Q&A: Blair's Mideast summit plan
LONDON, England (CNN) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair is traveling Monday to the Middle East where he will promote an international conference he plans to host in London after next month's Palestinian election. CNN's European Political Editor Robin Oakley spoke to anchor Tony Campion about the visit.
Q. Why is Tony Blair going to the Middle East?
A. Essentially it's a chance to build on the opportunities provided by the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and inject some new momentum into the Middle East peace process. He went to Washington last month to discuss the issue with President George W. Bush. What he wants to do is to stage this conference in London involving the U.S., the Europeans and whoever is elected as leader of the Palestinian Authority in the elections on January 9.
The idea is not so much to move into "final status" peace talks -- that is a long way off --- but to bolster the new Palestinian leadership, financially, morally and to get them more onto the world scene.
Q. Blair will be hoping Mahmoud Abbas, if he is elected as leader, will come to the conference, and presumably Blair is traveling to sow the seeds of the kind of lines of discussion he wants to hold. He's also going to be meeting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who is not going to come to the talks in London. Why is that?
A. The Israelis are not expected at the conference but they have given a tacit blessing to it. They want the conference to be very carefully framed just to be a boost for the Palestinian Authority, pushing them towards getting rid of corruption, pushing them towards effective security and ending terrorism.
The Israelis don't want anything at this stage that looks like a "final status" peace process. They say things are not ready for that -- there's the pullout from Gaza to come, and so on. So I think there'll be a bit of careful definition between Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon when they meet.
Q. What do you read into Tony Blair pushing his peacemaker profile like this?
A. It was interesting that just before the war in Iraq, we also saw an effort to get Palestinian Authority leaders to Britain. At that time Israel prevented them from traveling and it ended up just as a video link conference that everyone forgot about pretty quickly.
Tony Blair has a lot invested in this issue. He told his party conference back in October: You share my frustration that we haven't achieved much on the Middle East peace process but it is the most important thing in the world at the moment. People are saying though: Look Mr. Blair, you've got to show that your close alliance with George W. Bush on Iraq gets results on issues like the Middle East process, because the key player as Israel's closest ally is President Bush.
Tony Blair is there partly for public relations for his own electoral purposes. He's got an election coming up, probably next May, and he's got to demonstrate he's getting results on this issue. This could be a sign of progress for him.
