Brezhnev calls for new M.E. talks in Geneva

Press, 23 February 1978, Page 8

Brezhnev calls for new M.E. talks in Geneva

NZPA-Reuter Moscow Prospects for an over-all Middle East peace settlement have been seriously damaged by the Egyptian-Israeli peace talks, according to the Soviet President (Mr Leonid Brezhnev). The Soviet President gave his view in a speech at a banquet for President Hafez al-Assad, of Syria, who is in Moscow to discuss opposition to the Egyptian initiative.

Speaking after talks with the Syrian leader, Mr Brezhnev said it was now clear that Egypt’s President Sadat had surrendered “one allArab position after another” to the Israelis. “As a result, serious damage has already been inflicted on the struggle of the Arabs . . . and the cause of the iMiddle East settlement,” Mr Brezhnev said. The Soviet President went on to call for a reconvening of the Geneva conference — a major point of difference

between the Soviet Union and several of the Arab States now backed by the Kremlin in a stand against President Sadat.

South Yemen, Algeria, Libya, and Iraq, whose leaders or senior officials have come to Moscow for talks in recent weeks, have voiced strong reservations about the possibility of any peace settlement. President Assad, a valuable ally to the Kremlin with his more moderate stand on the question, called in his speech for peace on the basis of United Nations resolutions with Soviet participation. The United States Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East Affairs (Mr Alfred Atherton) was due to go to Cairo late yesterday with Israel’s proposals for a declaration of principles for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement.

Mr Atherton, unobtrusively resuming his role as

middle man between the two sides, met Israeli leaders in Jerusalem on Tuesday, but said that nothing ” new emerged. In Beirut, Palestinian commandos have claimed that they killed or injured a number of Israelis in two operations in Israel and the occupied West Bank of the River Jordan during the past few days.

The Palestine news agency, W.A.F.A., said the commandos on Monday planted time bombs under gas reservoirs at a building used for police interrogation in Acre. The blasts set fire to the building, destroyed all its contents and injured an undetermined number of Israeli policemen, W.A.F.A. added.

It said the commandos ambushed a military truck in Nablus, on the West Bank, on Friday evening with automatic weapons and hand grenades, killing, or wounding all the occupants.