By Xinhua,
Kuwait City : Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Cairo-based Arab League, here Saturday underscored the pan-Arab bloc’s role in leading Arab action, warning against attacking against the AL role.
Moussa made the remarks at the opening session of a forum on Arab private sector and civil society, one of preparatory meetings for the first-ever Arab economic summit due to open on Monday, Kuwait’s official news agency KUNA reported.
“The Arab League leads Arab action and a stance needs to be taken against those attacking it, because this would mean knockingd own the Arab entity as a whole,” Moussa was quoted as saying.
He explained that the situation in Gaza, which is under massive Israeli attacks, has intensified tension and chaos among Arab states, and changed the “general mood” of the economic summit, which would lead to “great conflicts making Arab stance abnormal.”
The AL chief called for efforts to support the 22-member pan-Arab body, saying without the Arab League, “there is no Arab entity.”
He said though the Gaza crisis is a serious issue that needed an urgent solution, the underdevelopment in the Arab world was also a grave problem needed to be addressed.
He hailed the importance of the upcoming economic summit, which is the first for the Arab League to exclusively devote to Arab economic, development and social matters, gathering heads of state, politicians, businessmen and intellectuals.
Issues concerning Arab development, such as infrastructure, education, free trade and transportation, will be on the table of the two-day summit, which has been under preparation for more than one year, according to Moussa.
He urged for paying an attention to education which “forms an individual,” saying “standards of graduates were not consistent with the requirements of the labor market.”
The Kuwait summit was initiated by Arab leaders during the annual Arab summit in Riyadh in March 2007 as they found Arab national security has been affected by the economic and social underdevelopment.
The summit will approve some proposals and projects to improve Arab nations’ power linkage, roads and railways networks, food security and education.
An agreement on the Arab Customs Union plan is likely to be reached, according to the summit’s coordinator general Mervat Tellawi.
Following the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, the Gaza issue is expected to top the agenda of the summit.
Arab leaders are expected to review the latest developments in the Palestinian enclave, and to find a solution to end the Israeli attacks which began on Dec. 27 of 2008.