By Nigel Thorpe
Senior English Editor
Albawaba.com - Amman
Monday, the second day of meetings between Arab League foreign ministers, gave some delegates the chance to take advantage of perfect spring weather to do some local sightseeing before the summit officially opens in Amman, Jordan on Tuesday. Jordan’s Channel 1 television reported that Libya’s Moammar Khadfi visited shopping malls and a coffee shop in the capital, as well as taking a trip down to the Dead Sea.
Over two thousand years ago an earlier army of occupation, with relatively few soldiers, patrolled the shores of the Dead Sea and the borders of historic Palestine. The Roman generals successfully applied Caesar’s maxim,
“divide et impera” (divide and conquer) to subdue warring tribes and Nabataean factions. Now, in the twenty-first century, modern day Arab leaders seek the unity they need to fight the new army of occupation that currently controls the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
The Arab leaders meet at a time of political change and uncertainty. The entire future of the Arab-Israeli peace process has been thrown into serious doubt following the election of hard-liner Ariel Sharon who many Arabs consider to be a war criminal and an archetypal Israeli hawk. The new Bush US administration is also, as it promised, taking a far more “hands-off” approach than the previous Clinton administration. As a result, the pro-western moderate Arab governments have been forced into a corner where they find themselves, to use the graphic American expression, “between a rock and a hard place.” On the one hand, if they join the Arab hawks, they will alienate America upon whose financial and military backing they have come to depend. On the other hand, if they stay with the doves, they will incur the wraith of the Arab in the street who is increasingly demanding an uncompromising militant stand against Israel.
The presence of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as an observer at the summit is seen as further evidence of the shift from “traditional US brokerage of the peace agreement.” In Annan’s words, the “summit is being held at a crucial time in the Middle East and the history of the Israeli-Arab peace process.” PLA Chairman, Yassir Arafat agrees “this summit is held during a difficult time, especially for the Palestinian people, who face a dangerous military escalation on our towns and villages.”
The PA is unable to pay its administrative expenses and the salaries of its 130,000 employees due to Israeli government’s refusal to hand over customs duties and tax revenues collected from Palestinians working in Israel. Living conditions for ordinary Palestinians are deteriorating rapidly, and both Arab leaders and the United States fear the consequences of a possible collapse of the PA. The Arab League delegates are due to finalize their approval for PA funding worth 40 million dollars every month for the next six months. This follows a pledge at the emergency summit meeting in Cairo last October at which Arab leaders pledged $1 billion dollars. Little money, however, has reached the West Bank and Gaza due to a combination of bureaucratic delays and concerns over “financial accountability.”
An inter-Arab row over Baghdad’s demands for the lifting of UN sanctions and ending US and British air patrols over Iraq threatens to sabotage the summit which the Palestinian Authority (PA) wants to pledge diplomatic and financial support for its intifada.
“Giving priority to the Iraqi issue will only lead to Arab conflicts and confrontations which may lead to the summit’s failure,” commented Masoumah al-Mubarak, a Kuwaiti political scientist in an interview with CNN.
The Cairo Summit last year saw the beginnings of the return of "black sheep" Iraq to the Arab fold. Ties between Iraq and many Arab countries have warmed still further over the recent months to the dismay of America, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has gained widespread popularity and praise in Arab countries for his rhetorical and material support for the Palestinian uprising. This factor, together with widespread Arab sympathy for the suffering for ordinary Iraqis, has led many in the Arab world to believe that it is time to lift sanctions and allow Iraq back onto the center stage. In advance of the summit, Iraq has been drumming up support for the lifting of sanctions. Kuwait, worried by growing Arab sympathy for Iraq, has resorted to, in the words of CNN, “heavy shuttle diplomacy.”
BACKGROUND TO THE ARAB LEAGUE SUMMITS
The League of Arab States, or to give it its popular name, the Arab League was founded in 1945 to strength the political position of Arab nations and foster Arab culture and economies. The original seven charter members
(Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Trans-Jordan (now Jordan), Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen) where joined by Palestine (PLO) in 1976. Fourteen more Arab nations (Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea (pending in 1999), Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates) joined the league during the period 1976 to 2000 bringing the total number of members to the 22.
The Arab League has held twenty summits over the past thirty-six years giving an average of one summit every 1.8 years. Morocco has hosted the largest number of summits (7), followed by Egypt (6). The league’s secretariat had its headquarters in Cairo before Egypt’s ten-year suspension from the Arab League due to its signing of a peace treaty with Israel. During this period, the headquarters was transferred to Tunisia before moving back to Cairo in 1991.
The interval between summits has, however, been highly variable with two summits being held in each of the years 1964 and 1990, while five years elapsed between the summits of 1996 and 2000, and six years separated the 1990 and 1996 summits (Table 1). The timing of these conferences is, it is fair to say, determined by crisis (the “need to have”), rather according to any fixed calendar schedule. The three “post-war” summits (Table 1: 1967 – Six-Day War, 1973 – October 73 War, 1996- Gulf War) are examples of crisis meetings conveyed to consider important political problems. The few “routine” summits, such as the 1980 summit in Amman, have concentrated on economic policies designed to develop the economies of member states. Inter-Arab disputes have often prevented the Arab League from taking effective action as occurred in the 1965 and 1969 summits in Morocco. Analysts attribute the infrequency of meetings to the fear that public disputes at summits undermine the strength and credibility of Arab unity and policies.
According to the Washington Institute, the greatest successes of the Arab League have been in the field of economics with the formation of the Arab Telecommunication Union (1953), Arab Postal Union (1954), Arab Financial Organization (1959) and the Arab Common Market (1965). The common market agreement provides for the eventual abolition of customs duties on natural resources and agricultural products, free movement of capital and labor among countries, and the coordination of economic development.
On the cultural level, the Arab League has objected to the stereotype image of Arabs depicted in many Hollywood films and to the plans of Disney World, Orlando, to feature Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in a multi-media exhibit.
Internal disputes, the Washington Institute argues, have limited the Arab League’s political and military successes. In the cold war era, the Arab League nations were divided into three “camps”, the pro-western, the pro-soviet, and the neutralist factions. Egypt’s decamping from the pro-soviet to the pro-western faction illustrates the changing alliances within the league.
With the thawing of the cold war, and the collapse of Soviet Russia, Russian influence in the Middle East has declined, and the main divisions within the League, the institute argues, are now between the pro-American Arab moderates and the militant Islamic fundamentalists.
Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia (moderates) favor pursuing diplomatic means to resolve the Israel-Palestine crisis, while Arab hard line nations such as Syria propose a complete cut in all diplomatic ties, and a revival of the Arab boycott of Israel.
Unfortunately for Jordan’s desire to host a successful summit of “Accord and Agreement”, floating a draft resolution on lifting the sanctions against Iraq is proving to be extremely difficulty. The troubled, bitter, pan-Arabic waters threaten to become a new Dead Sea that could kill the chances of the summit’s success.
The consensus of opinion amongst analysts is, however, that the Arab Summit is likely to give diplomacy a final chance, and leave the door open for Middle East politicians to climb up the path of peace rather than march down the road to war.
Post Summit Update
As the delegates to the Arab Summit return home, and national flags are furled and moth-balled for future occasions of state, the concensus of opinion is that the often fractious meeting could be best described as the "Amman Summit of Partial Accord and Agreement."
As detailed in a current Al Bawaba article, the summit conclusions were, as predicted, "firm on Palestine but loose on Iraq." On the positive side, the two-day summit's final declaration issued a call for "the lifting of the embargo on Iraq and to deal with the humanitarian issues related to the Kuwaiti prisoners and missing people and Iraqi missing people," he said. The leaders also “welcomed” Iraq’s decision to support the Palestinian with one billion euros, while they instructed the secretariat controlling the Aqsa and Intifada funds set up by the last summit in Cairo last October, to find a mechanism to support the PNA budget.
On the negative side, however, Iraq’s call on the Arabs to unilaterally lift the decade-long embargo was not mentioned in the final communiqué, but a call for lifting the sanctions was included in the Amman Declaration. The conference also charged Jordan's King Abdullah II with the task of arranging further consultations and contacts to improve ties between Iraq and Kuwait for the sake of Arab "solidarity” since the feeling was that, given the present state of the Israel/Palestine dispute, "partial solidarity" is not enough and would be taken as a sign of weakness.
As predicted in this article, progress on the economic front proved to be much easier than advances on the political front. The summit agreed on the Egyptian-proposed Arab economic summit to be held in Cairo in November 2001 and hoped that this declared intent would be seen as an additional sign of unity.
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
