Summit Lends Glimmer of Hope to Arab Unity

The downtown streets were crowded with people hustling past Khalid Sadik’s electronics store Wednesday as he sat behind his gray metal desk staring blankly into an empty room. Few people have the money to go shopping these days, so he spends his time sitting, fidgeting and hoping things in his country will improve.

“The economic situation is this way,” Sadik said, tipping his head toward the vacant shop. “If the political situation in Palestine and Iraq were better, it will reflect better here.”

A few miles away, in a heavily guarded conference hall, Arab leaders were in the final hours of a much-heralded Arab League summit, where participants were hoping to develop concrete solutions to their common problems. Those issues touch almost everyone here, from those who have relatives in the Gaza Strip and West Bank to others such as Sadik, who have seen their livelihoods undermined by the turmoil in the region.

But after all was said and done, the Arab League failed to produce much in the way of substance. There were some feel-good slogans, cash for the Palestinian Authority and a committee given the mandate of ironing out the differences between Iraq and its Persian Gulf foes--Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

But there was no breakthrough, no eureka moment. At best, the meeting left some with a glimmer of optimism rooted in the belief that the leaders took a small step forward in uniting the Arab world into one influential voice.

“What they have decided is much less than our aspiration but maybe much better than we expected,” said Fahed Fanek, a Jordanian analyst and columnist. “The main success of this summit is the mere fact that they were able to meet in a regular meeting. . . . They now all admit they belong to one Arab world, and the whole world will look at them as one bloc, though that bloc is not united enough.”

In fact, after days of tense negotiations, Arab leaders from 21 nations and the Palestinian Authority failed to overcome differences on Iraq. That discord diverted a lot of time and energy away from other issues, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Finally, the Arab leadership issued a 53-point communique--and a separate, nonbinding declaration.

The communique, very similar to the document issued five months ago at an emergency summit in Cairo, covered a wide range of topics, from support for nation-building in Somalia and the preservation of Sudan’s territorial integrity, to the Arab leadership’s “extreme indignation” at the U.S. veto late Tuesday of a U.N. resolution supporting an observer force in the Palestinian territories.

The leadership, however, emphasized as its top priority a commitment to at least try to work together, not as 22 different entities, but as one Arab union. The document said: “Restoration of Arab solidarity constitutes the basic support and source of power for the nation, safeguarding its security and fending off dangers.”

The Iraq issue was only mentioned in the context of the appointed committee, to be headed by Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and in the nonbinding declaration, which called for lifting sanctions.

Iraqi officials blamed the unresolved conflict on Kuwait, saying its strategy had been to present itself as a moderate while putting up obstacles that have made reconciliation impossible. Kuwait’s position had been that Iraq must obey all U.N. resolutions regarding the dismantling of weapons of mass destruction, offer assurances that it recognizes the territorial integrity of all Arab League states and resolve the issue of Kuwaitis who have been missing since Baghdad invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf said that Kuwait was being hypocritical because it allows U.S. planes to be stationed on its soil for the purpose of patrolling the southern “no-fly” zone in Iraq. “Those who want us to respect their sovereignty and security, isn’t he supposed to respect our security?” Sahaf said at a post-summit news conference.

The Kuwaitis “drove the summit to failure,” he said earlier.

But others said that although the Iraq-Kuwait conflict wasn’t resolved, the overall success--or failure--of the summit can be determined only when it becomes clear if this was the first step toward a more unified region--or simply another case of hot rhetoric that cools the minute those assembled leave town.

From the wealthy hilltop neighborhood of Abdoun, where satellite dishes poke from large gated villas, to the crowded shopping district along Saqf al Sail Street in the center of the Jordanian capital, people expressed weariness with the region’s troubles and frustration at their leaders’ inability to take action. And yet many expressed the feeling that the current unrest has, at least, generated a real chance for unity.

“There are a lot of things they can do, but they do nothing. They just talk,” Raul Nasser said as he delivered cash from his business to the bank. “There are lots of obstacles, lots of problems they are unwilling to deal with.”

Subhi Salaymeh runs a two-chair barbershop downtown. He has been there for 30 years and says he has never seen times as dire.

“There is no peace, our families are dying, the kids are dying, and nobody is doing anything,” he said as he pulled a long razor along a customer’s thick beard. “When I ask someone, ‘How are you?’ They answer, ‘Don’t ask how I am--ask can I feed my family today.’ ”

And yet he said that he manages to feel some optimism.

“Miracle days are over,” he said, “but with unity, cooperation and God’s help, everything will be OK.”