Cairo Summit to Seek Arab Solution

The Egyptian government announced today that an Arab summit on the Iraqi invasion will be held in Cairo on Thursday. King Hussein of Jordan said the meeting will be the “last chance” to resolve the crisis peacefully.

In a nationally televised speech, President Hosni Mubarak spurned a U.S. plan for multinational forces under its leadership in Saudi Arabia, opting instead for a purely Arab force. Mubarak called for an emergency Arab summit “within 24 hours” to discuss the crisis and offered to host the summit.

At a news conference in Amman, Jordan’s King Hussein said he will attend the conference. “We are trying to resolve the problem in an Arab context,” the king said.

He described the meeting as the Arab world’s “last chance” to solve the problem without resorting to further violence.

He said he could understand the anger of Arabs over the inability of Arab states to resolve the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by themselves. ‘

“I have no plan to present,” Hussein said. “The plan will be presented by the Arabs themselves. It will be a good and open meeting.”

Mohammed Abdel-Moneim, Mubarak’s press secretary, told reporters that the summit will convene in Cairo on Thursday evening.

“Arab leaders will begin arriving for the summit in a matter of hours,” he said. “This quick response reflects a sense of the gravity of the situation, which President Mubarak stressed in his speech.”

Abdel-Moneim did not give the exact number of Arab countries that accepted Mubarak’s summit proposal. But he said they included Saudi Arabia, Syria, Algeria, Djibouti, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Libya and Qatar.