Can the Tunis summit help the Arabs unite in the face of new challenges before things get out of hand, asks Mohamed Sid-Ahmed In a few days' time, an Arab summit will be held in Tunis, one year after the war was launched against Iraq and at a time of shock and anger throughout the region following last Monday's brutal killing of the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. This latest outrage makes it all the more imperative to determine the features of the post-Iraq war world, especially as they impact on the region, a subject that will be addressed more fully in next week's column. A question that needs to be asked as the world marks the first anniversary of the war is whether the removal of Saddam Hussein has created a more favourable global climate or whether it has done just the opposite. It is of course difficult to separate the outbreak of the war from the terrorist attacks launched against New York and Washington on 11 September, 2001. the most powerful state on earth was not expected to endure such a slap on the face without reacting violently. But it was one thing to attack Afghanistan, whose Taliban regime was providing the suspected mastermind of the attacks, Al-Qa'eda, with a safe haven, quite another to attack Iraq on trumped-up charges. However repulsive Saddam Hussein might be, resorting to such extreme measures to topple him has raised the level of violence in the region and throughout the world at large. Even if we assume that the leaders of the US and the UK did not deliberately mislead public opinion into believing that Saddam posed a clear and present danger to global security, we now know that the war was waged on the basis of false information. The leaders of the US and the UK claimed to have conclusive evidence that Iraq, after ten years of UN sanctions, had somehow managed to accumulate weapons of mass destruction that, somehow, the UN weapons inspectors were unable to find. Armed with their "infallible" intelligence reports, the two leaders launched the war on Iraq before investigations to discover the weapons cache had been completed and without UN approval. The decision was based on an ambivalent reading of Security Council Resolution 1441, which split the council into two antagonistic groups and led the most acrimonious debate ever witnessed between the Western allies. The war exposed Iraq to widespread destruction, with no legal justification for such devastation. And, instead of dealing a painful blow to terrorism, the war created a climate favourable to its expansion. How to explain the attempt to expand the borders of the Middle East, a region now associated with the scourge of terrorism, to include countries lying outside its traditional geographical borders in the so-called Greater Middle East as other than an admission that the scourge of terrorism has split beyond those traditional borders? As the recent tragic events in Spain and Kosovo illustrate all too graphically, the war has failed to curb the spread of terrorism and violence. Last week's horrific attacks in Spain, the worst terrorist outrage in its history, brought down José Maria Aznar's right-wing government, which has been replaced by a socialist government. Overnight, Spain moved from the ranks of Coalition partner to a proponent of the French-German axis, with Socialist Party leader José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero calling the war a disaster and vowing to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq as soon as he assumes office next month. At the same time, violent confrontations erupted in Kosovo between Serbs and ethnic Albanians, threatening to destabilise the entire Balkan area. Mosques were attacked by angry crowds in response to the burning of orthodox churches and houses in the ethnically divided province. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica threatened to intervene and protect the Serbs if the Security Council did not issue a resolution and send forces to put an end to violence. Terrorism is developing from a regional phenomenon into a global one. One year after the Iraq war, terrorism has become more widespread than ever. This critical situation should be seriously addressed before it gets out of hand. The internationalisation of terrorism is not unfolding only in the space dimension, but also in the time dimension. If disturbances in Spain (in the extreme west of the European continent) attest to the spread of terrorism geographically, the recurrence of disturbances in Kosovo (in the eastern part of the continent) attests to the fact that the propagation of the phenomenon has also acquired a historical dimension. Indeed, violence in Kosovo reached its peak long before the 11 September events, proving that the issue goes far beyond Iraq and the problem of weapons of mass destruction. The acceleration and growing severity of terrorist acts is creating a high level of panic among many world leaders, who are bracing themselves for what they fear may be a decisive moment in the confrontation with international terrorism. Western leaders will be framing their response to the growing threat at the forthcoming G8 summit and at the NATO meeting which will discuss the Greater Middle East project. The Tunis summit is the last chance the Arabs have to come forward with a project of their own in response to the Bush project and to define their position before something is decided without their participation and, possibly even against their will. What should the Arab position be? To begin with, there can be no compromise on a number of basic demands. Foremost among these is the need for an overall settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict based on the unanimous Beirut summit resolution adopting Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's initiative calling for the recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. The forthcoming summit needs to adopt a common stand on the issue of internal reform. The document produced by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina symposium last week could serve as a blueprint for such an enterprise. Arabs leaders also need to adopt a common stand towards the situation in Iraq, especially at this critical time when conditions are far from ripe for the holding of elections to pass authority over to genuine Iraqi political forces. But the Tunis summit's most urgent task will be to come up with a unified response to the Greater Middle East project. The project proceeds from the premise that the world is divided into two categories of states, subjects of history which are qualified to determine the course of events, on the one hand, and objects of history qualified only to accept whatever is meted out to them, on the other. It is a premise that is unacceptable to the Arabs, who have been classified in the second category. In other words, they are to have no say when it comes to determining the features of the region's future. The European Union has been invited to take part in the overall settlement of the Middle east problems as a subject of history while the Arabs are being sidelined and relegated to the role of an object of history. The time has come to go back to the United Nations and to recognise that there is no substitute for it in the negotiation process. The Security Council should be reinvigorated and restitute the status it enjoyed before breaking down into two antagonistic groupings on the eve of the war in Iraq. It should be remembered that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the central issue in the Middle East. By expanding the geographical borders of the region to incorporate other conflict situations, the Greater Middle East project minimises the importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict and plays into the hands of Sharon, whose driving ambition to liquidate the Palestinian problem altogether is becoming clearer by the day.
