AMMAN (AFP) — US ally Jordan will send a lower-level delegation to a Washington-sponsored Middle East peace meeting this autumn unless it has a clear action plan, a senior palace official said on Wednesday.
King Abdullah II may send his foreign minister if he feels the meeting will have no substance, the official said before the Jordanian monarch hosted another key US regional ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, for evening talks.
"Jordan will take part in the meeting but the level of the kingdom's participation depends on how serious the planning for the meeting is," the palace official told AFP.
"Until this moment, we still do not have a clear idea about the meeting, and we are afraid that the meeting will turn into another photo opportunity."
The United States has called an international Middle East peace meeting for later this autumn as part of its efforts to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks following the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June.
Washington has not officially announced the date or venue of the meeting, but it is widely expected that it will take place in November.
"The meeting should be based on a clear action plan to help establish an independent Palestinian state and tackle core issues like Jerusalem, the refugees and borders," the Jordanian official said.
"Jordan is directly involved in these issues and should completely be informed of all talks and developments related to them."
The king's concerns about the meeting's agenda were expected to dominate his talks with Mubarak, whose country is the only other Arab state apart from Jordan to have signed a peace agreement with Israel.
"The king will express his concerns to Mubarak about any possible repercussions for the failure of the international meeting in the absence of good planning," the official said.
At their talks over the iftar meal that breaks the daytime fast during the Muslim month of Ramadan, the two leaders said the peace meeting is "an important opportunity to achieve tangible results," a palace statement said.
"They stressed the need for careful planning for the meeting that should address Palestinian-Israeli final status issues and come up with clear and positive results leading to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state."
Mubarak held a previous round of talks with King Abdullah II in Egypt's second city of Alexandria on September 4 in a bid to avert what he called "another lost opportunity" at the November meeting.
As well as Egypt and Jordan, the United States has said it also intends to invite fellow US Arab allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, plus Syria, the main Arab ally of its regional arch-foe Iran.
The six countries are all members of an Arab League committee established to follow up on a five-year-old Arab peace initiative that was relaunched at a summit in Riyadh in March.
In comments broadcast on Monday, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal warned that the meeting's "success hinges on the issues it will tackle."
On the same day an official said the kingdom had yet to decide whether to attend.
Jordan, a neighbour of both the West Bank and Israel, fears that the peace meeting may raise the idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation.
"This idea could be a pretext to empty the Palestinian territories and leave the door open to an exodus of Palestinians to the kingdom," where around half of the six million inhabitants are of Palestinian origin, the official said.
"Resources in the Palestinian territories are very limited. Jobs in Jordan will attract thousands of Palestinians if the two peoples are linked officially," a political analyst said.
"Creating a confederation or federation before or after the establishment of a Palestinian state will harm Jordan."
The Jordanian media have always warned against a solution to the Palestinian issue "at Jordan's expense."
Earlier on Wednesday, the Islamist movement Hamas, which seized power in the Gaza Strip in June, urged Arab countries to stay away from the US-sponsored peace meeting.
"The (Hamas) government warns that the autumn conference will be a new occasion for negotiators to make concessions," it said. "We thus call on our Arab brothers not to venture into this obscure tunnel."
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