A few days ago the leaders of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) held a consultative summit in Riyadh. The Kingdom’s Foreign Minister, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, declined to reveal what decisions, if any, were made by the leaders. He said the decisions would be revealed at the next official GCC summit.
The joint communiqué issued at the end of the summit contained nothing new. Like statements issued after previous GCC summits, the communiqué was loaded with the utterly predictable: Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, the fight against terrorism and reform emanating from within, the progress of the joint GCC march and joint cooperation in economic, social, media, military and security areas.
All of these are important issues. But there are too many of them to discuss and decide upon in only one summit. Assuming that technical committees have met earlier and prepared recommendations on the issues, it would still be difficult for the leaders to review all the recommendations and issue resolutions covering every single topic in just one session.
Perhaps the most obvious flaw of most Arab meetings, whether at the summit or other levels, is the large number of items contained on the agenda.
The result is all those decorative and almost identical statements that follow each meeting. Because of the same, incessantly- repeated words and expressions, any man on the street feels he could easily draft the final statement from a summit or a conference even before it begins. I think if summits and meetings were limited to discussing and deciding on just one topic it would be more realistic, credible and practical than what happens today.
It would be a thousand times better for the GCC to reserve its official summits for debating external issues, regional and international, and allocate the consultative summits to discuss and decide on one important domestic issue that concerns their people instead of having the same topics dominate the final statement each time a conference is held.
