EU TO BOLSTER PA

EU moves to bolster new Palestinian cabinet Mon Jun 18, 6:50 AM ET


LUXEMBOURG (AFP) - The European Union moved Monday to bolster the Palestinian emergency government, offering political and financial support and urging Israel to follow suit. At a meeting in Luxembourg, EU foreign ministers were to discuss ways to directly fund cabinet leader Salam Fayyad and get aid to people in the strife-torn Gaza Strip, which was seized by Hamas fighters late last week.
There will be a direct relationship, economically also with the government, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told reporters as he arrived for the talks. There will be a part of the money that will be direct.The EU, the biggest donor to the Palestinians, suspended direct aid to the previous Palestinian cabinet after Hamas which is blacklisted by Brussels as a terrorist organisation -- took office in March 2006.

But the Union has continued to pay hundreds of millions of euros to needyPalestinian people through a special financing mechanism which ensures that funds do not fall into the hands of the Islamists.Solana said that it was important to support Fayyad, a western-backed independent sworn in to head the cabinet by Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas after weeks of bitter internecine fighting saw Hamas over-run Gaza.
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.

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 that was set up with Fayyad when he was finance minister in the previous Hamas-led cabinet.

Gaza, he said, would pose a special problem.

In order to help the Palestinian people in Gaza we would need some mechanism that would not be direct support, he said.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.Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was scheduled to take part in Monday's talks in Luxembourg, and the German EU presidency said she would be urged to follow the EU's lead.The objective of today's discussion will be to press upon the Israeli foreign minister, who will be at the meeting, that they too need to support the emergency government, said German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

I think that the Israelis will have to do the transfer of money to the new government, Solana said, after Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged in New York to help avert a wider humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.