France Confirms Having Contacts With Hamas
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
PARIS — France has had contacts with the leaders of the Palestinian Arab Islamist group Hamas “for several months,” the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said yesterday.
“We must be able to talk if we want to play a role,” Mr. Kouchner said in a radio interview. “These are not relations, they are contacts.”
Mr. Kouchner’s remarks followed the publication yesterday of an interview with France’s emissary to Hamas — a former ambassador to Iraq — in the daily newspaper Le Figaro.
The disclosure of French contacts with Hamas, which America and European Union consider a terrorist organization, followed an uproar in the U.S. presidential campaign over the issue of government contacts with sponsors of terrorism.
President Bush, during a Middle East visit last week, told the Israeli parliament, “Some seem to believe we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.” He compared the willingness to meet with “terrorists and radicals” to the pre-World War II “appeasement” of Nazi Germany.
Senator Obama chastised Mr. Bush for what he said was an obvious slap at his comments that America should open communication with countries such as Iran and Syria in an effort to advance peace. The Illinois senator has not advocated negotiating with Hamas.
Hamas defeated the Fatah movement, long dominant in the Palestinian Arab territories, in January 2006 parliamentary elections. After a power-sharing deal failed, Hamas last June forcibly took control of the Gaza Strip, where it is much stronger and more influential than Fatah, which continues to control the Palestinian Authority from its base in the West Bank.
President Carter drew criticism from Israel and the Bush administration for meeting with Hamas leaders in Damascus last month.
Regarding the French contacts, Israeli officials said they had been assured that France’s policy had not changed.
In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said, “We don’t believe it is helpful to the process of bringing peace to the region.”
