JEDDAH, 21 May 2004 — Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the foreign minister, will lead the Kingdom’s delegation to the Arab summit in Tunisia on May 22, a statement from the Royal Court said yesterday.
The delegation will include Finance Minister Ibrahim Al-Assaf and Haj Minister Ayad Madani, the statement said.
Bahrain’s King Hamad ibn Issa Al-Khalifa, the current summit chair, has delegated the Gulf country’s prime minister to represent him at the meeting. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is also staying away.
Officials in Tunis said leaders at the summit in Tunis were expected to adopt a final declaration on the need for good governance and the fight against terrorism.
Entitled “Development and Modernization” the five-page document stresses the importance of “good governance with transparency in all areas, a widening of participation in the decision-making process, and political freedom”, according to one senior official who wanted to remain anonymous.
The document speaks of the “struggle against terrorism and the action that must be taken by Arab countries to fight this plague, notably the dismantling of terrorist networks”, he said.
The declaration, one of several due to be adopted at the summit, stems from ideas put forward by Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Tunisia and Yemen and was approved at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Cairo earlier this month.
Tunisia initially aborted the two-day summit, originally scheduled for late March, because of differences over its proposals for democratic reform in the Arab world.
The new declaration stresses the “importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict which must be regulated to allow the development of political reform”, said another Arab official.
He said it was impossible to “start reforms as if the conflict did not exist.”
