King Abdullah Criticizes U.S. ‘Occupation’ of Iraq and Beirut’s Tent City Protest
| Arab leaders launched a two-day summit in Saudi Arabia Wednesday aimed at reviving a five-year-old plan for peace with Israel and launching a diplomatic offensive to resolve the Middle East conflict. The opening session was marked by Saudi King Abdullah’s attack on the deployment of U.S. forces in neighboring Iraq which he termed an “illegitimate foreign occupation” and Beirut’s Hizbullah-sponsored tent city that was changing streets into “hotels.” Several world figures, including U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon and EU foreign policy envoy Javier Solana, attended the opening session in Riyadh, amidst stringent security measures. Red carpets and streets lined with national flags of the guests greeted heads of state who are expected to adopt resolutions on Iraq as well as Lebanon, which has been crippled by a months-long political crisis. Only Libyan leader Moamer Ghadafi boycotted the summit. The annual gathering comes after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Arab states to “begin reaching out to Israel” by building on a peace blueprint first adopted at a summit in Beirut in 2002. But Abdullah said: “We will not allow forces from outside the region to determine the future of the region.” Foreign ministers from the 22-member Arab League agreed during preparatory talks on Monday to revive the plan and form working teams to hold contacts with all parties, including Israel. The blueprint offers Israel full normalization of relations if it withdraws from all land occupied in the 1967 war, allows the creation of a Palestinian state and the return of Palestinian refugees. Abbas warned the Israelis on Tuesday: “If this initiative is destroyed, I do not believe that a better chance for peace will present itself in the near future.” “They have not said that the Arab initiative is positive, but that it contained something positive, which means that Israel does not want to consider the plan as a whole.” In a speech to the summit’s opening session, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon warned Arab leaders that the region was on a knife-edge. “The Middle East region is more complex, more fragile and more dangerous than it has been for a very long time,” he said. The summit, which continued its deliberations behind closed doors after the opening session, is expected to call for an end to a Western financial and diplomatic boycott imposed on the Palestinians since Hamas first came to power a year ago. The Palestinians are also seeking 2.7 billion dollars in aid from Arab states, including unpaid pledges. The summit also is expected to adopt a resolution calling for amendments to the Iraqi constitution to give more power to the former Sunni Arab elite, with King Abdullah warning that “the threat of civil war is carried by ugly sectarianism.” He also appealed for an end to the “crippling” political crisis in Lebanon, where divisions were highlighted by the presence at the summit of two rival pro- and anti-Syrian delegations. He criticized the pro-Syrian opposition for changing Lebanon’s streets into “hotels” in an apparent reference to the make-shit tent city that has been erected since Dec. 1 in down town Beirut in an effort by the Hizbullah-led camp to topple Prime Minister Fouad Saniora’s majority government. Saudi-led efforts to break the deadlock have so far failed to yield a breakthrough, but Abdullah held talks on Tuesday with Syrian President Bashar Assad for the first time since relations chilled over last year’s Lebanon war and Syria’s policy towards its neighbor. Syria is to host the next Arab summit in 2008, heads of state decided.(AFP-Naharnet) |
| Beirut, 28 Mar 07 |
