Al-Ahram Weekly | Summit

Summit images

It was during the extraordinary Cairo summit of October 2000 that all 22 member states of the League agreed to annex to the charter of the organisation a resolution stipulating an annual meeting for all Arab leaders, or their representatives, in March at an Arab capital.

The first regular Arab summit convened in the Jordanian capital Amman in March 2001. Like the Beirut summit, the Amman meeting was preoccupied with two key issues: the Arab-Israeli conflict -- an issue that has haunted practically every Arab summit meeting since the late 1940s -- and the Iraq-Kuwait tensions that have cast their shadow over pan-Arab meetings since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990.

The invasion, shocking as it was, came in the wake of a long dispute over oil resources between Iraq and Kuwait. Arab attempts to resolve this dispute or to contain its grave consequences failed. Neither the May 1990 summit in Baghdad nor the August 1990 summit in Cairo managed to find a peaceful solution. This led to the military action conducted by massive Western, especially American forces as well as Arab forces, to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

Serving the cause of pan-Arabism was offered to the Arab peoples as the objective of the establishment of the Arab League in March 1945 with the membership of only seven Arab countries at the time: Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. However, the Arab League has not been particularly notable for its success in handling inter-Arab disputes.

And, just as Arabs failed to find an answer to the Kuwait-Iraq quarrel over oil resources and the consequent Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they also diverged dramatically, in the late 1970s, over the decision of Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat to sign with Israel a unilateral peace treaty. In 1978, an Arab summit convened in Baghdad in the absence of Egypt and decided to expel it from the Arab League. Consequently, the secretariat of the League was moved out of its Cairo headquarters to Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. This decision was reversed in the 1980s as a result of intensive diplomatic efforts exerted by President Hosni Mubarak who succeeded in rebuilding Egypt's bridges with the rest of the Arab world.

A notable exception in terms of settling inter-Arab disputes was the extraordinary Cairo summit in 1970. Thanks to the charismatic leadership of President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, that summit managed to get both King Hussein of Jordan and Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, to end a bloody battle between Jordanians and Palestinians. This summit concluded its work on 28 September, hours before Nasser passed away.

With Nasser's death, but especially in the wake of the 1973 October War, the cause of pan-Arabism was sidelined if not abandoned altogether. There were times where some Arab capitals even pondered the idea of closing down the Arab League altogether.

This caused the Arab organisation to go through a long slumber that prompted much criticism across the Arab world.

It was only last year, during the Amman summit, that the Arab League was given a new lease on life. In the Jordanian capital, Arab leaders voted the then Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa as the sixth secretary-general of the League and granted him a broad mandate to reform the structure of the organisation and to give the role of the secretary-general a higher political profile.

However, as Moussa himself admits, the revival of the Arab League is not something for the secretary-general to do alone. Such a daunting task depends on the political will of all 22 member states that need to find common ground to unify their ranks.

photos: Al-Ahram Archives, The Arab Leagueon-line photo gallery

Compiled by Dina Ezzat and Hani Mustafa

King Farouk of Egypt and King Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud of Saudi Arabia oversee the establishment of the Arab League

President Hosni Mubarak delivering the inaugural speech at the Cairo 2000 Summit

Arab leaders (from right to left: Yemen's Abdullah Saleh, Syria's Assad, Mubarak, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Algeria's Bouteflika, Qatar's Bin Khalifa and Jordan's Abdullah, during the Amman summit in March 2001

A preparatory committee of senior Arab officials, chaired by Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa El-Nahhas, meets in Alexandria on 25 September 1944 to prepare for the launching of the Arab League

Current Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Al-Sharaa during a ministerial meeting earlier this month at the Arab League to prepare for the Beirut Summit

El-Nahhas, Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia with Abdel-Rahman Azzam, the first secretary-general of the Arab League

Photographers and newsmen wait to take pictures of Arab leaders after long hours in closed-door sessions

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel-Nasser -- hours before he passed away on 28 September 1970 -- seeing off the Kuwaiti emir after an eventful summit in Cairo that ended a bloody military showdown between Palestinians and Jordanians

September 1964 -- Arab leaders meet in Alexandria for their second summit conference, attended by the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which declared the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Army

November 1973 -- leaders of a triumphant and exceptionally united Arab world meet in Algiers to coordinate joint strategy following the October War (from left to right President Boumedienne of Algeria, Al-Assad of Syria, Egypt's Sadat and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia

November 1978 -- unity gives way to rupture as an Arab summit meets in Baghdad without Egypt and suspends its League membership in punishment for its peace deal with Israel (in the photo, Syria's Assad addressing the summit)

the inauguration of the Arab League offices in Cairo's Tahrir Square

May 1990 -- Iraqi President Saddam Hussein gives a warm welcome to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia upon his arrival in Baghdad for an extraordinary Arab summit

August 1990 -- the emir of Kuwait during the tumultuous Arab summit held in Cairo a few days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

January 1964 -- in the first Arab League summit conference, held in Cairo, Arab leaders took residence at the newly established Nile Hilton Hotel, and rather than use the specially constructed tunnel connecting the hotel to the nearby League headquarters, chose to walk the short distance, to the resounding cheers of euphoric crowds.

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 March - 3 April 2002 Issue No.579
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map