“Come on, I want the hall super clean; you make sure that it is super clean and I will come to check on it before we turn off the lights from the main switchboard.” Such were the orders issued by an administrative officer at the headquarters of the Arab League based at the heart of Tahrir Square in Cairo. He was speaking to his staff with the same assertive tone that he had used every time he had to prepare for a top Arab meeting in the past 25 years since he took his job at the building following the return of League headquarters to Cairo in 1990 after 10 years residence in Tunis during the Arab boycott of Egypt in the wake of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979. “Through the years, this place has seen some glorious moments in Arab relations and some disastrous moments as well. But now it seems to be almost forgotten. Even when we have the Arab foreign ministers meetings we don't get that much media attention compared to what we used to have. Things are changing, not just for the Arab League, but for the region in general,” he said, leaning against a wall near the side entrance to the 55-year-old building. It was back in 1960 that Gamal Abdel-Nasser, at the time the foremost and most inspiring leader in the Arab world, inaugurated the building that later saw close to the day of his death the demise, to a great extent, of his dream of Arab unity in September 1970, following an Arab summit that tried to put a stop to bloodshed between Palestinians and Jordanians. The inauguration of the headquarters, constructed over the ruins of the British barracks, came 15 years after the launch of the Arab League in March 1945 following an Arab summit in Alexandria under the leadership of King Farouk. Some 70 years later, the Arab League is not the organisation it was in the heydays of pan-Arabism, with which it has been associated for the lion's share of its history. Today, it is not unusual to hear Arab diplomats, of many ages and levels of experience, acknowledge that the call for pan-Arabism has been long overshadowed, and indeed challenged, especially at the hands of the ultra-traditional monarchy of Saudi Arabia. “In a sense, Nasser built the cause of pan-Arabism around his call for the liberation of Arab countries under his leadership. This was very clear in the Arab meetings that convened in the late 1950s and early 1960s,” said a retired Egyptian foreign minister. He added that when Nasser was “defeated in 1967” the call of pan-Arabism suffered a harsh setback. “The knockout, if will, was when Sadat decided to sign the peace treaty with Israel, and I think Egypt had no other choice to regain the land it had lost in 1967 but through a mix of military action, as we saw in 1973, and a political deal. But we could argue about the quality of the deal that Sadat concluded,” said a former member of the negotiating team that joined Sadat in the Camp David talks in the 1970s. It is not just Egyptian diplomats in the Arab world who argue that the day the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League was shut down for the operation to be moved to Tunis, everybody knew largely that this was the end of whatever the Arab League had stood for. “Because despite the many differences that were always there among Arab countries, the one uncontested fact was that Egypt was at the centre, and this is why the headquarters was in Cairo in the first place,” said a retired Arab League diplomat. She added that when she went to Tunis it was clear that the whole purpose of the Arab organisation was simply to oppose the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, rather than to pursue collective Arab action of any particular nature. It was during this decade that the secretary general of the Arab League was exceptionally non-Egyptian a Tunisian, Chedli Kilibi (Al-Shazli Al-Kalibi). From the very beginning the secretary general of the Arab League was Egyptian, the first being Abdel-Rahman Azzam in 1945. And when the Cairo headquarters reopened its doors in 1990 for the return of the secretariat from Tunis after then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak managed to re-establish ties with Arab countries, his foreign minister, Esmat Abdel-Meguid, was nominated for the job and was selected in collective recognition of the “return of the Arab League to Egypt”. This return was designed to initiate a new phase of Arab diplomacy that Mubarak and many Arab leaders wanted to be on the quiet side, with few squabbles and also few expectations on the joint cooperation promised at the onset on Arab economy and military forces. “I remember Dr Esmat was just about to settle into his new office, which had been refurbished, when disaster hit. Of course, yes, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And suddenly this place was about to explode,” said the administrative officer of the Arab League. The then adjacent Nile Hilton now the Ritz Carlton was suddenly packed with foreign journalists and diplomats whose main destinations were the headquarters of the league and the offices of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry across the road. The failure of the league to resolve this tough Arab dispute brought the Arab organisation and the entire Arab system into a diplomatic semi-coma, especially after the war to liberate Kuwait in 1991 that was waged essentially by the West with the participation of some Arab forces, including Egypt. Arab diplomats of diverse affiliations agree that since that day not remained of the “Arab world” or for that matter the Arab League. This, they add, did not change despite the 2003 US war on Iraq that led to the ouster of Saddam Hussein. “On the contrary, it got worse because while almost every Arab country was united in supporting the right of Kuwait to be liberated from the Iraqi invasion, it was hard for any country outside the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to support this war. Even Egypt voiced considerable concern over this war,” said a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq under Saddam Hussein. “It was not just Egypt. I think it is fair to say that there was a great deal of apprehension across the Arab world regarding this war, and secretary general Amr Moussa tried to pursue a political deal but he was firmly blocked by the GCC whose leaders were determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein,” said a member of the secretariat under the Moussa mandate. He argued that what Moussa did at the time to try to save the role of the Arab League was to push the focus to less divisive fronts, including building a political and legal coalition to support the Palestinian cause, promoting socio-economic and cultural cooperation, and establishing the Arab organisation as a launching pad for ambitious outreach diplomacy to developing countries, especially those that had “historic” relations with Arab countries, such as in South America and Africa. “At the time, we saw world leaders coming to the Arab world to show interest in collective cooperation, and we saw key events taking place in this very headquarters that seems now deserted when so many developments are happening all over the Arab world,” the same former secretariat member added. Arab diplomats do not contest the fact that the most crucial files in the Arab world today are not examined at the headquarters of the once pan-Arab organisation. Developments in and around Syria are discussed in Turkey, in leading Western capitals, and Israel, with some talks in Riyadh and less in Cairo. The havoc in Libya is being examined in New York, with some talks in Algeria and less in Cairo, while the war on terror is being discussed in the West, with some talks in Riyadh. The one issue that still finds room for discussion at the headquarters of the Arab League is the Palestinian cause, which is all but fully frozen. “Each country is overwhelmed with its own developments. This is not just in Egypt but also in all member states. And there are many disagreements, I am not going to deny it, among Arab countries about the settlement of the key Arab issues,” said a source at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. “Yes, you are talking about a very divided and very weakened Arab world that has been going through wars, revolutions and terror attacks,” the source added. And at this point the only thing that the Arab League seems to be preoccupied with is the candidate to follow the current Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Al-Arabi in the spring of next year. The Foreign Ministry source agreed, “We are no longer at the moment when the acquisition by Egypt of the seat of the secretary general is uncontested. And anyway it is not the first time that we hear voices from several Arab countries talk about the need to pursue the rotation of the seat.” Who will be the next Arab League secretary-general: an Egyptian, a Saudi, an Algerian or a Qatari? This is the question that one hears in the corridors of the dimly lit and barely frequented building of the Arab League. According to several sources, it might be Secretary-General Al-Arabi himself who would get a new mandate — for another five years.
