Arab Crises Prove to Be Too Big for League to Handle

With vague promises of political reform, fretting over Arab bloodshed and a heavy mood of powerlessness, Arab leaders on Sunday barely managed to finish their annual summit.

Leaders of the Arab League publicly insisted that they had made history with their calls for human rights and modernization. But there was no hint of how or when reforms would come about, and few analysts held out much hope that change would unfold anytime soon.

The closing ceremony ended with the Tunisian foreign minister beseeching a rowdy throng of reporters to give the gathering “positive” coverage.

During the two-day summit, the heavily guarded conference hall had more than a few empty chairs. Eight Arab rulers, including Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Abdullah, did not attend. Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi showed up just long enough to flounce back to Libya in disgust Saturday. A slow and quiet exodus followed, as leaders headed to the airport overnight, leaving underlings to settle into their seats. Only four Arab leaders remained Sunday.

Under pressure to hammer out a consensus at a time of bitter regional crisis, the leaders pledged solidarity with their brethren in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories, but they pushed the responsibility for straightening out the region’s deepest woes onto the U.N. and the international community.

“We are in a very critical time, and it’s needed, of course, to be unified,” said a high-ranking Egyptian official who attended the summit. “But the issues are bigger than the summit, so it will not be fruitful.”

A few days before the gathering, an Arab League spokesman, Hossam Zaki, said the statements about Iraq would be “full of condemnation, because everything that happened there is worth condemning.”

Compared with the red-hot rhetoric in Arab coffee shops and editorial pages, the leaders’ words on Iraq were muted. They did not criticize the United States by name or set a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign soldiers. Nor did they lay the blame for Iraqi casualties at the feet of the U.S.-led coalition.

Instead, the rulers called for the United Nations to take a larger role in Iraq, bemoaned the use of excessive force by the “occupying forces” and condemned the “terrorist explosions” that kill Iraqi civilians.

The leaders sounded the sharpest note when they decried “the crimes and inhumane and immoral practices committed by the occupying soldiers against the Iraqi prisoners.” They called for the soldiers to be punished.

Arab rulers find themselves in a diplomatic bind over Iraq. Public anger over the occupation of Iraq, an Arab nation of profound historical and religious importance, is ever more intense, but the leaders balk at the idea of the security vacuum that the retreat of U.S. soldiers would create.

“There’s some kind of condemnation [of the occupation], but in light words, not in severe terms. In such a situation, it’s difficult to say more,” said Wahid Abdel Meguid of Cairo’s Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.

Some Iraqi officials have recently called on Arab countries to send troops to Iraq. Most Arab leaders say that is out of the question during the U.S.-led occupation, but some say they would be willing to send soldiers if the U.N. took charge.

“There’s not even such a question,” Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said Sunday. “What we have now is an occupation, and we can’t support an occupation.”

As expected, the rulers railed against Israeli violence and called for a return to peace talks and a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli fighting. They also condemned terrorism and civilian casualties -- and for the first time acknowledged Israeli civilian bloodshed.

The unprecedented pledges to enact reforms came in response to pressure from the United States, which leaked a draft paper this year calling for broad political modernization in the Arab world. Deeply sensitive to the appearance of foreign tampering -- and unsettled by the fate of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- Arab leaders insisted that they would come up with a reform agenda.

“The bottom line is that all the Arabs agree they don’t want real reform, but they’re very divided over how to react to the United States,” said Michael Young, a political analyst in Lebanon. “Everybody here is sort of going through the motions.”

Arab spokesmen bustled about after the summit, congratulating themselves on making it through the gathering. But in a raucous news conference with Moussa and Tunisian Foreign Minister Habib ben Yahia, Arab reporters demanded to know why the league had not taken a stronger tone on the Palestinian plight, the occupation of Iraq and reform.

“You’re talking live to 250 million Arab citizens,” one reporter called out.

Looking out over the dozens of Arab and foreign journalists, Ben Yahia pleaded for “positive criticism.”

“You have criticized our ways of working, criticized the convening of the summit,” he said wearily. “Please give us time. Do not weaken the credibility of the Arabs. We need criticism, of course, but positive self-criticism to move ahead and not feel defeated. We ask you to help us get better credibility.”

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Times staff writer Jailan Zayan in Tunis contributed to this report.