UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Sunday began a Mideast trip to promote Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and attend the opening of a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Annan met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday and planned to travel to the West Bank yesterday for talks with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas and other top officials.
Annan's spokesman said the UN chief offered to help coordinate peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians.
Annan also is expected to meet with many of the 30 world leaders attending ceremonies today and tomorrow for the inauguration of the new Holocaust museum at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial. The presidents of Poland, Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, prime ministers of France, Italy and the Netherlands and several European foreign ministers are among the scheduled guests.
The trip will take on personal meeting for Annan as well. His wife, Nane, is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during World War II before disappearing.
Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Annan, said that in his talks with Israelis and Palestinians, the secretary-general hopes to help both sides "sustain the momentum that has been generated in the past few weeks."
He cited the Feb. 8 Mideast summit in Egypt, where Sharon and Abbas declared an end to four years of bloodshed, and the international show of support for the Palestinians at a March 1 conference in London. At the conference, international donors pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and other assistance to promote Palestinian reforms.
The UN is one of the "Quartet" of sponsors of the "road map," an internationally backed peace plan that stalled shortly after it was launched in mid-2003. The plan called on Israel to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank, while calling on the Palestinians to dismantle militant groups.
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