UN Security Council Must Do Its Part For The Resumption Of Peace Talks

KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 25 (Bernama) -- The United Nations Security Council, serving as the custodian for international peace and security, must do its part to ensure the conditions are ripe for all parties to resume negotiations on finding a solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. The Permanent Representative of Malaysia to the United Nations in New York, Hussein Haniff said that Malaysia believed in order to achieve a fair and peaceful solution of the conflict the way for negotiations did not fall on Palestine alone. "All sides must realise that in order to realise peace in Palestine and the Middle East, negotiations would need to begin in a spirit of sincerity, goodwill and trust. "Obviously, this is not easy to accomplish, but for a start all parties should refrain from engaging in provocative actions that would certainly do more harm than good," he said in a statement at the Open Debate Of the Security Council On 'The Situation In The Middle East, Including The Palestinian Question', in New York, Tuesday. His text of speech was sent to Bernama here, Wednesday. Hussein said that Israel's insistence that Palestine should assume direct negotiations without any preconditions did not reflect Tel Aviv's willingness to be fair and to be more accommodating to its future neighbour. "While my delegation speaks today with a sense of pessimism, make no mistake that we remain resolute in our commitment towards finding a lasting two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine where both sides could live side by side in peace and taking into account security concerns of both sides," he said. Hussein said prolonging the conflict would only create more problems and was not in the interest of anyone. -- BERNAMA