TRIPOLI, 26 May 2003 — Libya has dropped its plan to withdraw from the Arab League, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said here yesterday at the end of a meeting with Libyan leader Muammer Qaddafi.
“Libya has renounced its withdrawal from the League and this decision was obtained because I personally insisted on this with Mr. Qaddafi, who agrees,” Mubarak told reporters.
Libya had reiterated as late as early April its decision to withdraw from the 22-member Arab League in protest over the group’s inability to take “a firm and strong position” toward the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Qaddafi has also several times in the past threatened to quit the Cairo-based League over its impotence, notably over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In March he also added that Libya “is above all an African country ... the African Union (AU) is sufficient enough.”
The country’s withdrawal was frozen after heavy lobbying by Mubarak and Arab League chief Amr Moussa.
Under League rules, a member wishing to quit must also lodge an official demand, which Tripoli had not done. The withdrawal would have then become effective one year later.
Mubarak’s talks with Qaddafi were also expected to have focused on postwar Iraq and developments in the Middle East, Libyan officials said. Egyptian officials in Libya told AFP the two leaders also discussed the Sudan peace process and bilateral relations.
The League, which was sharply divided over the war in Iraq, has been the subject of much talk lately, with Arab leaders looking at proposals to reform the body in order to make it an effective force in the face of future crises.
Mubarak, who arrived in Tripoli earlier yesterday, was accompanied by his foreign and information ministers Ahmed Maher and Safwat Al-Sherif. The two countries are also working together to propose solutions for the 20-year civil war in Sudan.
Sudanese rebel leader John Garang met with opposition leaders Sadeq Al-Mahdi and Mohammed Osman Al-Mirghani in Cairo Saturday. They rallied their support for the peace talks under way in Kenya between Garang’s rebels and the Khartoum government.
