A 22-nation Arab summit tackling the region’s crises, despite splits over Iran and Turkey, was cut back to a single day Monday due to the absence of the heavyweight leaders.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi stayed at home because of “a busy domestic schedule,” an Arab League source said.
Opening the talks, Egypt’s premier Sherif Ismail called in the name of El-Sisi 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, he added.
Mauritania’s head of state Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who is hosting the summit, also slammed the “blind violence of terrorists” as well as foreign interventions that feed instability in the Arab world.
The summit, originally scheduled for two full days, is to focus primarily on security and on plans for a joint force across a region fraught with tension, notably in Libya, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and the Palestinian territories.
Also present were the heads of state of Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Comoros and Djibouti as well as the premiers of Lebanon and Libya. It is the first Arab League summit hosted by Mauritania since it joined the organization in 1973.
The Mauritanian president also called for fresh efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that regional instability would continue until the issue was settled.
Meanwhile, comments by Lebanese health minister on a local TV show in which he questioned Mauritania’s ability to host top delegations triggered a spat between the two countries.
Lebanese officials were attacked by journalists and on social media.
“They don’t have the infrastructure and it’s miserable,” said Abu Faour. “The summit will be held inside a tent,” he added.
The minister later clarified on TV that his statements were not meant against the people of Mauritania and said he got his information from a Lebanese delegation.
Prominent Palestinian journalist Abdul-Bari Atwan criticized Lebanese politicians in a column he wrote in his online Rai Al-Youm newspaper.
“We don’t understand the arrogance by leaders who claim they are Arabs, toward a country like Mauritania whose only guilt is that it is a poor country that does not have oil or gold,” Atwan wrote.
Mauritanian journalist Naji Mohammed Al-Imam wrote in the daily Al-Wahdawi that Abu Faour “lives amid mountains of trash” and described Salam as a prime minister “by coincidence.”

Source : Arab News