(1 Feb 2000) Natural Sound
U-S secretary of state Madeleine Albright and her Russian counterpart have opened a Middle East conference in an attempt to inject new initiative into the stalled peace process.
The conference is the continuation of the co-sponsored US-Russian talks which began in Madrid in 1991.
But the Chechen war continues to dominate the agenda.
Clashing openly with Russia, Madeleine Albright said the conflict in the rebellious republic had inflicted "an incredible amount of misery" on civilians.
In Moscow - to aid the faltering Mid East peace process - Madeleine Albright was joined by a host of other foreign ministers.
Representatives from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunis and Canada, as well as the European Union were on site to hammer out their differences.
It's the first time there has been such a high level meeting in Moscow since 1992.
But, despite the number of delegates, Syria and Lebanon have refused to send their delegations to the conference.
They've justified this by their failure to reach bilateral agreements with Israel.
But as well as discussions over the Middle East, Albright drew attention to Russia's more local problem.
She appealed to Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Monday to open a dialogue with Chechen political figures.
But Ivanov responded at a joint news conference that Russia had to move firmly against terrorism, a view in which he said other governments concurred.
He said no one had come up with an effective recipe to deal with the extremist threat.
Their open debate after more than three hours of talks underscored the dip in U-S Russian relations.
This has also been marked by disagreement over a potential U-S program for space-based weapons that Russia insists would fuel a race in offensive nuclear arms.
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