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Chairman of the German Green Party vitits Palestine |
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The Chairman of the German Green Party, Mr. Reinhard Bütikofer who has been visiting in the region several times during the last years came to the Palestinian Territories at the end of March 2008. The Heinrich Böll Stiftung’s Arab Middle East Office organized a program of political meetings to provide the guest with new information on and Palestinian assessments of the current political and social developments in Palestine and on the perspectives of the so called peace process. The humanitarian situation in the Palestinian Territories, especially in the Gaza Strip, was the main topic of the briefing at the headquarters of UN-OCHA in East-Jerusalem. The representatives of OCHA also focused their presentation on the impact of the occupation, especially of the separation wall on the lives of the Palestinian people.
Mr. Bütikofer met with Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala) in Abu Dis to talk about the prospects of the current negotiation process and the state of reform inside Fatah in the wake of the upcoming Fatah congress for which a date has not been set yet. The current situation in the Middle East was also discussed in separate meetings with Mr. Ghassan Khatib, former Minister of Labor and Planning, and Dr. George Giacaman, Director of the Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy (MUWATIN).
The present deadlock of negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian representatives and between the leaders of Fatah and Hamas was one of the issues the German politician talked about with former Palestinian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Nasser Al-Kidwa. Finally Mr. Bütikofer met leading members of the Green Party in Palestine to collect information of the development of the Green Party in the occupied territories. He also encouraged them to send a delegation to the Global Greens Conference that will take place in Sao Paolo (Brazil) where representatives of all the green parties of the world will meet in May 2008.
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