Posted on 05/24/2004 6:47:56 AM PDT by billorites
UNIS, May 23 - Arab leaders adopted a modest if unprecedented joint commitment toward political change at the end of their annual summit meeting on Sunday. Squabbling over the issue, which had delayed the meeting for two months, continued until the last minute.
Participants and analysts alike wondered aloud if the document would have any significance, because putting it into effect was left largely up to the individual countries, and past summit meetings were littered with weighty resolutions that went nowhere.
"We are talking about problems that require real change in society - its position toward women, its position toward democracy, the role of civil society," Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, said at the meeting. "They need a dynamic in order for them to happen and the dynamic is not just monitoring by the Arab League. The hope is that when the League approves of this as an Arab policy, this will encourage individual states to follow through with their reform programs."
Tunisia, the host of the meeting, said the Arab states needed to be given time to establish credibility on their desire for change.
"We are deadly serious about the implementation of that paper," said the Tunisian foreign minister, Habib Ben Yahya, rejecting the idea that the document on reform was forged under pressure from the outside. "It is not at the request of anybody. It has been done in a way that is a home-grown process."
Although the final document mentioned issues like expanding the role of women, respecting human rights and supporting freedom of expression, it did not detail any specific steps to effect such change in a region that contains the world's most autocratic governments. Even a participant described the measures as "wishy-washy."
The reform issue created tension between the region and the United States starting last winter, when the Bush administration let it be known that it would issue a blueprint called the Greater Middle East Initiative to push democracy - seen as the best antidote to militancy - across the Arab and Muslim world.
The failure to establish a working model in Iraq seriously dented that effort. But Arab leaders have still been toiling to come up with a plan of their own before the Group of Eight summit meeting in the United States in June, when the United States is supposed to present its blueprint.
After objections from Arab leaders that reform cannot be imposed from the outside, the plan has since been modified to make it more of a collective effort between Arab leaders and Washington.
In hammering out the agreements at the Arab League meeting, there were endless arguments among members over everything from semantics to how the response to the Americans would be organized. They even delayed the final session for two hours on Sunday. Arab diplomats said, for example, that Syria had objected to the use of the word "reform," since its antonym in Arabic is "corruption" - implying by default that all current Arab governments are corrupt. So the final document stresses "development and modernization."
Egypt also made an effort on Sunday to get all Arab states to agree to a mechanism whereby any outside initiative on change in the region would be met with a collective response, and the Arabs would reject being lumped into a Greater Middle East geographic area that included non-Arab states.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said the foreign ministers had agreed on the idea in a final round of talks, but other participants said the proposal was not included in the final communiqué because they ultimately agreed to approve the document without last-minute changes.
Only two-thirds of the leaders of the 22-member Arab League attended the meeting, with most Persian Gulf states staying away. By Sunday morning that number had dwindled to four. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya was the first to withdraw, complaining that the agenda did not reflect popular sentiment.
Participants said it was something of an accomplishment that the meeting had taken place at all, given the overall chaos in the Middle East and the dizzying rush of developments. In just the two months since the earlier meeting was postponed, there have been startling revelations about American soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, a significant Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip and American sanctions against Syria.
The level of violence in the region threatened to overshadow the entire event, including the reform commitment, with the final communiqué strongly condemning Israel for attacks in Gaza that have killed about 40 people and the United States for the treatment of the Iraqi prisoners.
On Iraq, the Arab leaders called for an extensive United Nations role in rebuilding the Iraqi government and ending the occupation.
Easy.
Palestinian position toward women: blow them up; kill them for family honor; transportation for locked suicide belts.
Palestinian position toward democracy: interferes with kleptocracy; democratic choice between Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or Al Aqsa Brigades.
Palestinian position toward civil society: Hang suspected collaborators without trial; Selling land to Jews begets capital punishment; Teach kids hate.
Would the Palestinian Representative care to challenge his own dictatorship on these issues at the risk of his life, or is he comfortable representing the Palestinian position?
To me, this sentence seemed badly out of place in an otherwise reasonably straight-forward report on the Arab League meeting.
The effort in Iraq could take years and decades, but the Times was calling it a failure almost from the day troops started rolling into Iraq for the initial invasion.
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