Embrace sign of improving Iraqi-Saudi relations

ON THE NEWS Rula Amin: Arab League discussing Israel and Iraq sanctions

Kuwaiti still far from reconciliation with Iraq

By CNN Middle East correspondent Jane Arraf

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- It was the kind of embrace repeated hundreds of times at the Arab summit: the traditional kiss on the cheek that accompanies every cordial hello in the Arab world.

But this one was between the top-ranking Saudi at the summit, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, and the head of Iraq's delegation, Izzat Ibrahim. Diplomats say this highest-level contact between the two countries in 10 years, played out in front of the television cameras, was a gesture indicating the ice is starting to thaw between Saudi Arabia and the neighbor it went to war against a decade ago.

As for Kuwait, whose invasion by Iraq began the war, officials wouldn't even meet their Iraqi counterparts face-to-face in the same room. Kuwait made clear at the summit that reconciliation with Iraq has its price -- a price that an increasingly confident Iraq is unwilling to pay.

VIDEO A summary of what the summit accomplished, from CNN's Ben Wedeman Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)     MESSAGE BOARD Arab League summit     ALSO Arab summit calls for end to U.N. sanctions against Iraq

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein wasn't at the summit. He was shown on Iraqi television Wednesday meeting with military officials in Iraq. He hasn't left the country since the Gulf War, part of the stringent security measures that have kept him alive. No one believed he was about to do it for a summit with so little chance of a breakthrough on relations with Kuwait or abandoning U.N. sanctions.

After all the closed-door wrangling over rebuilding Arab unity a decade after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the final communique left out any mention of the issue. Reference to Iraq was relegated to the less-significant Amman Declaration, a statement that called on King Abdullah II of Jordan to hold further consultations to reconcile the two neighbors.

Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah insisted on putting on record at the closing session that all countries except Iraq approved its draft on the "situation" between Iraq and Kuwait. That resolution would have called on Iraq to respect Kuwait's sovereignty and referred to Iraq complying with U.N. resolutions -- both issues Iraq feels it has already done.

Iraq though, says it was Kuwait that earlier scuttled an agreement. Iraqi officials say Arab leaders meeting Wednesday morning agreed to a draft proposed by Iraq that called for the lifting of sanctions as well as respecting the sovereignty of other countries and investigating the fate of Kuwait and Iraqi "prisoners and missing."

The officials said when the Iraqi delegation left the meeting to allow the Saudi and Kuwaiti leaders to join the talks -- ties are still that bad -- Kuwait rejected the deal.

Iraqi officials say their reference to Kuwaiti prisoners and missing is a concession. Iraq denies that it is holding Kuwaiti prisoners of war and has called for an Arab League team to go to both countries to investigate.

Iraq though isn't wringing its hands over the lack of agreement to try to lift sanctions. Its billions of dollars of oil revenue have broken down a lot of the barriers to better ties with its Arab neighbors and with other countries.

The United States, in a tacit admission that sanctions have broken down, has been trying to persuade Iraq's neighbors to tighten their borders. "A resolution that sanctions should be lifted would have just spelled out what almost all Arab countries already believe," said a Baghdad-based diplomat.

If the summit was divided on Iraq, it was united at least on the spirit of condemning Israel over its attacks on Palestinians, if not how to make that condemnation concrete.

Hussein, who has fashioned himself as the champion of the Palestinian cause, raised the stakes in the deadly game of religious strife with a call in his speech sent to the Amman summit for God to "damn the Jews."

The Iraqi leader in recent speeches has turned from the usual condemnation of Zionists to denouncing the entire Jewish people. His statements would appear to put him at odds with the Koran, the Moslem holy book, which accords respect to Jews and Christians as among the "people of the book" -- those to whom scriptures have been revealed by God.

Although there is no evidence in Iraq that it's anything but rhetoric, the Iraqi President has increasingly talked of a Holy War to liberate all of Palestine and says he has the volunteers to do it - as unarmed as they may be.

Arab leaders welcomed an Iraqi pledge to give Palestinian territories suffering from an Israeli blockade a billion euros, about $900 million. The United States and some other members of the U.N. Security Council though have rejected that idea.

Iraq divides Arab world
March 26, 2001
Arab League: The issues
March 26, 2001

The Iraqi Presidency
United Nations

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