Cilina Nasser
Daily Star staff

Former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for his role in securing peace in Central America, says a proposed Middle East conference at the foreign-ministerial level would be futile without the attendance of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
“I am not optimistic about the conference at the level of foreign ministers, because what we need is those two guys to sit down around a table and negotiate,” Sanchez said referring to Arafat and Sharon.
Sanchez, who served as Costa Rica’s president from 1986-1990, said that based on his experience, foreign ministers “don’t  have any authority to make decisions.”
“Peace can only be brought by the heads of state, not foreign ministers,” he told The Daily Star in an interview on Saturday at the Palm Beach Hotel in Beirut.
“These issues are so complex that only heads of states can take the risk to (make) decisions. So this (conference) is just a waste of time. It is just to tell the world that we are doing something here.”
European Union and US officials are currently touring the Middle East in a bid to garner support for the conference, which was first proposed by Sharon and later adopted by the United States in May.
Sanchez, who was on a private visit to Lebanon, was the main architect of a plan that led to a peace agreement between Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Costa Rica on Aug. 7, 1987.
The former Costa Rican president stressed that Sharon’s refusal to meet with Arafat should be “unacceptable” to the international community. He added that “in these very sensitive times, anyone who criticizes Israel or advocates involving Arafat in talks may be seen as being anti-Semitic.”
Sanchez also criticized Sharon for “putting the cart before the horse” by demanding an end to violence as a precondition for resuming negotiations with the Palestinians.
“It seems to me that peace is a precondition for security and not the other way (around),” he said. “So what we need is for Arafat and Sharon to go back to the negotiating table with their negotiating teams and talk about a cease-fire.”
Referring to his experience at the negotiating table , he said: “It never occurred to me to tell my colleagues in the region before going to the negotiating table: ‘Well, we need to stop the violence, we need to stop the conflict.’ No, we were going to the negotiating table to find out how we were going to stop the violence (and) how we were going to put an end to the war, and not the other way around.”
During Sanchez’s mandate, the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front battled the US-backed Contras in Nicaragua, civil war raged in Guatemala, and El Salvador was in turmoil.
Sanchez urged international mediators to follow the footsteps of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was known for forcing parties to the point of conflict in order to reach a settlement.
“According to one of his biographers, Roosevelt used to keep negotiating parties confined to a single room for as long as necessary until they reached agreement. After reading that, I became determined to apply that principle to our peace negotiations in Central America in 1987,” he said.
“We, five Central American presidents, held the fate of some 30 million people in our hands; the responsibility was too great for us to walk away without an agreement,” he said. “So far neither Yasser Arafat nor Ariel Sharon has recognized the gravity of their intransigence for the 8 million lives that are directly affected by their authority.
“It is time for the governments of Europe and the United States to lock the two of them in a room until they exhaust their rhetoric and their personal hatred and reach an agreement,” he said.  “This is the only way true peace will be achieved in what is considered by so many around the world to be the Holy Land.”
However, Sanchez warned the United States, the major sponsor of the stalled peace process in the Middle East, about the consequences of taking sides in the conflict. “The more closely the Bush administration identifies with the government of Israel and its military actions, the less credibility it has as an impartial mediator, and the more it distances itself from the rest of the world,” he said.
Sanchez, who comes from a country that abolished its armed forces in 1948, lobbied for and succeeded in demilitarizing Panama and Haiti in 1994 and 1995 respectively.
“I asked the Panamanians: ‘Why do you need an army? Are you afraid of Columbia, or are you afraid of Costa Rica?” Sanchez said, referring to two speeches he made in Panama’s Congress before he worked with Panama’s minister of justice in amending the Constitution to abolish the military.
But Sanchez pointed out that demilitarization could not work in all countries: “It cannot be done everywhere and it cannot be done in the Middle East. We’re not that naive.”
However, he said that disarmament could work in “certain countries that have no border disputes or territorial conflicts such as in sub-Saharan Africa and Central America.”
If it was impossible for a country to survive without an army, Sanchez said that at least “it is possible to reduce military spending. It is a crime for governments to spend more on tanks, more on soldiers and more on arms than on education and healthcare together.”
For Sanchez, industrialized countries who manufacture weapons are also to blame.
“The United States is the main supplier of arms and most of the arms go to the developing world,” he said. “(The United States) doesn’t care if the buyer is an authoritarian or democratic (regime). Profits come before principles. They preach principles but don’t practice them.”

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