Arab League Summit to Tackle Old Problems

Officially, the Arab League summit conference opening here today is another “emergency” meeting of the 22 kings, presidents and emirs of the Arab world.

For the most part, however, the leaders who began arriving in Casablanca on Monday for the two-day conference will be preoccupied with old and by now tiresomely familiar themes.

Indeed, what is likely to be the most significant event at this 16th Arab League summit in 25 years has quietly taken place already.

At a preparatory foreign ministers’ meeting on Sunday, Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, resumed its seat in the league 10 years after it was suspended for signing a separate peace treaty with Israel.

While Egypt’s readmission underscores the extent to which political perceptions have changed in the region over the past decade, the chief topics on the agenda are anything but new: Palestine, the perennial centerpiece of Arab summitry; Lebanon; lingering tensions in the Persian Gulf, the Iran-Iraq cease-fire notwithstanding, and various inter-Arab conflicts such as those between Iraq and Syria, Syria and the Palestinians and Yemen and South Yemen.

Lebanon, the most urgent and intractable of these conflicts, dominated the preparatory discussions leading up to the summit and threatened to undermine it.

A six-member committee chaired by Kuwait has been trying to devise a formula to consolidate a cease-fire in Lebanon, but after two days of intensive and often-acrimonious talks, it was not even able to decide who should represent Lebanon at the summit.

Hassan Gets Hot Potato

In the end, it was decided to pass the issue along to Morocco’s King Hassan II, the conference host, with a recommendation that Lebanon’s Christian army commander, Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun, and Muslim Premier Salim Hoss be invited to take separate seats at the meeting.

A similar question mark hung over Libyan participation, with Col. Moammar Kadafi threatening a boycott because of Egypt’s readmission to the league.

The presidents of Syria, Algeria and Tunisia flew to Libya over the weekend to try to persuade Kadafi to come, but whether he does is not likely to have much of an impact on the proceedings.

“It would be nice, from the point of view of Arab unity, to have everyone here,” one Arab diplomat said, “but Kadafi himself is irrelevant. If he comes, he will be tolerated. If he boycotts, he will be ignored.”

The other main “emergency” the meeting was called to deal with is the Palestinian question, in particular the intifada against Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is coming with an agenda that seeks to win the political and financial support of his fellow Arabs for the uprising and for recent PLO peace efforts, including its recognition of Israel, renunciation of terrorism and the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the occupied territories.

Specifically, the PLO will be pressing fellow Arabs to honor the commitments they made at another so-called emergency meeting last year in Algiers to finance the intifada with a one-time contribution of $128 million plus $43 million a month. Only Saudi Arabia and Libya have been paying their share. A Palestinian source said the PLO has so far received only $40 million of the lump-sum payment, along with $12 million a month from the Saudis and the Libyans.

Summit sources said they expect the leaders to endorse the PLO’s peace moves but--in deference to radicals such as Syria--only in general, non-specific terms.

The conference is expected to condemn the peace plan recently proposed by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. It calls for elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to choose non-PLO leaders who would then negotiate and administer an interim plan for limited Palestinian autonomy.

Expressing the consensus that is considered certain to emerge at the summit, Arab League Secretary General Chedli Klibi told the foreign ministers Sunday that the transparent purpose of Shamir’s plan is to counter “the growing sympathy the Palestinian cause is winning in Western countries . . . to get rid of the intifada . . . and then to try to impose local leaders in an illusory attempt by the Zionist leadership to wipe out the role of the PLO.”

While virtually everyone attending the conference agrees that the Shamir plan is, in the words of a senior Egyptian diplomat, “a complete non-starter,” how this sentiment is expressed in the final communique is likely to be the subject of intense negotiations.

Morocco’s Rehabilitation

Whatever shape the final resolutions take, the main point of this meeting has already been made. It is the first Arab summit conference in Morocco since King Hassan was forced to resign his chairmanship of the Arab League three years ago for meeting publicly with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Thus, the meeting marks not only Egypt’s formal rehabilitation in the Arab world but Morocco’s as well. In so doing, it affirms and furthers the sense of unity and moderation that has been gaining ground in the Middle East in the last few years.

This is due in part to Iraq’s emergence relatively unscathed from its war with Iran and its alliance with Egypt, Jordan and other regional moderates at a time when Syria, the traditional spoiler of Middle East politics, is becoming more bogged down in Lebanon.

The intifada and the pressure it has put on the PLO to come up with a realistic peace plan to capitalize on the sympathy the Palestinians in the occupied territories have earned over the past 18 months has been another major factor.

But as is so often the case in this part of the world, the main motivation is fear--in this instance fear that as the intifada turns more violent, a historic opportunity for a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict will be lost.

“If that happens,” a senior Palestinian official said, “then the pendulum will swing back to the radicals, and we will all have to stand prepared for another Middle East war.”