CAIRO - This week, the second new Government has been formed with Ambassador Nabil el-Arabi replacing veteran career diplomat Ahmed Abul Gheit as Foreign Minister. El-Arabi,who has been Egypt's permanent representative at the UN, has been Cairo's envoy to Khartoum, Rome and head of the country's delegation at the United Nations' European Headquarters in Geneva. He has served as a judge in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for five years, after which he decided to return to Egypt to work as the head of the Foreign Ministry's Legal Affairs Department. The newly appointed Foreign Minister, who won plaudits from demonstrators for joining the crowds in Cairo's Tahrir Square shortly before former President Hosni Mubarak's resignation, became a member of the "Wise Men's Council" to help steer the country's path to democracy. El-Arabi was also a member of Egypt's team that negotiated the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978. But he is renowned for having voiced reservations about some of the treaty's clauses to then-President Anwar Sadat. He also was a member of the negotiation team that participated in the negotiations, which restored Taba to Egypt. Taba, a small Red Sea beach resort, was awarded to Egypt by international arbitration in 1989. Israel had controlled the tiny Red Sea resort since the 1967 Middle East war, and an Israeli-owned, $41 million hotel complex there has become a favourite winter vacation spot. Egypt had demanded the return of the land for years, and the dispute was a sore point between the nations. It began when Israel refused to hand over Taba in 1982 when it left the Sinai Peninsula under terms of the US-brokered Israeli-Egypt peace treaty. In 1986, the two sides agreed to take the dispute to an international arbitration panel in Geneva for a binding ruling. The panel drew a border that put Taba in Egyptian territory. Minister el-Arabi, 76, is a member of the Egyptian Council for Foreign Affairs. He has two children. His father, Mohamed Abdullah el-Arabi, was a general finance professor at Cairo University and member of the Islamic Research Council.
