Shannon spells out US position on Honduras (Extra)

Oct 29, 2009, 20:56 GMT

   Tegucigalpa - The United States pried open stalled negotiations over Honduras' political crisis Thursday, demanding 'political will' from disputing parties and getting directly involved for the first time in the four-month-old dispute over who can legitimately govern Honduras.

Tom Shannon, the State Department's assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, was in Honduras heading the team of US negotiators who brought representatives of ousted President Manual Zelaya together with agents of the self-declared interim government of Roberto Micheletti.

In remarks monitored in Washington via teleconference, Shannon insisted to reporters that negotiations are the best way to solve the ongoing political crisis and demanded 'political will' from the parties.

'This really isn't a complicated question of negotiation as much as it is a question of expressing political will,' Shannon said.

That expression of political will may include the acceptance that ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya not return to power. The United States and the rest of the Organization of American States (OAS) have been demanding his reinstatement since he was ousted by a coup on June 28.

'We - and not just the United States but the rest of the Inter- American community - have constructed these negotiations in a way that the solution be Honduran. And therefore, from my point of view, a deal is a deal: what the Hondurans can determine and sign among themselves we'll accept.'

'President Zelaya should be returned to office. But we recognize that we are operating in an environment in which at the end of the day Hondurans have to make this decision,' Shannon stressed.

He pointed to Zelaya himself as a safety valve for the whole process, which may entail that there is no going back to the pre-coup state of things.

'President Zelaya is represented in this negotiation process, and anything that is agreed to in that is going to be agreed to by President Zelaya.'

Shannon also left open whether the United States would accept the outcome of the November 29 presidential election. The vote had been scheduled before Zelaya's ouster, but Zelaya and the international community now reject the elections' validity since they are being carried under what they see as illegitimate conditions.

Shannon admitted that the Central American country's next government faces a major challenge in the wake of what he saw as the 'real tragedy' of recent events.

The coup, he noted, reflects not just a given series of events, but 'a larger, a more fundamental problem inside Honduran society, which is going to be addressed by the next government.'

Shannon and the rest of the US delegation arrived in Tegucigalpa Wednesday and had planned to return to Washington Thursday. However, since they were successful in convincing the parties to return to the negotiating table, they decided to extend the visit by one day.