Word: summiteer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...ignored by Tokyo, which seems to want to discuss the "comfort women" issue only with Washington. In fact, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently uttered the closest thing he's said to an apology on the issue, it was addressed to President George W. Bush at an April summit in Washington, rather than directly to the victims. Tokyo's obsession with Washington's opinion is generally only equalled by its obliviousness towards Japan's reputation in the rest of Asia. But with neighbors such as China and South Korea flexing their growing muscles, however, that attitude may become unsustainable...
Arab diplomatic sources tell TIME that the Arab-Israeli summit in Sharm el-Sheikh on Monday is intended as a stern message to Hamas: Stop fighting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, or we'll launch a political war against you. But the sources say that the goal of the Arab regimes is to press for Hamas to join a new Palestinian unity government along with Abbas's Fatah party. Explains a senior Arab official, the decision to hold a meeting between Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah II and Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert "is a diplomatic...
...sources say, despite a symbolic resumption of the peace process in January, neither the U.S. or Israel provided any tangible political or financial support to bolster Abbas's increasingly shaky leadership against Hamas's growing political and military challenge. On the eve of this week's Sharm el-Sheikh summit, Olmert announced that Israel will finally transfer to Abbas's emergency government - which excludes Hamas - hundreds of millions of dollars in Palestinian tax revenues collected by Israel but withheld after Hamas won parliamentary elections...
...summit comes against a backdrop of deepening Arab frustration and despair over the failure to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, worsened by the spectacle of Palestinians killing each other. "Gaza has become an embarrassing and frightening scene evoking sorrow and grief in the hearts," Saudi commentator Abdulrahman al-Rashid wrote in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat last week. Lately, Arab officials have grown anxious that their own increased diplomatic efforts are going unrewarded as they watch the growing influence of Iran, which backs radical Arab factions, including Hamas. While Hamas' power play humiliated the Saudis...
Arab diplomats say that besides warning Hamas, their aim at the summit is to lobby Olmert to provide help Abbas in the short term by releasing Palestinian money and easing Israeli security in Fatah-controlled areas, and in the long term by moving toward acceptance of the 2002 peace initiative recently relaunched by the Arab League. Meanwhile, they say, once passions have cooled down, their next move is to encourage Hamas and Fatah to restore their governing partnership. "We will try everything," an Arab diplomat explains. "None of us agrees with Hamas. But they are a political fact that...