Attending the Arab summit in Damascus, Dina Ezzat hears that the fate of inter-Arab relations and the Arab-Israeli conflict await the inauguration of a new US administration Tugs not tango Beyond a façade of containment, the Damascus summit was for many an opportunity to draw demarcation lines between conflicting Arab agendas Attempts failed to redefine the rules of the game in the Arab world ahead of and during the Arab League summit that opened Saturday for two days in the Syrian capital Damascus. The status quo ante remains in place: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are promoting regional political choices based on acquiescence to US policy preferences, while Syria, with the support of Iran, the cooperation of Hamas and Hizbullah and the sympathy of several Arab states, is promoting an alternative agenda that is more confrontational in orientation. Lebanon and to a lesser extent Iraq are the locales in which these struggling Arab camps are facing off. On attendance -- or absence -- alone, the Damascus summit provided clear indication that the division between the two Arab camps is profound. Saudi monarch King Abdullah delegated his permanent representative to the Arab League to take Saudi Arabia's chair at the Damascus summit. According to Damascus-based Saudi diplomatic sources, King Abdullah was inclined to completely boycott the summit but deemed that this would harm the "leading" role of the kingdom in the Arab world and "shake the significance of the summit institution". "The Saudi decision was clear: the lowest level of participation to avoid a total boycott but to send a clear message of discomfort with Syrian policies," one Saudi diplomat said in Damascus. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who had planned to deputise his foreign minister to head Egypt's delegation to the summit, made a last minute change and sent Moufid Shehab, minister of state for legal and parliamentary affairs. Cairo, sources say, had contemplated following the Saudi lead in fielding the lowest possible representation but backed off for fear of internal criticism of following rather than leading other Arab countries. Jordan, for its part, did not hesitate to succumb to pressure exercised by Saudi Arabia, amongst other Arab and Western players. After having delegated his foreign minister to take his country's seat at the summit, Jordanian King Abdullah II pulled his top diplomat and confined Amman's presence to its permanent representative to the Arab League. "The pressure was very intense; we had to succumb," said one informed Jordanian source. He alluded that the visit of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to his capital for talks with King Abdullah over the future of Palestinian- Israeli negotiations was at stake. The Americans, he said, were asking for support for the decision of the anti-Syria Lebanese government of Fouad Al-Siniora, which decided to overlook internal opposition and boycott the summit. Lebanon was the announced reason for the decision of Cairo and Riyadh to shrug a once-ally turned now, for them, political foe. In his speech to the summit, delivered by Shehab, President Mubarak clearly expressed dismay over the failure of Syria to influence its Lebanese allies -- namely the Hizbullah-led opposition -- to agree to the election of Lebanese Army chief Michel Suleiman as head of state ahead of striking an agreement on Lebanese power sharing. "We had hoped that the summit would be preceded by factors conducive to a positive atmosphere that could produce the kind of positive conclusions that the [Arab] peoples aspire for, including the settlement of the Lebanese crisis and the election of a consensual president who would take his country's chair at the summit," Mubarak said in his written statement to the Damascus conference. According to statements made by Shehab in Damascus, "the president applied all efforts and up to the very last moment he was hoping that things would move in the right direction to allow him to participate in the summit, but unfortunately things did not work in the right way." Indeed, Mubarak's statement to the summit accorded more volume and emphasis to the Lebanese file than to any other pressing issue that has traditionally topped the agenda of Egyptian national security interests -- including the Palestinian-Israeli struggle -- or the issue of Arab reconciliation, supposedly first on the agenda of the Damascus summit. For his part, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal, in a press briefing in Riyadh on the eve of the Arab summit, accorded Syria indirect but harsh blame for "obstructing" a political settlement in Lebanon. Al-Faisal went as far as blaming Damascus for undermining the Arab League through its failure to lend sufficient support to its consensual initiative aimed at filling the presidential post left vacant in Beirut since 24 November. The Saudi foreign minister, who rejected all press questions suggesting Riyadh was leading an attempt to isolate Syria within the Arab world, went as far as saying that the Arab League should intervene by imposing "deterring sanctions" in the face of "obstructionist attempts against any of its consensual resolutions". At the end of the summit, during a joint press conference of Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Moallem and Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, the tone was of "reconciliation in the making" between Syria and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Egypt on the other. The fact of the matter, however, according to high-level and well-informed sources, is that any such reconciliation will be extremely hard to achieve. Sources inform Al-Ahram Weekly that a tentative proposal of Algerian President Abdul-Aziz Boutaflika to President Mubarak in the wake of Boutaflika's participation in the Damascus summit concerning a limited Arab reconciliation summit to be held in Algeria or at the Cairo headquarters of the Arab League was not warmly received. Egypt, the sources say, is not vetoing the Algerian proposal. However, both Cairo and Riyadh "believe" that a summit level meeting that brings the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria together "must" follow the election of a Lebanese president. This approach, Syrian diplomats argue, is not one of reconciliation but rather of coercion that Syria rejects. "Relations between countries are like relations between individuals... One cannot court [the other] while the other [shrugs]... It takes two to court; it takes two to tango," Al-Moallem said in his joint press conference with Moussa at the end of the summit. In its capacity as chair of the summit, Syria is now in charge of following up on all resolutions adopted and initiatives proposed during the meeting. This includes the Libyan proposal of promoting Arab reconciliation. Syria is effectively the head of a committee that Moussa is due to set up to diagnose and address problems straining Arab relations. However, as Syrian diplomats said, while undertaking its responsibilities as the chair of the Arab summit, Damascus is not prepared to extend a hand of reconciliation to Arab regimes that base their political priorities on the US agenda for the region, including targeting Syria and its regional allies. Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad played a containing role during his inaugural speech to the summit on Saturday, arguing the need for members of the Arab "family" to handle their "legitimate" disagreement in a way that reflects an awareness of the joint interests and challenges of those who "are on the same boat". His foreign minister played down all press questions attributing the absence of certain Arab leaders to the influence of the US and argued diplomatically that Arabs are not divided into two camps. However, the Syrians and others were not willing to exert much effort to conceal the concern that some Arab capitals share with Washington over what they perceive as Syria's negative influence not just in Lebanon but also in the Palestinian territories and in Iraq -- not to mention its close alliance with Iran, qualified as a "radical" and "nuclear" threat by the US, Israel and some leading Arab states. According to background accounts, the "tug-of-war" between the two camps is unlikely to disappear by way of public statements. In the words of a senior Arab diplomat, "nobody [from either camp] wanted to obstruct the convocation of the summit, but at the same time nobody was expecting this summit to yield any [prompt] results in terms of reconciliation." Diplomats attending the summit speak of an "overall healthy atmosphere" among Arab officials "that refrained from traditional finger- pointing". However, they also accept that this "positive atmosphere" is extremely fragile. It is based, they explained, on the acceptance that each country is in charge of deciding its best political and military interests -- be it through alliance with the US and its regional allies or with the opposing camp. Any clash of views over national agendas is hazardous. During the closing session of the summit, the Iraqi delegation made a reservation to a language included in the Damascus Declaration that insinuated the need for a prompt end to the US-led military occupation confronted by resistance groups. "Iraq decides what it wants to get. It offers the language for resolutions it wishes in relation to the Iraqi case, and it's up to the others to agree with it or not, but they do not offer us unsolicited views," said Adel Abdul-Mahdi, who headed Iraq's delegation to the summit. Ought the Arab summit to be a mere public event where points of agreement are automatically adopted and where disagreements are avoided? "The annual convocation of the Arab summit, [even] in this way, and the preservation of the Arab League, is the least we could do to maintain the Arab regime," Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi stated in a typically controversial speech before the inaugural session of the Arab summit Saturday. "Unfortunately, the [current] status of Arabs is very difficult; it is terrifying. Their future is marred by many a question mark," he added. In a solemn speech to the Arab summit, Arab League Secretary-General Moussa indicated clearly the frustration with the degeneration of the Arab order. The "negative" management of the Arab regional regime, Moussa said, "has become an example" of how to poorly run relations among member states of the same regional organisation. "Arab regional security is threatened -- just as regional security is," Moussa said. According to Moussa "firm decisions" needed to spare collective Arab interests are not impossible to take, nor are they necessarily "unaffordable". However, judging by the Damascus Declaration, which is all but identical to declarations adopted since the convocation of the annual Arab summit, mostly under the presidency of Arab allies of the US, member states of the Arab League are not ready yet to address their differences up-front, an obvious pre-requisite for reconciliation.
