Arab Summit Bogs Down; Palestinians Stage Walkout

The Palestinians stormed out of the Arab League summit here Wednesday after their host refused to let Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat address the assembled dignitaries via satellite hookup, and hopes of forging a unified Arab proposal for Middle East peace slipped away with them.

The dispute, which Lebanese President Emile Lahoud characterized as a “misunderstanding,” overshadowed the much-anticipated speech of Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. The crown prince laid out a simple, if vague, vision for making peace with Israel, one that at its core promised “normal relations” with all Arab states in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from lands occupied since the 1967 Middle East War.

But the minute his speech ended, a conference already marked by disunity and a long list of no-shows slipped into free fall, prompting charges of petty rivalries and inspiring several eulogies for the lost opportunity.

The brouhaha over Arafat’s speech--to have been given from confinement in his West Bank headquarters--appeared to have been settled Wednesday night, and the Palestinian delegation was expected to return today for the summit’s final day. But the damage was already done. Even if the Saudi peace plan is adopted today, few here expect it to hold much credibility.

At the summit, theories abounded as to why Lahoud thwarted the Palestinian leader’s efforts to speak live. Lahoud explained his move by saying he was afraid that Israel would intercept the satellite signal and beam Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into the hall. Others said it was simply arrogance on the part of the president. And still others said that because Lahoud owes his position to Syrian support, his actions probably were taken in behalf of Syria’s apparent efforts to torpedo the Saudi initiative.

“What we are seeing is some Arabs who are not pleased with the Saudi proposal,” said Gibran Tueni, editor in chief of Lebanon’s largest daily newspaper, An Nahar. “They are not interested in Arab interests, only in their own.”

Throughout its history, the Arab League has been riven by controversy and intra-Arab conflicts. But after Sept. 11, and with the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at an all-time high, it had appeared that Arab leaders would be willing to set aside their differences to try to break the cycle of violence while improving the image of the Arab world.

Palestinians entered the conference hopeful that they could return to Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters with the full support of the Arab community, and the moral authority that would come from extending an olive branch to Israel.

Those hopes were diminished even before the summit began. More than half of the heads of state skipped the gathering, including the two most important moderate voices in the Arab world, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Mubarak first said he wasn’t attending because of domestic obligations, then amended that to say he was sitting out the conference in solidarity with Arafat. King Abdullah said he was “exhausted” from a recent working trip abroad.

But even with their seats empty, Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah tried to move his initiative forward.

In his 10-minute speech, the crown prince laid out a bare-bones plan in which Israel, in addition to returning to pre-1967 borders, would cede control of East Jerusalem to a new Palestinian state, while also allowing the return of Palestinian refugees.

“The time has come for Israel to put its trust in peace after it has gambled on war for decades without success,” the Saudi declared in a portion of the speech that he said was aimed at the Israeli people. “Israel, and the world, must understand that peace and the retention of the occupied Arab territories are incompatible and impossible to reconcile or achieve.”

The wording of the speech was changed slightly from a draft resolution a day earlier, reflecting an effort to satisfy some of the more hard-line members of the Arab League, primarily Syria.

From the moment Saudi Arabia launched its initiative, Syria has objected on two counts: It didn’t want to promise fully “normalized” relations with Israel, and it was upset that the plan did not guarantee the right of return for about 4 million Palestinian refugees.

In his speech, Abdullah did add the term “return of refugees”--an ambiguous phrase that is not the same as the “right of return,” which Israel rejects, yet is closer to what Syria had sought.

But the attempt at compromise language didn’t appear to work. Immediately after the crown prince was done, Syrian President Bashar Assad, while not objecting to the Saudi plan, said that the only way to achieve peace was to continue to support the Palestinian uprising, and to have the Arab world sever all political ties with Israel.

The latter was a shot at Egypt and Jordan, which have signed peace treaties with the Jewish state.

“Now is the time for action to save the Palestinian people from the massacres, from the new Holocaust, that they are being subjected to,” Assad said in his 45-minute speech.

But in the end, the Palestinians didn’t get a chance to speak for themselves. Lahoud had told members of the Palestinian delegation in the morning that Arafat couldn’t speak via satellite because there was no precedent for such an act. The delegation had objected, and Lahoud had agreed to allow Arafat to be beamed into the conference room when Assad was done, Palestinian officials said.

In Ramallah, Arafat was all ready to go. He sat patiently, for about three hours, waiting to read his speech to the gathering. But when Assad was finished, Lahoud called on someone else to go next.

The Palestinian delegation rose in a huff and walked out. The Saudi delegation followed suit. Although the Saudis didn’t formally withdraw from the conference, they told the Palestinians that they would if asked. Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian Cabinet minister, slammed the Lebanese president.

“The only way left to express himself to this conference was through the electronic entrance,” Shaath said of Arafat. “He was prevented from doing that by the president of this conference. Now we are out of the conference.”

In Ramallah, a disgusted Arafat gave his speech on the pan-Arab satellite TV network Al Jazeera, which broadcast it throughout the region.

“The Palestinian leadership confirms that it welcomes the enlightened, brave initiative launched by . . . Crown Prince Abdullah,” Arafat said. “This initiative, God willing, will turn into an Arab initiative at this summit for the peace of the brave between us and the Israeli and Jewish people.”

Back in Beirut, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa was trying to mediate the spat, which threatened to pull the plug on the second day of the summit. One non-Arab official said the skirmish demonstrated that the Arab world “never misses a chance to miss a chance.”

Sensing the public embarrassment that a complete collapse would mean for Lebanon, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri agreed to escort the Palestinian delegation back into the conference as a sort of public mea culpa on behalf of the president. The Lebanese also agreed to broadcast Arafat’s speech to the gathering, but because it had already appeared around the world via satellite, there was talk late Wednesday that perhaps they would just hand it out.

In any case, the whole affair proved a serious distraction from the substantive issues that the conference sought to address.

In addition to sidetracking the Saudi proposal, the Arafat imbroglio also took attention away from the Iraq-Kuwait dispute. Iraq was quietly trying to present itself as ready to end its impasse with Kuwait, whose invasion by Baghdad led to the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Iraq said it recognized Kuwaiti sovereignty and as a show of good faith announced that it was releasing a Kuwaiti detainee. Kuwait dismissed the Iraqi overtures as “sweet talk.”

Sheik Abdullah bin Zaid al Nahayan, the information minister of the United Arab Emirates, summed up the day’s events: “The summit is heading toward total chaos.”

Special correspondent Ranwa Yehia contributed to this report.