On the 25th of this month there will be an Arab summit in Kuwait, a little more than two weeks from today. It’s the 38th meeting to be held at this level since the Arabs decided almost half a century ago to convene such high-level meetings to discuss key issues facing the Arab world.
A few years back, after a long pause, they decided to make the summit an annual event, though not successfully all the time. Kuwait’s hosting of the event this time faces a difficult task — almost impossible in some of its aspects — to bring to an end the little Arab cold war which sprang out of the Arab Spring.
On the one hand the Gulf house, so to speak, is not in good order, and seems almost divided. Publicly, for the first time, the rift between some Gulf states and Qatar is quite a noticeable issue appearing in the daily papers.
Things came to an unprecedented head as Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain withdraw their envoys from Doha last week because of the sharp differences over political developments in Egypt, as Qatar sees it — through Al Jazeera television — as a military codetta. Furthermore Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE are not pleased with the support Qatar is providing to the Muslim Brotherhood movement, viewed by the three nations, as not friendly in the least.
On the other hand Qatar has been hosting Egyptian cleric Yousuf Al Qaradawi for a good number of years. The cleric publicly interfered in local issues of the UAE, making the authorities so dissatisfied with Doha to the extent that they summoned their ambassador in protest.
Kuwaiti Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Shaikh Subah Al Khaled, known for his careful diplomacy, has been shuttling between Cairo and Doha but so far with no tangible results.
A few months back, Kuwait’s Emir Shaikh Sabah Al Ahmad used his well-known diplomacy skills to bridge the gap between Riyadh and Doha. A number of meetings at summit level were held but these are yet to yield any results.
The coming summit is also expected to witness a number of absentees as well:
* The Algerians will not show up as they are in middle of preparations for elections in which an ailing President Abdul Aziz Bouteflika is seeking a fourth term.
* Tunisia’s interim president is facing demands at home to step down if he wants to contest the presidential elections.
* Egypt so far has a caretaker president who cannot enter into a long-term commitments.
* Yemen is in the same category while Libya has no head of state.
* Lebanon’s president, apart from other difficulties he is facing at home, is left with only a few months to step down, while the Sudanese president is being hunted by the International Court of Justice.
These are not the only challenges facing the coming summit.
The Arabs are facing more than protocol weaknesses. The sharply divergent views on the bloody fighting in Syria are one issue, which will separate the gathering between two forces — with the majority supporting the Syrian opposition and the minority backing the regime.
One obvious case is Iraq, which does not hide its staunch support for Damascus. Some reports have stated that there are some Iraqi forces fighting beside the Bashar Al Assad regime.
The Syrians will be represented by the opposition but the opposition, as it is now, is fragmented and in disarray with millions of Syrians in the diaspora. Geneva 2, the international effort to bring peace, has failed with no obvious alternatives. One expects them to achieve very little at the summit for their cause even though they will be the sole representative of the state of Syria!
Terrorism is quite a new issue facing the coming summit in Kuwait. It is an international and pan-Arab issue as it is almost everywhere in the Arab lands from Egypt to Bahrain and from Algeria to Aden. Terrorists are working to destabilise regimes, engaging governments in combat and depleting precious resources badly needed for development.
In some countries some deep political reforms need to be introduced to quell spread of terrorism, while others need to step up educational reforms and achieve some sort of social equality.
The odd thing is that the Arab summit meetings started a long time ago to achieve one goal — that is, to support the Palestinians’ cause, but that issue has almost disappeared from the agenda except for a few words here or there in the final statement.
A recent court ruling in Cairo, naming Hamas, the controlling political body in Gaza, as a terrorist group and banning it in Egypt, was the final straw in the long involvement of Palestinians or some of them in internal Arab affairs.
The whole picture is unpleasant. Kuwait has in its hands a volatile political situation, contradicting opinions and hard-to-please members.
These are the acute obstacles facing the coming Arab summit in a few weeks and I am certain that new challenges could come along, taking into consideration the state of uncertainty engulfing the whole region and the world.
— Mohammad Alrumaihi is a professor of Political Sociology at Kuwait University.