Agence France-Presse
RIYADH: Arab leaders kicked off a two-day summit in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday aiming to revive a dormant plan for peace with Israel and launch a diplomatic offensive to resolve the Middle East conflict. Several world figures, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, will attend the opening session in Riyadh, where security was tight as police blocked roads and military helicopters patrolled the skies.
Saudi Arabia, the political and oil powerhouse in the region, has been rocked by a wave of bombings and shootings blamed on suspected Al-Qaeda militants since May 2003.
Red carpets and streets lined with their national flags greeted heads of state who are expected to adopt resolutions on Iraq as well as Lebanon, which has been crippled by a months-long political crisis.
Only Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi is boycotting the summit.
The annual gathering comes after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appealed to Arab governments to begin reaching out to Israel by building on a peace blueprint first adopted at a summit in Beirut in 2002.
Foreign ministers from the 22-member Arab League agreed during preparatory talks on Monday to revive the plan and mandate working teams to seek to initiate negotiations.
The blueprint offers Israel full normalization of relations if it withdraws from all lands it occupied in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and permits the creation of a Palestinian state and the return of Palestinian refugees.
Saudi Arabia, a US ally and author of the blueprint, lobbied fellow Arab states to endorse the plan s revival. In doing so, it has leaned particularly on the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas which now leads a new unity government with the Fatah party of president Mahmud Abbas.
Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya is accompanying Abbas to the summit, which will express support for the unity cabinet and call for an end to a Western financial and diplomatic boycott imposed since Hamas first came to power a year ago.
If this initiative is destroyed, I do not believe that a better chance for peace will present itself in the near future, Abbas said.
Israel initially rejected the peace plan, but its leaders have recently spoken of it as a starting point for talks.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, however, said its insistence on the right of return of Palestinian refugees as a particular stumbling block.
Arab ministers said their offer of talks with all parties including Israel was intended to address such problems.
But Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal warned Israel not to expect any further diplomatic overtures.
What we have the power to do in the Arab world, we think we have done, Saud told London s The Daily Telegraph.
If Israel refuses [the Arab blueprint], that means it doesn t want peace and it places everything back in the hands of fate. They will be putting their future not in the hands of the peacemakers but in the hands of the lords of war.
Solana said he hoped that a meeting of the international Middle East peace quartet – EU, Russia, UN and United States – with key Arab players can be swiftly arranged to further the peace process.
We plan for the next Quartet meeting to take place in the region and if possible another one bringing together the so-called Arab Quartet, he told journalists.
European sources said initial plans were being made for a Quartet meeting in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh in the second half of April.
Eventually it is hoped to get Israel involved in the talks.
In contrast with the Palestinian show of unity, Lebanon is represented by two delegations, one led by pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud and the other by Western-backed Prime Minister Fouad Seniora.
Saudi-led efforts to break the deadlock in the run-up to the summit failed to yield a breakthrough, but King Abdullah held talks on Tuesday with Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad for the first time since relations chilled over last summer s Lebanon war and Syrian policy in its neighbour.
The summit is also expected to adopt a resolution calling for amendments to the Iraqi constitution to give more power to the former Sunni Arab elite.
