Arab summit cut short as leaders stay away

NOUAKCHOTT // An Arab League summit to tackle the Middle East’s various crises was cut back to a single day of talks yesterday because of the absence of heavyweights Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah El Sisi stayed at home because of “a busy domestic schedule” while the absence of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman was down to “health reasons”, an Arab League source said.

Mr El Sisi’s office said yesterday that the Egyptian president would not be attending the summit but gave no reason.

Opening the talks, the Egyptian prime minister Sherif Ismail called for “an Arab strategy of struggle against terrorism”.

“We must recast the religious language that terrorist elements exploit to their own ends to sow terror, death and destruction.”

He said terrorists were deflecting Islam’s message of peace.

Mauritania’s head of state Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the summit host, also slammed the “blind violence of terrorists” as well as foreign interventions that fed instability in the Arab world.

He also called for fresh efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that regional instability would continue until the issue was settled.

This was the first Arab League summit to be hosted by Mauritania since it joined the 22-nation organisation in 1973. The summit was attended by the heads of state of Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Comoros, Djibouti and Sudan, as well as the prime ministers of Lebanon and Libya. The UAE delegation to the summit was led by Sheikh Hamad Al Sharqi, Ruler of Fujairah. He was accompanied by Sultan Al Mansouri, the Minister of Economy; Dr Anwar Gargash, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs; Mohammed Al Dhanhani, the director of the Fujairah Amiri Diwan; Juma Al Junaibi, the UAE Ambassador to Egypt and Permanent Representative to the Arab League; Saif Sultan Al Samahi, Adviser to the Ruler of Fujairah; and Isa Al Kalbani, the UAE Ambassador to Nouakchott.

The summit, originally scheduled for two days, was to focus primarily on security and on plans for a joint security force across a region fraught with tension, notably in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and the Palestinian Territories.

However pre-summit ministerial talks showed there were sharp divisions over attitudes towards the tension between Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as over Turkey’s incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan.