| Khartoum brings Damascus and Beirut closer together The summit of the League of Arab States (LAS), which includes 21 countries and the Palestinian Authority, concluded yesterday in the Sudanese capital Khartoum. The meeting participants adopted a declaration, which was read by the Arab League Secretary General, 69-year-old Egyptian Amr Musa, whose powers were unanimously extended for a second five-year term. Among the achievements of the summit were decisions on the creation of an inter-Arab Security Council designed to resolve conflicts between members of the Arab League, as well as on funding for African Union peacekeepers in the Sudanese province of Darfur, torn apart by an interethnic war. The summit made the decision on Darfur after much debate and at the request of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is resisting UN Security Council resolutions on sending UN “blue helmets” to his country.
Absent from the meeting in Khartoum were the kings of Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Bahrain, the presidents of Egypt, the United Emirates, Tunisia and Iraq, as well as the Sultan of Oman. There are already too many disagreements in the Arab world, in particular on the Iraqi problem, which the summit participants called for to be resolved through political means. It is significant that the Arab League has not followed through on its decision last year to open a representative office in Baghdad, which upset Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The head of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry, Hoshyar Zebari, who arrived in Khartoum, personally asked Arab leaders to urgently help Iraq, “which has gone through decades of tyranny and wars.”
Those gathered in Khartoum supported the position of the head of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), Mahmoud Abbas, who was present at the summit, who rejected the plans of the current acting. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on the unilateral determination of borders with Palestine. Let us note that it was under the slogans of unilateral disengagement with the Palestinians that the Kadima party led by Olmert won the parliamentary elections held in Israel on Tuesday. At the Arab League summit, Arab countries confirmed their readiness to transfer $55 million monthly to the PNA and follow the 2002 “Arab Peace Initiative,” which proposed concluding peace with Israel in exchange for the return to them of the territories occupied in 1967. The summit addressed the “quartet” of international mediators for the Middle East settlement (Russia, USA, EU, UN) with a proposal to intensify the implementation of the “Road Map” developed by them. However, both Israel and the radical Hamas movement that came to power in Palestine no longer consider this plan for a peaceful Palestinian-Israeli settlement to be relevant.
Russian President Vladimir Putin sent a message to the Arab League summit, which was read out by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Saltanov, who arrived in Khartoum. It calls for “acting together under the auspices and with the key role of the UN.” “Unilateral actions, as the events of recent years in the Middle East show, not only do not solve problems, but aggravate them even more,” Putin noted. He promised that Russia, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, chairman of the G8 and an active participant in the Middle East Quartet, will contribute to “the development of consensus approaches to resolving conflict situations in the Middle East and North Africa.” At the same time, Vladimir Putin mentioned the need to defuse tensions around Lebanon and Syria on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions.
On the sidelines of the summit, a significant first meeting took place between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad al-Siniora, a friend of Rafik Hariri, an opponent of the Syrian military presence in Lebanon and ex-Prime Minister of that country, who was killed last year in an assassination attempt. At the same time, al-Siniora defiantly stayed away from the pro-Syrian Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, who arrived in Khartoum. The prime minister, whom Assad once called “the head of the cabinet of anti-Syrian puppets,” shook hands with the Syrian leader and accepted his invitation to visit Damascus “to discuss differences between the two countries.”
“The summit in Khartoum took place on the sidelines of the Arab world, but the search for peaceful initiatives will definitely have an impact on the situation in the entire region,” Professor Anatoly Yegorin, head of the Russian-Arab Dialogue scientific center at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Vremya Novostey. “For many Arab leaders, the United States’ intention to “encircle” the Middle East with its initiatives is unacceptable so as to leave no chance for others.” Alexander SAMOKHOTKIN |
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