JEDDAH, 14 September 2004 — The Gulf Cooperation Council announced yesterday that the six-member group backed the UN Security Council Resolution that calls for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Lebanon.
“The GCC supports the latest Security Council resolution that demands withdrawal of all forces from Lebanon,” Kuwait’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Muhammad Al-Sabah, chairman of the GCC Ministerial Council, said.
Sheikh Muhammad was talking to reporters after a two-day meeting of the GCC foreign ministers in Jeddah. “This is an old GCC stand,” the Saudi Press Agency quoted Sheikh Muhammad as saying.
The Security Council resolution, adopted earlier this month, called on all foreign forces to leave Lebanon without mentioning Syria by name.
The GCC meeting denounced all acts of terror worldwide including the school hostage bloodbath in southern Russia and the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
“Islam is based on justice and considers attacks on innocent people a crime,” said the meeting’s final communiqué read by GCC Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Al-Attiyah.
Ministers also hit out at Israeli threats to take their war against Palestinian militant groups to their offices in Damascus if necessary.
“Such threats escalate tension in the region, and do not serve international efforts to revive the (Middle East) peace process,” Attiyah said.
Referring to the protracted island row between the UAE and Iran, Sheikh Muhammad said the GCC would be forced to take the issue to the International Court of Justice if Tehran fails to settle it through negotiations.
He reiterated GCC’s demand to make the Middle East region free of weapons of mass destruction. “The GCC has demanded that Israel must give international inspectors access to its nuclear facilities, not Iran alone,” he said, while answering another question.
