PrimeTime: Sawyer Talks to Arafat

— -- Following is an unedited, uncorrected transcript of Diane Sawyer’s entire conversation with the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. Portions of the interview aired on PrimeTime Thursday on Oct. 26, 2000.

Diane Sawyer: I think people in the United States wonder, if Prime Minister Barak were to call you tomorrow and say let us meet and talk about peace, would you do it?

Yasser Arafat: Don’t forget, we have a Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, President Clinton and Barak and Kofi Annan and me were the guests of his excellency President Mubarak at Sharm el-Sheikh, and before that we were at Paris, do you remember?

Diane Sawyer: Yes

Yasser Arafat: And the most important thing which has been mentioned at the Arab Summit Conference, the communique which has been declared, it was clear that the peace process has been accepted by all of them as a strategy.

Diane Sawyer: And if Arial Sharon became part of the government …is that the end of the peace process ?

Yasser Arafat: We don’t interfere in their interior affairs.

Diane Sawyer: Do you control what is going on in the streets? And if you said “stop, stop the violence,” would it stop?

Yasser Arafat: Can you do it if you were do it if you were in my place?

Diane Sawyer: I was never in your place.

Yasser Arafat: There is no switch for the, for all the people — small children, youth, students, workers, women…how to control all the of them? What we have been asking is to convince them.

What they have to be convinced by? By the peace process. Not by tanks surrounding their cities and towns everywhere. Not by rockets and missiles … not by 200 which have been killed until now and about 6500 which have been wounded.

Diane Sawyer: But if you make a public statement, stop, I want you to stop, what will happen?

Yasser Arafat: Before I give them the instruction to stop—because I haven’t the right to give them that instruction when they are very angry and very confused … and surrounded by tanks and helicopter over them, and missiles ….

Diane Sawyer: Would it help in the name of peace if they stopped?

Yasser Arafat: They’re attacking against our people, against our students, against our women, against our children. Its not a part of the peace process. It is completely against the peace process. You know that this headquarters have been shelled in the last ten days? And some of my guards have been killed out here, beside me?