Shifting gears

What does the appointment of Ahmed Maher as foreign minister and Amr Moussa as Arab League secretary-general signify for Egyptian and Arab diplomacy?
Egyptian foreign policy is ultimately the prerogative of President Hosni Mubarak. For the past 10 years, Amr Moussa has acted to promote Egypt's strategic interests by building a just peace in the region and balanced ties around the world. On Tuesday, Moussa moved down the street from the Foreign Ministry building on the Corniche to the Arab League headquarters in Tahrir Square.
Moussa's trademark toughness, as popular as it was in the Arab world, has not always made things comfortable for Israel and the US. "They may have tried to show otherwise," said one Egyptian diplomat, who served in Washington, "but they hated him."
Actually, Israel's and America's anti-Moussa sentiments are not something either the Americans or the Israelis tried that hard to hide. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, for instance, is said to have showed a decided preference for the presence of Mubarak's political adviser Osama El-Baz, rather than Moussa, as note-taker during her meetings with the Mubarak.
"They seem to have felt that his presence was a problem for them," commented an informed source, "because he was not a facilitator of American and Israeli ideas about peace in the Middle East, and he didn't hesitate to tell them this loud and clear."
Informed sources are predicting a more quiet diplomatic tone at the Foreign Ministry now that Moussa is in the Arab League. The new foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, while pursuing the same overall foreign policy guidelines as Moussa, is expected to adopt a milder tone, particularly with respect to differences with Israel and the US.
Maher, an established career diplomat with an impressive CV (he has served as ambassador to Lisbon, Brussels, Moscow and Washington), would probably not publicly criticise an Arab monarch for his country's over-zealous ties with Israel, as Moussa did with Jordan's late King Hussein. Nor is Maher, according to a colleague, the type to meet an Israeli foreign minister, then refuse to shake hands with him for the photo op, as Moussa did with then foreign minister Ariel Sharon.
Some would argue that it is more style than substance that is at stake here. Moussa's popularity across the Arab world was directly related to his charismatic presence and a panache for saying the right thing, in Arab eyes, at the right time. An incident that occurred last week in Morocco, when Moussa was coming out of a meeting with the foreign ministers of 11 Mediterranean countries, is symbolic of the reactions he gets wherever he goes.
"You are the dream of the Arab street," an elderly Moroccan man told him after waiting for hours in the hotel lobby for the meeting to end. "We will always love and support you wherever you go."
The man proceeded to embrace Moussa while security guards looked on in surprise.
Mubarak's decision to nominate Moussa for the Arab League's top job comes in the knowledge that his former foreign minister has the potential to wake the League up from its slumber, driving it towards the more active role it should take in the aftermath of a nearly decade-old peace process that somehow always diverts itself back to conflict.
"The peace process, the Iraq-Kuwait dispute... are issues in which Moussa will be directly involved," commented one of Moussa's close aides. "Moussa also has clear ideas about the role of the Arab League in promoting inter-Arab economic and cultural cooperation," he said.
A widening of the diplomatic sphere is one of the main legacies Moussa, who strenuously expanded Egypt's global ties, will leave his successor. He was also responsible for launching the Ministry into the IT age. On his first day at the ministry Maher told reporters that Moussa had left it in an "excellent state", and that he planned on "building on the [successes] of the past [10] years".
Maher's swearing-in on Tuesday followed months of speculation over who would replace Moussa as Egypt's top diplomat. As the date of Moussa's take-over of the Arab League neared, the speculation reached a fever pitch, with several newspapers and Egyptian TV actually naming Maher's brother Ali, also a career diplomat and Egypt's ambassador to Paris, as the new minister on their Tuesday front pages.
Maher, who in the late 1970s served as the head of then Foreign Minister Ibrahim Kamel's cabinet, will spend the next few weeks re-acquainting himself with the ministry from which he retired in 1999, following seven years of service as ambassador to Washington, preceded by four years in Moscow.
His background, which includes serving on Egypt's negotiating team at the 1978 Camp David peace talks with Israel, will certainly provide him with the diplomatic acumen to make a difference in an increasingly tense region.
How well the coordination between Egyptian and Arab foreign policy will be after the shift may become clearer when Maher and Moussa meet, along with the foreign ministers of the other Arab states, at the follow-up meeting of the Arab Summit set to take place on Saturday. (see p.5)
By Dina Ezzat and Tarek Atia
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