In a bold new initiative likely to rile the United States, President Boris Yeltsin has arranged visits to Moscow by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin in an attempt to get the stalled Middle East peace process back on track.


The trips next month by the PLO chairman and Israeli prime minister were announced in Moscow on Tuesday even as Rabin flew to Washington hoping to salvage the peace talks. A breakthrough on the talks escaped U.S., Israeli and PLO officials meeting in Tunis on Monday.


A senior Russian Foreign Ministry official told a news conference that Arafat had been invited to come to Moscow on April 19 and Rabin from April 24-26.


"The invitations were accepted with gratitude," said Viktor Gokitidze, deputy head of the ministry's Middle East department.


Gokitidze said that both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization were prepared to resume peace talks, which have been stalled since Feb. 25 Hebron mosque massacre. But he said that Arafat wanted to link resumption of the talks to the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution denouncing the killings.


The Russians made their announcement 24 hours after receiving a warning from the United States against uncoordinated actions in the fragile Middle East peace process.


During talks in Vladivostok on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher told Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev that better communication was needed between Washington and Moscow, U.S. officials said.


"Christopher suggested in a direct way that at this delicate point in diplomacy, there needs to be a common purpose," a State Department official said, according to The Washington Post.


The Kozyrev-Christopher meeting in Vladivostok was originally scheduled to coordinate tactics on bringing peace to Bosnia. Those talks had been requested by Washington following Moscow's diplomatic coup last month in preventing NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs, an initiative that brought relative peace to the region but angered the Americans, who were not consulted in advance. There was no immediate word from Washington on whether advance notice had been received on the forthcoming Arafat-Rabin visits to Moscow. If Kozyrev did tell Christopher about it in Vladivostok, no word leaked out.


Rabin's visit would be the first to Moscow by an Israeli leader since diplomatic links were restored with the Soviet Union in 1991.


The Russian television program "Vesti" reported that Kozyrev, who visited PLO headquarters in Tunis last weekend, handed Arafat the invitation from Yeltsin at that time. Kozyrev also visited Israel during his Middle East trip.


The Kozyrev tour created concern in Washington that the Russians might upset American efforts to restart peace talks between Israel and the PLO. Moscow is nominally a cosponsor of the talks but has played a negligible role in what has been Washington's show.


Taking sides in the Middle East situation -- Moscow is a traditional backer of the PLO -- might revive a kind of Cold War rivalry in the region and encourage the Palestinians to hope that Russia will negotiate for them, U.S. officials fear.


At a news conference with Kozyrev on Monday in Vladivostok, Christopher emphasized the need to communicate.


"We will try to limit the degrees of imperfection and improve methods of consultation," he said.


Washington is trying to deal with a more assertive Russian foreign policy. A senior U.S. official attributed recent Russian activism to Moscow's effort to "assert its significance as a power." The official noted that the United States has "been very fortunate to have had a couple of years in which our views seemed fully to be congruent.


"I think it's not at all surprising we have hit a situation where there have been some strains in the relationship," the official said.


At the news conference, Kozyrev suggested that Russia has been feeling like a junior partner to the United States. But he defined current relations as a "mature partnership" of equals.


Russia launched its new round of Middle East diplomacy after a Jewish settled killed about 30 Arabs in Hebron, which suspended peace talks.


Russia has proposed holding a new peace conference along the lines of the historic Madrid forum in 1991 that initiated Israeli-Arab negotiations. This idea has been rejected by Israel and greeted coolly by the United States.


(Reuters, WP)