Reporter’s Notebook From Casablanca : Some Arabs Are More Equal at Summit

While the just-concluded 13th summit meeting of the Arab League here provided little in the way of substantive progress on the hard issues dividing the Arab world, it did provide some offbeat moments.

At a meeting meant to stress Arab unity, all Arabs are, of course, equal. But it is equally true that some Arabs--i.e. Saudi Arabians--are more equal than others.

Before the opening session in Casablanca’s opulent royal palace, Arab foreign ministers were asked to enter by a side door while their delegation heads went in the front. Foreign ministers who tried to follow their heads of state through the front door were politely but firmly turned away. All, that is, except the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, who walked in the front door unchallenged.

The special treatment accorded to the Saudis even trickled down to the traveling press corps. Room service at the hotel where reporters stayed seemed to be reserved exclusively for the Saudi journalists. Waiters hurried in and out of their rooms bearing silver trays of food and beverages, even as Western journalists were told that room service facilities were “closed” for the duration on the summit.

When one Saudi called for ice to go with his Scotch whisky late one night after room service had really closed, the assistant manager of the four-star hotel personally delivered the tray. “Will there be anything else?” he asked. “Yes,” replied the Saudi guest. “Close the door on your way out.”

As a collection of kings, princes and prime ministers flew into Casablanca, their flags fluttered proudly in front of an esplanade that a few week earlier did not exist.

As part of the extraordinary security precautions for the summit, which ended Friday, bulldozers razed three to four acres of two- and three-story concrete houses around the royal palace of King Hassan II, diplomats based in Casablanca said. In the space of four weeks, an army of workers and landscape artists transformed what had been a bustling commercial and residential quarter into a gracious royal garden.

The diplomats said they were told that the garden was created for “security reasons.” The possibility of a terrorist attack on the palace, where the summit participants were meeting, was too great to leave the houses intact, the sources said.

The families who lived in the houses were resettled 10 to 15 miles away in the suburbs of Casablanca. Many lost not only homes but businesses as well.

“They were given cash compensation, but there was still a lot of resentment and grumbling about royal prerogatives,” one diplomat said.

Etiquette is terribly important in Morocco, which, as a monarchy, tends to follow courtly standards of behavior at official functions. Thus, Moroccan protocol officials were shocked when journalists, invited to a dinner to meet Moroccan Foreign Minister Abdellatif Filali, tried to rush off before the first course to file reports on what he had said. The reporters knew that they would not have time to eat dinner, and many had not had lunch. So before leaving, they quickly began stuffing hors d’oeuvres, slabs of delicately smoked salmon and tablespoons of caviar into their hungry mouths.

“For God’s sake,” one official said to a famished journalist who ignored his plea to sit down. “At least take a plate.”

Plagued by inter-Arab differences, only 16 of the 21 members of the Arab League showed up for the summit, and of them, only 10 were represented by their heads of state. Nonetheless, a number of prominent names were here: Cartier, Rolex, Patek Philippe. Even when they cannot achieve a consensus, Arab summits do bring together a magnificent assemblage of wristwatches.

No mention of Casablanca can be complete without a reference to the famous movie. When they first arrived, in fact, many of the Western reporters covering the summit went off in search of Rick’s Cafe Americain. The closest they came was the bar at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which is plastered with portraits of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Sidney Greenstreet.

Rick’s doesn’t exist except on film, of course--a fact that one Moroccan official soon grew tired of explaining.

“You Americans--all you know of Casablanca is the movie,” he said. “Nobody wants to know about Morocco. All they want to know is where Rick’s place is. It drives me crazy.”