MADRID - Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mussa on Thursday threw his weight behind Spanish calls for an international conference on the Middle East at a meeting to mark the 15th anniversary of the Madrid Conference which preceded the 1993 Oslo Accords.
"I invite the participants of this meeting to urge for an urgent international conference for a peace settlement, this time with the United Nations," Mussa told the gathering in the Spanish capital.
"The peace process should not be considered secondary to the fight against terrorism. It must come first," said Mussa.
He added that the parties involved should not be "afraid of peace", while urging Israel to "work to be a full member of the Middle East society of nations".
The EU's External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner added her voice to the clamour for a new conference as she appealed for the relaunching of the Quartet, comprising the United Nations, United States, the European Union and Russia, to work on a peace settlement.
"A revigorated Quartet has to play a key role," Ferrero-Waldner said, urging the pursuit of "consensus and (economic) development, (but) not by violence".
She added the EU was ready to play a key role to help develop "a comprehensive regional solution" but added that ongoing violence would hamper outside efforts, noting the standoff between supporters of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's Fatah party and those of the ruling Hamas movement.
"The first priority is to stop violence, the Palestinians must work towards resolving their own internal differences," Ferrero-Waldner said, stressing that a solution "cannot be imposed externally."
Thursday's meeting brought together a number of European, Arab and Israeli figures, some of whom attended the original US and Russian-sponsored version which paved the way to the Oslo Accords for Palestinian self-government.
Overnight, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos made an impassioned call for revamped peace talks via a new international conference which Spain has been lobbying for for months.
Also overnight, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who was co-chairman of the original 1991 Madrid conference with former US president George Bush senior, regretted in a statement that "the situation in the Middle East has dramatically aggravated."
He added that the wider dimension of Iraq had also undermined the quest for peace.
"The new war in Iraq (Gorbachev also referred to the first Gulf War of 1991) has ... provoked a sharp political division in the international community.
"The Israeli-Palestinian conflict after the hopes raised in Oslo and Madrid turned away into the road of deception," Gorbachev opined, warning that the region was prey to "destructive, extremist" forces who had undermined "the moderate and responsible politicians who were present 15 years ago."
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