BERLIN (AFP) — International donors committed 242 million dollars Tuesday to bolster the Palestinian police and justice system to help pave the way to a viable state, Germany's foreign minister said.
The money will be passed to the Palestinian Authority (PA) over the next three years for measures such as putting more police on the beat, rebuilding destroyed courthouses and training judges, Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.
He said the funds would also go towards an expansion of the European Union Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS), set up in 2005 to train the Palestinian police force.
It is hoped that through such measures Palestinians will turn their backs on violence and put more trust in the rule of law so that an eventual Palestinian state will be able to stand on its own two feet.
The cash comes out of 7.4 billion dollars already pledged by donors in Paris in December, a month after peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians were relaunched in Annapolis in the United States.
US President George W. Bush has said he wants to see a deal on founding a Palestinian state by the end of the year.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had urged donor countries at the opening of the conference in the German capital to allocate uncommitted funds from their existing pledges to support the PA.
"Every link in what we call the chain of security must be intact and unbreakable. To ... feel invested in a future state the Palestinians must have confidence that their police, courts, penal system are dedicated to upholding the rule of law and respecting human rights," Rice said.
She was speaking ahead of a meeting of the so-called Middle East Quartet -- the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States -- later Tuesday and as a truce between Hamas and Israel entered its sixth day.
Earlier, the Israeli military said it had killed two Palestinians in the West Bank, one of them a senior member of the Islamic Jihad group, and militants in Gaza fired rockets into Israel for the first time since the truce.
The heads of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams, Ahmad Qorei and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, as well as Rice also held "serious" talks on the sidelines, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat told AFP.
At the Berlin conference the PA presented a list of projects that it needed help on, a list praised by Quartet envoy Tony Blair as "proper and comprehensive."
Blair said that a functioning criminal justice system was "fundamental for a two-state solution."
"There will never be a two-state solution just by people sitting in a room negotiating ... a state will only be created when people take the action to create the reality that allows a state to be credible, credible for the Palestinians ... credible for the Israelis," the former British premier said.
"A state that cannot run its own security is a state only in name," he said.
But Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad told the conference that while better security conditions were vital for the creation of a Palestinian state, such improvements must be accompanied by other measures such as an immediate freeze on new Israeli settlements and the dismantling of Israeli checkpoints.
"There needs to be progress not just on the security front but also on the political side," Fayyad said, warning also that the PA's public finances were "critical."
He added after the conference however that the meeting "gave us Palestinians a glimpse of the enthusiastic international consensus that is present, in favour of the freedom for all people and the establishment of an independent state of Palestine."
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that the vast majority of the Israeli population saw the need for a two-state solution but that they needed to see evidence that the eventual Palestinian nation would be a "democratic, responsible state."
"When we hand over the keys ... we need to know that our neighbour is a partner for peace," Livni said. "I need to know what is going on on the other side of the border."
More than 40 countries sent delegations to the Berlin conference.
Also present were Arab League secretary general Amr Mussa, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and 23 foreign ministers including Russia's Sergei Lavrov.
The conference was focused on helping the PA in the West Bank and does not cover the Gaza Strip, which has been controlled by Hamas since last year.
Gaza has been subject to a near-total Israeli blockade since Hamas seized control. The international community refuses to talk to the Islamist group until it renounces violence and recognises Israel's right to exist.
Copyright © 2009 AFP. All rights reserved. More »
