Arab League Backs PLO; No Lebanon Resolution

Arab leaders, ending a long and stormy summit meeting, declared their support for Palestinian peace moves Friday but failed to overcome their deep differences over Syria’s military role in Lebanon.

Egypt’s formal return to the Arab fold, after a 10-year absence, and a broad endorsement of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Middle East peace strategy were the two main achievements of the four-day meeting of the 22-member Arab League, officials said.

On the Palestinian question, Arab leaders declared their “full support for the Palestinian peace initiative” being pursued by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

They welcomed last November’s decisions by the Palestine National Council, which implicitly recognized Israel’s right to exist and laid the foundation for Arafat’s subsequent renunciation of terrorism and explicit recognition of Israel.

But at the same time, they also rejected Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s plan for elections in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank as a “scheme” to end the 18-month-old uprising there and sidestep the PLO in negotiations.

“The summit gave us what we wanted,” a senior PLO official said. “Arafat now has broad backing.”

While, from the Palestinian perspective, this was a major achievement, it was overshadowed at the summit by the Lebanese crisis and the Arab League’s failure, in the face of unshakable Syrian opposition, to devise a credible plan to end the 14 years of fighting in that divided country.

The summit did approve a diluted peace plan for Lebanon that would begin with the drafting of political reforms, in consultation with the major Lebanese factions, and end with the election of a new president and the formation of a “national reconciliation” government that would exercise sovereignty over Lebanon with Arab League support.

However, the Arab leaders failed to deal with the more immediate military dimension of the Lebanese conflict, leading many participants at the summit to gloomily predict that the plan is doomed to failure.

Indeed, several senior participants dismissed the plan as chiefly a “face-saving” device to cover the Arab League’s “disarray” on the Lebanese question.

Asked what would happen now, one foreign minister predicted a new round of fighting between the Christian forces of Lebanese army commander Maj. Gen. Michel Aoun and the Muslim militias backed by Syria’s 40,000-man army in Lebanon.

Efforts by Egypt, Jordan and Iraq to put teeth into the plan by calling for the replacement of Syrian soldiers in Beirut with a pan-Arab peacekeeping force were successfully fended off by Syria’s President Hafez Assad who, bloodied but unbowed, has emerged as the main victor of this summit.

Instead, the leaders appointed another committee, chaired by the leaders of Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Algeria, to oversee the implementation of the reforms that would eventually be included in the Lebanese constitution to give majority Muslims greater representation in their previously Christian-dominated government.

The plan sets forth a six-month timetable to achieve these reforms and holds open the possibility of reconvening the summit at the end of that time to “take further steps” to implement them if necessary.

The plan finally adopted by the conference was a watered-down version of an already diluted compromise proposal circulated late Thursday by Egypt and Kuwait before the summit was forced, for the second time, to extend its session by an extra day because of the bitter debate over the lingering Lebanese crisis.