Global Policy Forum

By Patrick McDowell

Non-aligned countries urged the U.N. Security Council to deploy peacekeepers to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict citing concerns that worsening bloodshed there has fueled violence in Iraq, including prisoner abuse by U.S. forces and the beheading of an American civilian.

"The international community and the United Nations cannot afford to allow this issue to remain unresolved indefinitely," Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, told a key meeting of the 116-nation group Thursday. "The rising tensions in the Middle East following the war in Iraq have increased the need for, and importance of, rapid positive movement on the Israeli-Palestinian track," Abdullah said.

Malaysia hosted a meeting of the group's Committee on Palestine and members on the U.N. Security Council — Algeria, Angola, Benin, Chile, Pakistan and the Philippines — to help reverse the Middle East's slide into violence, which Abdullah said is rooted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The countries issued a communique urging the Security Council to "authorize an international presence and establish a United Nations peacekeeping mission" in occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.

They condemned recent assassinations of leaders of the Palestinian group Hamas, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposal to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip without reaching an overall settlement that would include the West Bank. Israel is building a wall between settlers and the Palestinian inhabitants that "would render a two-state solution practically impossible to achieve." U.S. support for Sharon's plan was deemed "unacceptable," the communique said. It urged the Bush administration to revert to its own so-called road map to establish a separate Palestinian state by 2005 under an overall peace settlement with Israel.

Bush introduced the road map to build Arab support for last year's invasion of Iraq, but the plan ran into immediate trouble from tit-for-tat violence. Bush's support for the Sharon plan is widely seen as a tacit abandonment. Veteran Palestinian envoy Farouk Kaddoumi noted that U.S. support for Sharon's plan would leave the road map "frozen for many years" and hoped that Washington would not again use its veto in the Security Council to stop the deployment of peacekeepers, an idea Israel has traditionally opposed. "It is a good idea and we hope that the United States, once again when we bring this matter to the Security Council, do not oppose it," Kaddoumi said. Malaysia, South Africa and Cuba were holding special non-aligned talks on Iraq later Thursday.

Abdullah said he had been "shocked" to see stills from a video on an al-Qaida-linked Web site that depict the execution of American civilian Nick Berg, as well as photos showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. "Violence begets violence," Abdullah said. "That is what it is all about. We must find the root causes and we must stop this. If the violence continues, both sides will show their capability of treating their captives or prisoners in a way we have seen in the photographs published in the media."

The men who killed Berg claimed they were angered by coalition abuses of Iraqi prisoners. The video bore the title "Abu Musab al-Zarqawi shown slaughtering an American," referring to an associate of Osama bin Laden believed responsible for a wave of suicide bombings in Iraq. A Malaysian company that hosted the site that first posted the video has disconnected it because it was drawing too much traffic. Company officials were unaware of the site's content and said they would have disabled it earlier had they been aware.