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James P. Rubin, Spokesman On-the-Record Telephone Readout to the Press, Middle East Peace Process Shepherd College, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, January 5, 2000

SPOKESMAN MR. RUBIN: Okay, this will be short and sweet and then, hopefully, you can all go enjoy lovely dinners again tonight in Shepherdstown and improve their economy. Essentially, the situation is unchanged from the last time I briefed you at mid-day. The additional developments are that Secretary Albright met with Foreign Minister Shara mid-afternoon. It lasted about an hour. It was a one-on-one meeting, as was the one-on-one lunch with Barak. The Normal Peaceful Relations Committee met all morning. The Security Arrangements Committee has been meeting pretty much throughout the day with, obviously, breaks. I think I got over to you all a list of all the participants of all the committees and the participants of the informal session last night. Secretary Albright is now meeting with Foreign Minister Levy of Israel and I think, in addition, there were informal contacts and discussions today on the other issues, the borders and the water issue. So that has happened during the course of the day. The formal meetings of the committees occurred as I stated it. QUESTION: So the two other committees don't meet until tomorrow, you think? MR. RUBIN: I don't know when they're going to actually meet. Let me repeat that they've all four been established but those two have not met. QUESTION: And informal contacts on water and border? MR. RUBIN: Informal contacts on water and borders, yes. QUESTION: Through the U.S.? MR. RUBIN: Exactly. Through the U.S. Exactly. QUESTION: Does the meeting with Levy mean that the Israeli delegation is beginning to position themselves for the Prime Minister leaving, taking a break and going home with other business, and that Mr. Levy will now be the point man for Israel? MR. RUBIN: I would not make that assumption at all. Secretary Albright met with Prime Minister Barak at lunch, and there has been no decision about his plan and we're not moving more towards one direction or another. QUESTION: Jamie, isn't it inevitable that an issue like borders and the withdrawal from the Golan is going to come up in a discussion in the formal working groups on security and normalization? There's no way you can talk about security and normalization without talking about borders and the Golan; isn't that a fair conclusion? MR. RUBIN: I mean, I would agree with you only to the extent that I'm sure it could be mentioned, but it is not necessarily germane to beginning to work out, say in the Security Arrangements Committee, stuff like the early warning station or what kind of zones, there are different kinds of security zones or demilitarization zones you would have. You can have a discussion about the nature of those without having nailed down the border of withdrawal. QUESTION: Has Albright had a chance to take a few minutes or maybe even an hour or so to maybe get away from all this, relax? And could you tell us a little bit how she, if she is reporting -- she hadn't as of mid-afternoon - to the President on this, who is elsewhere and doing other things? MR. RUBIN: Right. It is correct that during the course of the day the Secretary has been carving out a couple of hours to work on other subjects that are before her on a variety of issues from around the world. I don't believe she has called the President yet today. Her habit has been to sort of call at the end of the day, and the day isn't over yet. She may just have a report issued on paper to him, so I'm not entirely confident there will be such a call today. QUESTION: And could you provide any guidance on Friday, Jamie, whether it's going to be a -- well, it certainly can't be a full workday. It has to end about -- MR. RUBIN: At this point, we are planning for working tomorrow and the next day to the extent we can given the religious observances of the various participants. QUESTION: Jamie, can you give us an idea of the mood of the Secretary's meetings with Barak and Shara because the photograph of the lunch had to be -- it looked like -- the official photograph, I don't know what was going on there, but they look like they're made out of cardboard. MR. RUBIN: I'll tell the photographer you enjoyed his photo. I'm sure he'll be very thrilled by your thinking he took pictures of cardboard figures. But it was really Prime Minister Barak and Secretary Albright in the photo. QUESTION: Which was which? MR. RUBIN: I think it's fair to say -- and I saw her after each of the meetings -- that she felt they were very -- they weren't specific discussions, say, on a security zone or that kind of thing. They were much broader discussions of how we get from this stage of chugging along on to a fast track and what we need to do to get there and where the movement has to come. It was a sort of a strategic discussion about how to strategize on the different tracks of the peace talks that need to come together if we're going to get on to a fast track. QUESTION: Is Clinton coming back tomorrow night? MR. RUBIN: You know, I have a sense at this point that he may be coming back tomorrow, yes. QUESTION: What about a request from the American Government to the Syrian Government -- MR. RUBIN: Let me rephrase that to protect myself, and I hope you all will respect this. I have a sense that the Secretary will recommend that he come back tomorrow. QUESTION: Will there be a reQUESTION:uest from the American Government to the Syrian Government to utter some voices of peace in the Arabic-speaking media of the Syrian Government? MR. RUBIN: Again, we have imposed as carefully a limitation on media as we can. There have been a number of voices in both the Syrian and the Israeli media that have talked about the benefits of peace. There have been some commentaries from some government officials in Israel and in Syria that have not done so. I think we're trying to focus most of our attention on, right now, on getting the chugging along moved to a faster pace and not worry so much about the public side, which is important but it's not something we're focused on today given the need to move to this faster pace. QUESTION: Is that why President Clinton is returning tomorrow, to try to move things along, or is it just part of the summing up at the end of the week? MR. RUBIN: I think what I would assume is that, you know, we see President Clinton's presence as always useful but we don't want to overdo it. I think we feel that with work today and through the night and tomorrow, it will be appropriate again to convene at the Presidential level. That's why Secretary Albright will be recommending that. But it's not the end of the week, Thursday, so we'll just have to see what happens tomorrow. QUESTION: What do you see as a fast track looking like? Would it be a case of more meetings, more technical officials coming here to be able to break into smaller groups? I mean, what would the difference be apart from, obviously, the fact that it's faster? How are they going to physically work faster than they already are? MR. RUBIN: I think it's not so much faster in the sense of getting additional people but, you know, it's a creaky machine that needs to be geared up. Remember, the committees are now reviewing the details of where they left off and we're trying to encourage both sides to come up with new ideas. And we're going to, obviously, have some ideas of our own as to how to encourage new ideas so that the existing agreements can be not only codified but expanded to wider areas of agreement. QUESTION: Can you tell us more about these informal meetings today? Were the three parties together, and why it was not an official meeting? MR. RUBIN: As I indicated in my briefing earlier, the distinction I would make between a committee meeting and informal discussions and contacts is that the latter, the informal discussions and contacts, involves officials from the United States meeting with a Syrian official or an Israeli official on a bilateral basis, and then meeting with - and then vice versa. So the difference between an informal discussion or contact and a committee meeting is a committee meeting means you have the three groups together in one place. QUESTION: Why didn't they meet today? MR. RUBIN: As I indicated, the organizational plan is the one I indicated. That's the one that we, as the leaders of the talks, as the hosts and the honest brokers, have recommended, and we're proceeding on that basis. And as I indicated earlier today, I don't intend to analyze at this point why each step is taken. QUESTION: Have you heard any new ideas offered so far by either side? MR. RUBIN: I think it's fair to say that in order to move from the chugging-along phase to the faster track that we're going to have to get more new ideas. QUESTION: But you've had some? MR. RUBIN: I've really said all I want to say in answer to that question. QUESTION: This, whatever you call the peace group, has now met almost the whole - well, they met all morning, anyhow. Do you now have a better idea what Hafiz Asad means about peace than you did before you came here? MR. RUBIN: Again, I don't want to get into answering -- QUESTION: I'm not asking what. Do you have a better idea? MR. RUBIN: Hold on. I don't want to get into the substance of what goes on in each session. By that, I mean if it is perceived to be well known what existed before and I were to say that nothing new happened, then you would know what the substance was. So I'm not going to make it a practice of parsing the discussions of each of the committee meetings. For now, it's sufficient for me to tell you which meetings have occurred and give you the general sense that the Secretary in her meetings with Barak and her meetings with Shara was thinking strategically with them about how to get us from a chugging-along process to a faster pace. QUESTION: In a different way, has Syria begun to define what it means by peace? MR. RUBIN: Well, certainly the topic of discussion in the Normal Peaceful Relations Committee is the content of normal peaceful relations and what that entails. And so, yes, there have been discussions on what would be encompassed by normal peaceful relation in some detail. QUESTION: Help us with the security thing, with the security committees. Did the Israelis ask Syria to disarm Hezbollah in that meeting? MR. RUBIN: I was asked this earlier, and I do not believe that is the focus of the work right now. I do believe that the Lebanon QUESTION:uestion is something that has come up here from time to time. I believe the focus of the Security Arrangements Committee is more on things like demilitarized zones and early warning than the kind of issue you raised. QUESTION: Would it be fair to say that when you stop talking about informal talks it will mean that the transition has gone -- MR. RUBIN: As soon as the other committees have met, I will report that to you. QUESTION: Jamie, a repetitive QUESTION:uestion every day, but you understand why. Would you still say -- as you have, I think, every day so far -- that you don't foresee even a core agreement by the end of the week? MR. RUBIN: Our expectations are still neither great nor bleak. QUESTION: Jamie, would it count as moving on to a faster track if you did manage to get these two other committees to convene? MR. RUBIN: I think the meeting of a committee is not the determination of the overall pace. It's really -- QUESTION: (Inaudible)-- the obstacles -- MR. RUBIN: Hold on a second, please. I can't answer your question if you don't let me finish. And so what, in our view, is needed is in each of the committees and in each of the informal discussions that there be as much creativity and new approaches put together so that we can move forward. QUESTION: Will the committees move on into the evening, do you think, Jamie, or is that it for today? MR. RUBIN: The Security Arrangements is still going. I do expect there to be work conducted this evening here, but I don't know what point the Security Arrangements Committee is going to stop in its formal sense. QUESTION: Jamie, when you said that moving to a fast track would be codifying agreements that have been reached, can you tell us if agreement has been reached on anything yet? MR. RUBIN: I think what I was trying to say there is moving on to a faster track from the current stage, which I call the chugging-along phase, means not only codifying where we left off and agreement on where we left off but expanding those areas of agreement. We have not expanded in any substantial way our areas of agreement at this stage because we're just getting started and, as I said, we're just at the chugging phase. QUESTION: Jamie, "creaky machine" and "chugging along" aren't folksy enough for me. Do you have anything you can say along those same lines? MR. RUBIN: That goes in French? QUESTION: No, it doesn't have to be in French. QUESTION: But it has to be by Dickens. MR. RUBIN: I'm doing the best I can here, guys. QUESTION: Jamie, what about a weekend schedule? Any idea for planning purposes? MR. RUBIN: Nothing has changed on that. Let me just let you know I have my own personal desire to know what I'm doing this weekend, and I don't know. QUESTION: Thank you. MR. RUBIN: Thanks. Bye-bye. [end of document] Peace Process | Near Eastern Affairs | Department of State