Rice Says Quartet To Meet Ahead of Israeli-Palestinian Talks
17 January 2007
Says Russia, U.N., EU and U.S. can coordinate and integrate peace efforts
Washington -- Russia, the European Union, the United Nations and the United States, collectively known as the Quartet for Middle East peace, will convene in Washington at the beginning of February to help coordinate peace efforts, ahead of a planned meeting of Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. leaders, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said.
Speaking with German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier in Berlin January 17, Rice said the Quartet will convene ahead of her meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and described the group as “a very useful mechanism for the coordination and integration of international efforts,” adding that its composition gives it “the capacity to keep pushing the process forward.”
“There are a lot of ideas floating around about how we might get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track. And I think to get together and actually talk about how those ideas relate to one another is going to be a very useful thing because we want to have a concerted and unified effort, not multiple efforts,” she said.
Rice arrived in Berlin after visiting several countries in the Middle East. She said Germany’s new presidency of the European Union “comes at a very critical time for the international community.”
Steinmeier said Rice’s visit to the region was “not a charm offensive,” but rather an effort to assist “stabilization in the region and supporting peace in the region.”
He said he had pushed for a meeting of the Quartet in order to help moderate items on the agenda of the upcoming Olmert-Abbas-Rice meeting. (See related article.)
“We put an end to these competing ideas that are being presented by separate countries, individual countries,” he said. “The Quartet allows us to sort of bundle, and in so doing strengthen our common efforts. And I am confident that we are going to succeed.”
A transcript of Rice’s press availability with Steinmeier is available on the State Department Web site.
For more information on U.S. policy, see The Middle East: A Vision for the Future.
(USINFO is produced by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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