Cape Town - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is planning to visit South Africa this year to meet President Jacob Zuma and discuss ways of involving South Africa in the stalled Middle East peace process.
Abbas’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said in Johannesburg on Tuesday that he would deliver a letter from Abbas to Zuma on Wednesday accepting Zuma’s earlier invitation to him to visit South Africa.
Erekat said the Palestinians and Israelis could and should have learnt a lot more from South Africa’s experience of negotiating an end to apartheid and the start of democracy in the early 1990s.
He recalled that about 10 years ago, he was among a group of Palestinians and Israelis invited by then-president Thabo Mbeki to meet key players who had been involved in South Africa’s negotiations, to learn from their experiences.
“If South Africa could be solved, we in the Middle East shouldn’t despair,” he said.
Ethnic differences in South Africa were much greater.
“But no one can tell me from a Jew. We’re cousins. South Africa should play a much more active role in the Middle East.”
Erekat said he would meet Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane in Pretoria on Wednesday to hand over Abbas’s letter.
Former deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad and Zola Skweyiya, a former cabinet minister and high commissioner to the UK, have been visiting the Middle East as Zuma’s special envoys to investigate a possible role for South Africa in the peace process, but have said little about their discussions.
Palestinian officials have suggested that South Africa run one of the four tracks of the protracted peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine - borders and security, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of refugees and Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.
Erekat is in South Africa to receive the 2014 Global Champion for the People’s Freedom Award from the Mkiva Humanitarian Foundation in Butterworth on Friday. Previous winners include Nelson Mandela, former Ghanaian president Jerry Rawlings and former Cuban president Fidel Castro.
Erekat said on Tuesday that after the collapse of the latest negotiations initiative, the Palestinian Authority was pushing for a resolution at the UN Security Council. It would ask the council to accept a definite date for the end of the occupation of Palestine and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The Palestinian Authority would press ahead with the signing of the Geneva Convention on war, similar international instruments, and the Rome Statute, thereby becoming a member of the International Criminal Court. - Independent Foreign Service
Cape Times