Annan arrives in Middle East to keep peace momentum going

Mr Annan met Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, yesterday and was to travel to the West Bank today for talks with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, and other officials.

Mr Annan is also expected to meet many of the 30 world leaders attending ceremonies tomorrow and Wednesday 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 also take on personal meaning for Mr Annan. His wife, Nane, is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat who saved tens of thousands of Jews during the Second World War.

Stephane Dujarric, a spokesman for Mr Annan, said that in his talks with Israelis and Palestinians, the secretary general hopes to help both sides "sustain the momentum generated in the past few weeks".

He cited the 8 February Middle East summit in Egypt, where Mr Sharon and Mr Abbas declared an end to four years of bloodshed, and the international show of support for the Palestinians at a conference in London. At the conference on 1 March, 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. Neither side complied.

A warming of relations between Israel and the Palestinians since the 11 November death of Yasser Arafat has raised hopes in the international community that the peace plan would soon be restarted.

"We want the United Nations, as a member of the Quartet, to see to it that Israel’s obligations from the road map are carried out," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator.

The UN’s traditionally rocky relations with Israel are also likely to come up during his trip. Israel has long accused the UN of being biased toward the Palestinians. Israel’s troubled relationship with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) - the main UN body serving Palestinian refugees - hit a low last year when Israel accused the agency of allowing Palestinian militants to transport a rocket inside a UN ambulance.

But Mr Annan has also won praise in Israel for his tough stance on terrorism and the UN role in resolving a border dispute with Lebanon after Israel withdrew its forces from the country in 2000.

"Despite the sometimes difficult history between Israel and the United Nations, Kofi Annan has built up a level of trust and confidence with the Israeli leadership that I think previous secretary generals have failed to do," said Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. He added that following Mr Annan’s recent decision to name a new UNRWA chief, Israel hopes it can "turn over the page" with the agency.

Mr Annan’s visit to Yad Vashem comes weeks after the UN general assembly commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps - a dramatic change for a body previously reluctant to address the mass murder of the Jews during the Second World War.

At this week’s ceremony, the museum at Israel’s main memorial for the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust will unveil a 20 million facelift that took ten years to complete. The museum has been expanded and will include new exhibits focusing on individual stories about the Holocaust.