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EU to boost new Palestine govt
18/06/2007 22:57 - (SA)
Luxembourg - The European Union prepared on Monday to inject funds into the fragile Palestinian emergency government and send aid to people in the strife-torn Gaza Strip, urging Israel to follow suit.
At a meeting in Luxembourg, EU foreign ministers discussed ways of directly funding cabinet leader Salam Fayyad and get aid to Gaza, which was seized by Hamas fighters late last week, without any falling into the hands of the Islamists.
"The signal is that we support 100%, politically and financially (Palestinian leader Mahmoud) Abbas and his transition government," said Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said the bloc would break with practice over the last year, since Hamas won Palestinian elections, to provide some direct financial aid to the new 12-member cabinet.
"There will be a part of the money that will be direct," he told reporters as he arrived for the meeting.
The EU has long been the biggest donor to the Palestinians but it suspended direct aid to the previous cabinet after Hamas - which is blacklisted by Brussels as a terrorist organisation - took office in March 2006.
However the Union has continued to pay hundreds of millions of euros to needy Palestinian people through a special financing mechanism which by-passes the Islamists.
Solana said it was important to support Fayyad, a Western-backed independent sworn in to head the cabinet by Abbas after weeks of bitter internecine fighting saw Hamas over-run the narrow strip of coastal land bordering Egypt.
"It's very important that he's able to construct a budget with which he's able to help both" the West Bank and Gaza, where poverty and insecurity has been rife over the last year, Solana said.
"Whenever he does something to help he will do it in both places," he said. "This is very, very important."
Asselborn underlined that "the international community cannot accept that there be two Palestinian states".
EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner warned that European funds could not start flowing immediately because the new government would be hard pressed to effectively control and use the aid.
"It is a matter of financial control and transparency and an emergency government at that moment, I cannot imagine that already there are all the structures," she said.
But Solana said the EU would be able to inject money through a special account set up with Fayyad when he was finance minister in the previous Hamas-led cabinet.
Gaza, he said, would pose a special problem.
He said: "In order to help the Palestinian people in Gaza we would need some mechanism that would not be direct support.
"We are thinking about the possibility to do it through the agencies of the United Nations or maybe also to use the mechanism that we have in place."
- AFP
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