LONDON — At an international meeting Tuesday to help Palestinian leaders prepare for statehood, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said the world would back President Mahmoud Abbas' efforts to rein in militants and build a lawful government and healthy institutions.
The effect of the one-day meeting, attended by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a score of foreign ministers from Europe and the Middle East, was to give the Palestinians a feeling they are no longer isolated, Abbas said.
"We are confident that the international community has become interested in our cause ... and the security of the region is the security of the whole international community," the Palestinian Authority president said.
The final 17-page agreement spelled out actions by the Palestinians to prepare for statehood, including steps to reduce its multiplicity of security forces to just three groups under centralized command.
Though the meeting was not primarily about raising money for the Palestinian Authority, Blair said the European Union had committed $330 million and the United States an additional $350 million to support the Palestinians' efforts to reform their administration and economy.
Speaking in the wake of a suicide bombing Friday in Tel Aviv that killed five people and cast a shadow over a 3-week-old truce, Abbas pledged that he and his Palestinian colleagues would do all that had been promised to prevent terrorism under a U.S.-backed peace plan known as the road map. He urged Israelis to do the same.
However, Abbas argued that security would not be possible unless there were significant moves by Israel toward ending occupation of land claimed by the Palestinians.
"Experience has taught us that individual security measures, which are not part of a serious political path, do not achieve peace and security," he said. "For us as Palestinians, we are going forward to put our house in order and to address our commitments.... We only have one demand, which is reciprocity, according to the main elements of the road map."
Blair said progress between Israelis and Palestinians would reduce terrorism around the world, and he said the meeting had provided the Palestinian Authority with a "very clear script" to transform itself into a full-fledged democratic state once peace was achieved with Israel.
"The benefit ... will not just be felt by the Palestinians and the Israelis," Blair said. "It will be felt by all of us.
