Palestinian President Abbas to address UN Security Council on peace plan

Palestine’s Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour listens to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas during a meeting at the UN in New York. (File/AFP)
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Updated 30 January 2020
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Palestinian President Abbas to address UN Security Council on peace plan

UNITED NATIONS: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will speak in the United Nations Security Council in the next two weeks about the US Middle East peace plan, Palestinian UN envoy Riyad Mansour said on Wednesday.
Mansour told reporters he hoped the 15-member Security Council, at the same meeting that Abbas would address, would vote on a draft resolution on the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan unveiled by US President Donald Trump on Tuesday.
However the United States is certain to veto any such resolution, diplomats said. A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by permanent members United States, China, Russia, Britain or France to be adopted.
"We will try our best with our friends to have the strongest possible draft resolution and to receive the strongest and largest possible voting in favor of that resolution," Mansour said. He did not give details of what might be in the text.
"Of course we would like to see a strong, large opposition to this Trump plan," he said with Tunisian U.N. Ambassador Moncef Baati, currently serving a two-year term on the Security Council, standing beside him.
He said Abbas would use his visit to the United Nations in New York to "put before the entire international community the reaction of the Palestinian people and the Palestinian leadership against this onslaught against the national rights of the Palestinian people by the Trump administration."


Turkiye’s Kurdish party says Syria deal leaves Ankara ‘no excuses’ on peace process

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Turkiye’s Kurdish party says Syria deal leaves Ankara ‘no excuses’ on peace process

ANKARA: Turkiye’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party said on Monday that the Turkish government had no more “excuses” to delay a peace process with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) now that a landmark integration deal was achieved in neighboring Syria.
On Sunday in Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) agreed to come under the control of authorities in Damascus — a move that Ankara had long sought as integral to ‌its own peace ‌effort with the PKK. “For more than a ‌year, ⁠the ​government ‌has presented the SDF’s integration with Damascus as the biggest obstacle to the process,” Tuncer Bakirhan, co-leader of the DEM Party, told Reuters, in some of the party’s first public comments on the deal in Syria.
“The government will no longer have any excuses left. Now it is the government’s turn to take concrete steps.” Bakirhan cautioned President Tayyip Erdogan’s ⁠government against concluding that the rolling back Kurdish territorial gains in Syria negated the need ‌for a peace process in Turkiye. “If the ‍government calculates that ‘we have weakened ‍the Kurds in Syria, so there is no longer a ‍need for a process in Turkiye,’ it would be making a historic mistake,” he said in the interview.
Turkish officials said earlier on Monday that the Syrian integration deal, if implemented, could
advance the more than year-long process with the ​PKK, which is based in northern Iraq. Erdogan urged
swift integration of Kurdish fighters into Syria’s armed forces. Turkiye, the strongest ⁠foreign backer of Damascus, has since 2016 repeatedly sent forces into northern Syria to curb the gains of the SDF — which after the 2011–2024 civil war had controlled more than a quarter of Syria while fighting Islamic State with strong US backing.
The United States has built close ties with Damascus over the last year and was closely involved in mediation between it and the SDF toward the deal.
Bakirhan said progress required recognition of Kurdish rights on both sides of the border.
“What needs to be done is clear: Kurdish rights must be recognized ‌in both Turkiye and Syria, democratic regimes must be established, and freedoms must be guaranteed,” he said.