Rice Says Hamas Victory Reflects Palestinians' Desire for Change
27 January 2006
Says Palestinian people's aspiration for peace unchanged
By Phillip Kurata
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian legislative elections was "somewhat unexpected" but does not change the deep aspiration for peace of the Palestinian people.
In an interview with the Reuters news agency January 26, Rice said the Hamas victory was an expression of the Palestinian people's desire for change from the "corruption and non-accountability and lack of transparency" that characterized the rule of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. (See related article.)
Hamas, which captured 76 of the 132 seats of the Palestinian legislature, has sworn itself to Israel's destruction. In contrast, Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas won a landslide victory in January 2005, after a campaign based on seeking a negotiated peace with Israel.
Rice said that the Hamas victory does not change the U.S. view that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
"It's a terrorist organization; we're not going to deal with it. It has certain obligations if it wishes to govern in accordance with international standards, and we will see whether it's prepared to meet those obligations," she said.
The secretary said that she has been in contact with representatives from the United Nations, Russia, and the European Union, which along with the United States are known as the Quartet when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
All the Quartet members are in agreement with the view of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that Hamas cannot have one foot in the terrorist camp and the other in politics, she said.
Rice said that she has spoken with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and conveyed reassurances that the United States and the international community "remain committed to the proposition that terrorism has to end, violence has to end and the Israeli state has to be recognized by any party that would be involved in governing."
She said peace for Palestinians means that Israelis must also have peace, which is the basis for the Quartet's policy of supporting two states -- Israel and Palestine -- living side by side in peace and security.
"As my colleague [British Foreign Secretary] Jack Straw said earlier, Hamas is going to have to make some choices," Rice said.
Although the Palestinian elections produced a Hamas victory, the secretary said that the United States always supports democracy.
"They had elections that by all accounts were free and fair; they had elections that were peaceful, and they and President Abbas ... are to be congratulated for it," Rice said.
"The United States has to stand for democracy. And yes, there will sometimes be outcomes that surprise us. There will be sometimes outcomes, as the president said earlier, that are a wakeup call to leaders. But democracy is always preferable," she said in a separate January 26 interview with CBS radio news.
Rice said the United States has been through its “own struggles with democracy and we probably ought to be a little bit more tolerant and a little bit more understanding of the struggles of new democracy because certainly with America's history we have no reason for arrogance."
In a videoconference to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier that day Rice said, “Perhaps we have to step back and remember that our own journeys to democracy were also rocky and difficult.” (See related article.)
“I come from a part of the United States in which my parents were not even guaranteed the right to vote until 1965, when I was 10 years old,” she said, in reference to her early childhood in Alabama during the violent struggles of the civil rights movement, which sought to overturn centuries of government-sanctioned oppression against African Americans.
The Quartet statement on the Palestinian elections and the transcripts of Rice's interviews with Reuters and CBS are available on the State Department Web site.
For additional information on U.S. policy, see The Middle East: A Vision for the Future.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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