The 25th Arab Summit meeting closed on Wednesday in Kuwait with a lame statement that reflected little political will to deal with key Arab issues, including the Palestinian question that was reduced in the discussion between Arab heads of state to a debate over financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and anger against Hamas. Moreover, the summit did not deal with the search for democracy in the Arab Spring countries, openly criticised by some officials on the sidelines of the meeting, or with the ongoing conflict in Syria and other inter-Arab conflicts. According to diplomats, at the end of the day the summit had taken place as scheduled, which was an achievement in itself given the lack of interest on the part of the Arab states in collective cooperation except perhaps in the dedication of some to “combating political Islam and its acts of terror.” In the reading of some Arab Gulf capitals, as well as some North African countries including Egypt, this last objective was perhaps the most crucial cause for now. It was also one, some diplomats said, that required a tough stance to be taken against Qatar, which stands accused of supporting a militant version of Political Islam in order to reinforce its political weight in the region. Qatar was coldshouldered at the summit as a result, both in the treatment meted out to the head of the Qatari delegation, emir Tamim, and by the fact that the leaders of the three Arab Gulf countries who recently pulled their ambassadors out from Doha declined to join the Kuwait meeting in what was qualified by Arab League sources as a blow to the country's efforts to “rectify” relations between Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates on the one hand and Qatar on the other. The Arab capitals concerned, diplomatic sources say, are determined to give Qatar a hard time. “We have spoken with our brothers in Qatar, and we explained our point of view several times. They promised to revisit the matters that we disagree on, but nothing has been done thus far. As a result, we have had to make our position even more clear,” said one Saudi diplomat. It seems unlikely that the Arab leaders concerned will give much attention to the Qatari initiative, reiterated in Kuwait, to address issues of disagreement and to start a process of reconciliation. Arab diplomats from the offended capitals, Cairo included, insisted that if Qatar wanted to pursue the road of reconciliation, “it knows very well what it has to do. The Qataris need to stop meddling in the internal affairs of other Arab countries with the objective of helping any particular political group to ascend to power.” “The Qataris need to stop igniting internal disputes, either directly or through the Al-Jazeera TV Channel,” the diplomats said. “Qatar also knows that it needs to stop conspiring with Iran against the Arab Gulf.” On the road to the Arab Summit, the emir of Kuwait had consulted over an attempt to promote inter-Gulf, not necessarily inter-Arab, reconciliation on the basis of an end to the alleged Qatari incitements, but his initiative was not given much attention by the Gulf capitals concerned. “The Qataris must have felt isolated at the summit. They must have come to realise that they are painting themselves into a corner and that in order to get out of this they have to walk the path of accommodating Arab demands,” said an Arab League source, who added that Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Al-Arabi had “heard reassurances from Doha” but that things would have to go “beyond promises to commitments on the ground.” “We need to be up-front and to speak openly of the reasons behind the inter-Arab disputes, and we need to be transparent and serious in our approach to mending these differences,” Al-Arabi told the opening of the summit. At the Kuwait Summit, as at many other previous summits, there was no major victory to broadcast on reconciling inter-Arab differences, especially in the Gulf. The fact that “the problem of Qatar” was not sorted out within the confines of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) also meant that it was not yet ready to be resolved. “I think the Qataris have to make up their minds before we can say that we are ready, all of us, to discuss reconciliation. I am not sure that Qatar has made up its mind yet,” said one Egyptian diplomat. The statement made by the emir of Qatar appealing to unnamed Arab governments to refrain from calling the political opposition in their countries terrorists did not fall well on the ears of the delegates from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Algeria, Libya or Bahrain. The new dispute replaced the traditional Arab dispute over which Palestinian side to take, the Palestinian Authority or Hamas, and who to support in Lebanon where political tensions are a lived reality. As one source told Al-Ahram Weekly, there was little disagreement among the Arab delegates on how to accommodate a US request made through Secretary of State John Kerry to several Arab foreign ministers to refrain from including in their final statement any outright rejection of Israel's qualification as a Jewish state as part of the final agreement that the US diplomat is hoping to conclude between the Palestinians and Israelis. Meanwhile, the appeal made at the summit for reconciliation among the Arab states, with Al-Arabi talking of the need for “national dialogue,” ended where it had started as a mere appeal and no action plan to start the dialogue. “We are not sure about the readiness of the governments concerned or about that of their oppositions to start a serious dialogue. The Arab League cannot force a dialogue, but it can call for one,” the Arab League source said. The Arab League is very far from playing the role it played a few years ago when it pursued, with different degrees of success, the cause of national dialogue in Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon and even among the Palestinian factions. In the analysis of the Arab League source, this was because of “the state of weakness” that several Arab countries, especially a traditionally leading Arab country such as Egypt, were suffering from the tendency of other Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, to become focused on internal matters relating to stability and succession. “The Arab leaders are either ageing and frail or overwhelmed by internal developments. There is hardly any appetite for collective Arab anything. The summit is predominantly a photo-op, and one with several Arab leaders missing either because they could not make it or because they did not feel they cared enough to make it,” the source argued. Missing from the family photograph for reasons of ailing health were both Jalal Talbani, the president of Iraq, whose country is falling into a new and apparently tougher wave of internal conflict, and the Algerian leader Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika, whose declining health on the eve of the country's presidential elections has been seen as disabling. Arab diplomats admit that the ceiling of expectations from Arab summits has been going down along with the health and interest of the Arab leaders and even the stability of the Arab states themselves.
