Arab FMs Begin Meeting to Prepare for SummitArab foreign ministers began meeting in Cairo on Thursday to prepare for the Arab summit due at weekend.The preparatory meeting was expected to finalize the agenda of the Arab extraordinary summit and propose a draft final statement for the event, Egypt's newspapers reported. The Arab summit was prompted by the bloody clashes between the Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the past few weeks, which have left more than 100 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded. Arab leaders will try to forge a common position on supporting the Palestinians' struggle against Israeli occupation. Lebanon, the Palestinians and the United Arab Emirates have called for suspension of normalization process with Israel, clamping economic boycott on the Jewish state and steps to force it to withdraw from all occupied Arab territories. The summit may also discuss the situation in Iraq, which have been under international economic sanctions since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have expressed opposition to this procedure, saying that the summit should exclude the Iraqi issue. Surprisingly, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammad Said Al-Sahaf went along. "This summit is supposed to be devoted entirely to ways of supporting the (Palestinian) Intifada (uprising), we should not take up questions that will only divert attention from the focal issue," Sahaf was quoted by Egypt's English-language Al-Ahram weekly as saying. During the preparatory meeting, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa will brief the participants on the Middle East summit in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh on Monday and Tuesday, and its outcome. Arabs have criticized the Sharm el Sheikh summit, which brought together Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and United States President Bill Clinton, for failing to get Barak to sign an agreement on stopping Israeli excessive use of force against the Palestinians. But Mubarak told Egyptian television on Wednesday that the Sharm el Sheikh was a success for ending Israeli siege of Palestinian territories and further killing of innocent Palestinian civilians. He, meanwhile, cautioned that the upcoming Arab summit could not meet the demands of all the countries. |
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