Lebanon calls LEBANESE Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora was in Cairo this week for talks with top Egyptian and Arab League officials over the unending political crisis that his majority government is having with the Hizbullah-led opposition. Following extensive talks with President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday and with Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa on Monday, Al-Siniora voiced demands for the convocation of an extraordinary Arab foreign ministers meeting to discuss the Lebanese political crisis. Al-Siniora's government boycotted the Arab summit late last month in Damascus to protest what it qualifies as Syria's attempt to "hijack Lebanon" in order to get "a political ransom" either by regaining its blocked seat at the Arab leadership along with Egypt and Saudi Arabia or by securing a rapprochement with the West, especially the US. In his press statements in Cairo, Al-Siniora said it was impossible for his government to discuss the fate of his country at the heart of the Syrian capital. He also said that his government hopes that the ministerial meeting would discuss ways to strengthen Syrian-Lebanese relations on basis of equality. Egyptian Presidential Spokesman Suleiman Awad said that Egypt is supporting the Lebanese call for a ministerial meeting. Cairo indicated to Al-Siniora and to other concerned regional players that the convocation of this meeting requires sufficient preparations to ensure that the engagement of all concerned parties would be conducive to advancing the chances of a prompt end to the Lebanese crisis. Meanwhile, Moussa said that Al-Siniora's government has not yet formally forwarded a request for the meeting. "Consultations are still underway," he said. Arab, including, Egyptian officials acknowledge that such preparations would have to include offering Damascus sufficient "encouragement" to be more forthcoming about pushing its allies within the Lebanese opposition to show more flexibility on their conditions linking the consensual election of a head of state to an agreement on political power and cabinet seat shares. However, no one was offering any specific moves to facilitate negotiations with Syria. Syrian officials have repeatedly and publicly declared their willingness to work with Saudi Arabia, an ally of the US-supported Siniora government, to find an end to Lebanon's political problem, which is taking a serious economic toll on the country. Moussa has tried to open a window of dialogue for Damascus with Riyadh and Cairo but has not been successful. This week, Moussa told reporters that he is planning to resume his efforts to reconcile the conflicting Lebanese camps. However, he declined to announce a specific date for the launch of his mediation efforts. The failure of Arab efforts to make a mediation breakthrough, Arab and Western diplomatic sources agree, could lead to a call for an international rather than an Arab handling of the Lebanese crisis. The call for political dialogue on Lebanon comes against the backdrop of an upstaged Israeli manoeuvre that many Arab and other regional quarters fear could be the countdown to an Israeli military assault that might target Iran or its close ally in south Lebanon, Hizbullah. In Cairo, Al-Siniora said that he has no assurances that Washington is exercising pressure on Israel to spare Lebanon from any military action. He added that his government requested the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) to be in alert for any potential Israeli breaches of the southern Lebanese borders. UN Security Council attention, Al-Siniora said, is essential to secure stability on the borders and to encourage prompt election of a Lebanese president. He, however, declined to reveal any information in relation to an international meeting on Lebanon that a UN envoy on Lebanon has been trying to arrange. Al-Siniora is also visiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as a part of an Arab tour. Somalia dynamism COUNSELLOR Ahmed Abu Zeid, the officer in charge of the Somalia file at the cabinet of the foreign minister, said this week that Egypt is upgrading contacts in a hitherto slow mediation on Somalia. "We now have a new will by the Somali government and opposition to pursue reconciliation. Our effort is focussed on solidifying these intentions and on advancing them to allow for political talks," he said. According to Abu Zeid, Cairo is currently working with other concerned African and international players to provide the necessary requirements to make this dialogue "work and succeed". For this to happen, Egypt would have to encourage a redeployment of Ethiopian forces that entered Somalia with the collapse of the interim government over a year ago. Wide factions within the opposition have been demanding an end to the presence of Ethiopian troops in their country as a precondition for the launch of political dialogue. However, Nour Hassan Hassanein, the prime minister of Somalia has demanded a delay to the pull out of Ethiopian troops pending the establishment of adequate security arrangement in the country. Later this month, in April, while participating in a meeting of the International Contact Group on Somalia, Egypt will seek to garner support for a set of prompt moves to advance the cause of Somali peace under a credible regional or international umbrella and the consequent deployment of efficient peacekeeping forces. Darfur moves EGYPT is getting ready to send a second infantry battalion to Darfur, thus expanding the 2,000 Egyptian troop presence in the western Sudanese region by another 1,000 troops. This move comes in accordance with an agreement reached between the government of Egypt and the UN peacekeeping operation in Darfur, upon the recommendation of the government of Khartoum. Meanwhile, to overcome the continuous stalemate in talks between the Khartoum regime and the Darfur rebels, Egypt is actively pushing to expand the mandate of the joint mediation mission of the African Union (AU) and the UN. The Egyptian proposal aims to grant the AU and UN envoys a mandate to negotiate a potential set of guidelines for a deal and then take it to the rebels for further negotiations. The aim is to secure an end to all types of hostilities as a lead up to a political agreement. This week, the New York-based Human Rights Watch reported that rape and other humanitarian violations are still widespread in Darfur. The rights group called for an end to a shocking climate of "impunity". It said that the numerous rapes that it documented in a 44-page report it issued this week, for which it mostly blamed pro-Sudanese government forces, were only a fraction of those in Darfur because most go unreported. Human Rights Watch called upon the joint UN-AU peacekeeping mission which took over in Darfur at the beginning of this year to appoint more trained female officers to deal with rape.
