Kerry plans return to Middle East after visit yields no deal

TEL AVIV: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry ended a shuttle diplomacy mission on Sunday without an agreement on resuming Israeli-Palestinian peace talks but said gaps had been narrowed and he would return to the region soon. 

"I'm pleased to tell you that we have made real progress on this trip. And I believe that with a little more work, the start of final status negotiations could be within reach," he told a news conference before his departure from Tel Aviv's airport. 

"We started out with very wide gaps and we have narrowed those considerably," he said, without elaborating. "We are making progress. That's what's important and that's what will bring me back here."

Over four busy days, Kerry met Israeli and Palestinian leaders repeatedly and separately to try to find a formula for reviving direct negotiations stalled since late 2010 in a dispute over Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Kerry said both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had asked him "to return to the area soon". "(That is) a sign that they share my cautious optimism," he added.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said there had been some progress, "but we can't say there's been a breakthrough".

Erekat said he would hold further meetings with U.S. representatives to follow up on some issues raised during the Kerry visit, the secretary's fifth since taking office. 

Netanyahu has repeatedly called on Abbas to return to negotiations. But he has balked at Abbas's demand that Israel first halt settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, areas it captured in a 1967 Middle East war and which Palestinians want for a future state.

An Israeli official, who asked not to be identified, said Abbas was also seeking the release by Israel of scores of long-serving Palestinian security prisoners as a goodwill gesture.

But Netanyahu believed the issue should be addressed only after talks resume, the official added.
    
NO PRECONDITIONS

"Israel is prepared to enter into negotiations without delay, without preconditions, and we are not placing any barriers on the resumption of final-status talks on a permanent peace agreement between the Palestinians and us," Netanyahu told his cabinet after six hours of overnight talks with Kerry.

For new talks to be held, Abbas has said Netanyahu must also recognise the West Bank's boundary before its capture by Israel as the basis for the border of a future Palestinian state. 

Israel, seeking to keep major settlements under any peace accord, has rejected those terms, deeming them preconditions, and has said its security forces would not be able to defend the pre-1967 frontiers.

A U.S. State Department official said Kerry's discussions with Netanyahu and advisers in a Jerusalem hotel suite ended shortly before 4 a.m. (0100 GMT) on Sunday. 

Afterwards, Kerry strolled through the deserted streets of the city accompanied by his security and one of his advisers on the Middle East, Frank Lowenstein. He then drove to Ramallah, the Palestinian hub city in the West Bank, to see Abbas.

Kerry is keen to get fresh peacemaking under way before the United Nations General Assembly, which has granted de facto recognition to a Palestinian state, convenes in September.  

Netanyahu is concerned that the Palestinians, in the absence of direct peace talks, could make further moves at the U.N. session to get their statehood recognised, circumventing Israel.

 But Kerry said the pace of his diplomacy was set by the two sides, whom he described as sincere about finding a way forward. 

"We're not going to get stuck with artificial deadlines. That's a big mistake," he said before flying to Asia. Reuters

Obamas tour Mandela's island jail before Africa speech

CAPE TOWN: U.S. President Barack Obama and his family visited South Africa's bleak former prison of Robben Island on Sunday to pay tribute to ex-inmate Nelson Mandela, now critically ill in hospital. 

Obama was expected to later cite the legacy of Mandela, who was imprisoned on the windswept island for most of the 27 years he spent in jail before becoming the country's first black president, in a speech at the University of Cape Town.

Current South African President Jacob Zuma was also held at the notorious jail off Cape Town's coast under the apartheid regime, which ended in 1994 with Mandela's election victory.

In sunny weather, the U.S. president flew by helicopter with his family to the island, which is surrounded by the frigid, shark-infested waters of the South Atlantic.

His party drove a short distance to the former prison's lime quarry, where Mandela and other prisoners toiled for years. 

Their guide, 83-year-old former inmate and anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada, spoke about his time there with Mandela and other African National Congress prisoners.

Obama told his daughters the idea of non-violent resistance, an important tactic in the U.S. civil rights movement, had taken root in South Africa where its chief proponent Mahatma Gandhi worked as a lawyer before returning to India.
   
HERO

On Robben Island, Obama also again visited Mandela's cell, repeating a previous visit he made as a U.S. senator in 2006. 

After touring the former prison, Obama and his wife Michelle signed a guest book in which Obama wrote: "On behalf of our family we're deeply humbled to stand where men of such courage faced down injustice and refused to yield. 

"The world is grateful for the heroes of Robben Island, who remind us that no shackles or cells can match the strength of the human spirit." 

The 94-year-old Mandela's struggle with a lung infection has been a sombre backdrop to Obama's eight-day Africa trip. South Africa says his condition is "critical but stable". 

Obama met Mandela's relatives in Johannesburg on Saturday to deliver a message of support instead of directly visiting the frail former president at the hospital where he has spent the last three weeks.  

The U.S. leader describes Mandela as a "personal hero", and has reminded audiences in Africa that his first political activism was to urge his U.S. college to divest itself of South African investments to protest against apartheid. 

In his speech at the university, Obama was expected to look back to an address U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy gave in Cape Town in 1966 comparing the struggle to overcome apartheid with the U.S. civil rights movement.

Some protesters gathered outside the University of Cape Town ahead of Obama's speech, holding placards attacking U.S. foreign policy reading "Obama mass killer" and "End drone wars now". 

POVERTY AND CORRUPTION

Obama, the first African American president, is expected to remind a young audience at the university that Mandela and the U.S. civil rights movement persevered against daunting obstacles in bringing social change that many thought impossible.

The U.S. president will then challenge his audience not to be content with progress so far but to push ahead with battles to lift Africans out of poverty, combat government corruption
and improve health and living standards across the continent.

He will also aim to restore some of the lustre of the U.S. relationship with Africa by stressing the U.S. desire to move beyond being an aid donor toward greater economic partnerships.

The speech comes in the middle of an Africa trip taking Obama to Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania. 

Obama has sought to use the trip to emphasise Africa's potential as a business partner for the United States and to overcome the perception that he has ignored the continent. 

Many Africans are disappointed that despite the U.S. president's Kenyan ancestry, his only previous visit to the continent while in office was to Ghana in 2009.

In his speech, the president will unveil a $7 billion U.S. initiative to double access to electric power on a continent where only one in three people have electricity. 

While in Cape Town, Obama will also visit a health centre to highlight U.S. efforts to combat HIV/AIDS on the continent, which have contributed to a 32 percent drop in the number of
AIDS-related deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2011. Reuters