Aligning inter-Arab boundaries

The Arab summit in Beirut reveals a clear line of demarcation: on one side are America's friends and on the other, the rest. Dina Ezzat, in the Lebanese capital, reports
One needs only to take a quick glance at the lobbies and lounges of the Phoenicia Hotel in Beirut to work out the nature of post-11 September Arab alliances. It soon becomes clear that gatherings in the various coffee-shops and restaurants of the Phoenicia, which hosted the Arab summit and pre-summit meetings, were split between those who were -- to use US President George W Bush's favourite term -- "with" the US and those who were "not with," or even "against," the world's only remaining superpower.
Those select Arab officials who had recently received a number of American guests -- including US Vice-President Dick Cheney -- could be espied holding "limited meetings" to work on the Saudi peace initiative and the various paragraphs of the Beirut Declaration, which talk about peace as a "strategic choice."
Meanwhile, those who received neither White House envoys nor messages from the US administration could be seen clustering together in corners, churning out phrases that urge a boycott of Israel, the right to resist Israel's military occupation of Arab land, and support of the Palestinian Intifada.
Conspicuously present in the first group were the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar. The second group, meanwhile, clearly included the foreign ministers of Iraq and Syria. The two groups hardly met with each other, if they met at all, outside the official meeting rooms.
When they did happen to meet by chance in the busy lifts of the Phoenicia, an uncomfortable silence would ensue. Shuttling between the two groups was Arab League Secretary- General Amr Moussa who spent five days, from his arrival in Beirut on Friday until the opening of the summit yesterday morning, moving from one floor to the next to try and bridge the divide between the two factions.
Rejecting of international terrorism was the single issue on which all seemed to agree. On all other issues, however, the two groups held very different views. Topping the list of divergences were issues related to the state of affairs between Iraq and Kuwait, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"At a time when the US is threatening to use military force against any regime that it deems guilty of international terrorism, nobody was willing to upset Washington on this matter, not even those Arab states that are on the US State Department list of countries sponsoring terrorism," commented one Arab official.
"Other than that, there was a plenty of room for disagreement," he added.
"At one meeting of senior officials, we spent four hours or more in discussing the language related to reactivating the boycott bureau, which was referred to in the declarations of the past two Arab Summits in Cairo and Amman," the same source added.
This is a traditional diplomatic battle, in which representatives of Syria and Lebanon on the one hand engage with representatives of Egypt and Jordan on the other. What results is often a fuzzily-phrased statement which talks of boycott as a potentially peaceful diplomatic act of opposition to Israel's aggression and occupation, but lacks any mechanisms of implementation.
But the arguments over the phrasing of calls for an Arab boycott of Israel were trifling things compared to the diplomatic clashes involved in the drafting of the Saudi peace initiative and the language on the state of relations between Iraq and Kuwait.
When it came to the Saudi peace initiative, the Syrians battled hard against the Egyptians and Jordanians, and even the Saudis themselves. They argued for a clearer description of the mutual commitments involved.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Sharaa insisted that the declaration's wording ought to be to Damascus' satisfaction, as a key player in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Al-Sharaa reportedly expressed unease about Saudi Arabia -- which is not a neighbour of Israel -- setting the parameters of engagement for countries that have had land occupied by Israel.
Al-Sharaa was reportedly disgruntled about the initiative. He is said to have stressed that the Saudi initiative ought not to enforce normalisation commitments on the Arabs in return for Israel's withdrawal from Arab occupied land. Such commitments are not included in any of the relevant UN resolutions, such as 242 and 338, he said.
Meanwhile, talk of normalising all relations with Israel was strongly supported by Egypt, Jordan and most Gulf states.
"The Syrians have to be more realistic about what they expect. Israel will not withdraw unless it has guarantees for normalisation," one Egyptian diplomat said.
"But Israel will never reciprocate positively to this initiative, so why increase the ceiling of Arab commitment? Why offer a written willingness to normalise relations and then have to go through the diplomatic hassle of reneging on this commitment? When we want to react to an escalation of Israeli aggression," a Lebanese diplomat commented.
But talk about the Saudi initiative, or the right of return for Palestinian refugees, was not as tough going as talk about relations between Iraq and Kuwait. Most Arab diplomats who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly during the run-up to the summit agreed that the article of the draft declaration related to the state of relations between Iraq and Kuwait, which kept floating in and out of the agenda of the summit, was the thorniest of all the issues on the negotiating table.
"All Arab capitals would say that they are against a US strike against Iraq under any banner. This is what they say in public but, in effect, they were not all in favour of including clear language in the Beirut declaration to express opposition to such a strike. Indeed, Kuwait managed to block the inclusion of a resolution to this effect," one Iraqi diplomat told the Weekly.
Those supporting Kuwait "were all the good friends of the US," he added.
Iraq and Kuwait each offered a different proposal about the language to be adopted by the Beirut summit in relation to the state of affairs between them. The Lebanese presidency was so afraid of a crisis over the matter that it requested the secretary- general of the Arab League to offer a third, more reconciliatory, alternative.
In doing so, Moussa worked closely with the foreign minister of a country which is not really with the US, but not really opposed: Sudan.
Outside the official meeting rooms, representatives of Tunisia, the only Arab country that did not support the use of military force in 1990 to end the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, could be seen talking to the Iraqi officials and giving them tips on how to proceed.
Representatives of Qatar, whose officials are currently trying to assume a higher diplomatic profile, could be seen talking briefly with the Iraqis before disappearing into the Kuwaiti officials' lounges for long periods.
US President Bush's 'those who are not with us are against us' statement has been criticised throughout the Arab world, on both the offical and non-governmental levels. However, the threatening presence of a belicose America seemed to loom large over the Beirut summit, the first Arab summit meeting held in a post 11 September world. So much so, that some observers suggested that the different postures adopted by Arab officials at the summit were largely intended for American eyes.
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