sister called me a couple of days ago in New York and that was the first sentence that she uttered. You see, it happened.

BURNS: Another uncle remembers Noah as a talented dancer and artist, who even made a short film, wining a prize for it. Does her death change his mind about Israel's crackdown in the West Bank?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I think it should have taken place a long time ago. Like you say in English, strike the iron while it's hot.

BURNS: A common feeling among many here in Naharia (ph), a place bordered by conflict.

(on camera): Noah Schlomo's hometown is a beach town that's been hit by repeated attacks, by a suicide bomber in a train station, by Hezbollah guerrillas firing from the Lebanese border just a 10 minute drive away.

(voice-over): Hezbollah stopped the shelling two years ago but resumed recently. And then came the suicide blasts despite the Israeli crackdown.

YEHUDA BOTBOL, CAFE OWNER: It's the small thing that we can get because if Israel would not do that, it would be like before, every day, 20, 30 people dying.

BURNS: Yehuda Botbol joins in bidding farewell. Noah's comrades fire off a salute. She's laid to rest next to other soldiers 18, 19, 20 years old in a funeral this day multiplied several times over.

Chris Burns, CNN, Naharia, Israel.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

COSTELLO: And as always, if you would like to read more about developments in the Middle East, all you have to do is go to our Web site. The site covers the ongoing violence and Powell's visit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon plus the Mideast special chronicles the history of the crisis and profiles the issues. The address is, of course, cnn.com, AOL keyword: CNN. It's where you get the depth of a newspaper and the immediacy of television.

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