ALGIERS - Arab leaders next week will resurrect a three-year-old initiative for peace in the Middle East and assess the sluggish pace of reform in the region as they meet for a summit in Algeria.
Moderate Arab countries hope to resubmit the Arab peace initiative which their leaders put on the table at the 2002 Beirut summit, calling for peace with Israel in exchange for a full pullout from Arab lands.
Arab officials said the aim was to produce a comprehensive initiative with some "modifications in the language" of the original proposal, when the leaders meet on Tuesday and Wednesday in the Algerian capital Algiers.
"The aim is to re-articulate this initiative in a bid to make it clearer with unequivocal language, so as to make Israel a comprehensive Arab offer of peace," Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani Mulki said.
A senior Arab official said the initiative will be "written in language that cannot be interpreted differently by the various Arab countries and it will insist that peace is an undivided whole".
In an interview with Israel's Channel Two television earlier this month, Jordan's King Abdullah II said his country, along with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, were preparing to relaunch the plan, whose initial text in 2002 was the brainchild of Saudi Arabia.
But Arab officials contacted by AFP said that none of the delegations had received a draft of the modified initiative ahead of Algiers.
Efforts to push forward the Arab-Israeli peace process will also take into consideration the latest developments on the Palestinian-Israeli track, one official said.
Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas will make his debut at an Arab summit for the first time since his election in January, replacing veteran leader Yasser Arafat who died in November.
Iraq will also take center stage at the summit, which comes hot on the heels of the inaugural session of the first freely-elected parliament in half a century.
"The summit will reiterate Arab support to Iraq, namely in the upcoming elections, and it will insist on the need to preserve Iraq's Arab identity," a senior official told AFP.
Arab leaders who pledged at a summit last year to forge ahead with political reforms are also expected to voice a widely held belief that "hasty reforms only lead to the destabilisation of certain regimes," the official added.
At the 2004 summit in Tunis, Arab leaders agreed a 13-point reform programme pledging to pursue and intensify the process of political, economic, social and education reform, but according to their own national and cultural requirements, their religious values and their own "possibilities".
"An evaluation of the reforms adopted by Arab countries since the Tunis summit, show very little progress," said another Arab official who saw an assessment report drawn up by the 22-member Arab League.
"Maybe it was not such a good idea to have allowed each country to act on reforms according to their own possibilities," said the official on condition of anonymity.
"The Algiers summit could propose a global plan, spelling out priorities and the pace of reforms so that Arab countries implement collectively these reforms," the official said.
"It is clear that reforms cannot be imposed from the outside but at the same time this process must be organised in order to avoid internal outbursts that could affect the security of Arab countries," he added.
The leaders in Algiers are also expected to adopt an amendment to the Arab League charter calling for the creation of an Arab parliament, the official said.
The Lebanese crisis will also be an uninvited guest at the Arab summit, with diplomats saying the dispute will inevitably be discussed even though it does not figure on the official agenda.
03/18/2005 13:13 GMT