KUWAIT, (Reuters) – Arab leaders, at loggerheads over inter-Arab issues including Egypt and Syria, offered little evidence of progress after a two-day summit in Kuwait focused largely on avoiding further splits.
Gulf opposition to Qatar’s financial backing for Egypt’s Muslim Brother-hood and Islamist rebels in Syria burst into the open last month when Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador from Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain followed suit.
A declaration read out at the end of the summit said only that the 22 members of the Arab League would “pledge to work decisively to put a final end to divisions”.
It was not initially clear whether this even had the status of the communiques customarily issued after Arab League summits.
“The summit is not in agreement, even though Kuwait really tried,” one Western diplomat told Reuters. “The Saudis did not want it, they wanted to be very firm with Qatar. There are problems about the Brotherhood, the future of Egypt, Syria. Kuwait did all it could to have a consensus. But the Saudis are very firm.” A wave of uprisings that started in 2011 have fragmented the Arab world, deepening sectarian and ideological splits between and within states.
A decade of bloodshed in Iraq shows no sign of ending, Egypt, Libya and Yemen are in political turmoil, and there are sharp divides even between old Gulf allies, not least over the civil war in Syria, which has killed at least 140,000 people in three years.
AGREEING TO DISAGREE
“It seems they didn’t agree on anything except the Palestinian issue. Maybe the message was ‘We don’t want to rock the boat – let’s leave it at that’,” said Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdullah. “I think they agreed to disagree.”
The summit came three weeks after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain – Gulf states that usually keep their arguments behind closed doors – accused Qatar of disregarding an accord not to interfere in fellow Arab states’ internal affairs.
Officials have said the spat was over Qatar’s support for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was ejected from power by the military last year after mass protests against the Islamist president, Mohamed Mursi, and has now been outlawed.
