CAIRO: The next Secretary General of the Arab League will also be Egyptian because the headquarters are in Cairo, said Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit.
In an interview with terrestrial Channel One Thursday, Aboul Gheit said that an Egyptian will replace current head Amr Moussa after his second term expires next year, adding that there was an Arab consensus behind this decision.
Though he did add that some Arab countries wanted to rotate the post, Aboul Gheit insisted that issue was final for Egypt, and that the one time the head of the League was a non-Egyptian, the headquarters were moved to the Secretary General’s country in Tunisia.
Moussa’s term expires in 2011 and though there has been no official statement from the Arab League regarding his successor, there has been a lot of speculation in the press, including reports that President Hosni Mubarak may nominate Moussa for a third term.
Moussa has been the Secretary General of the Arab League since 2001, a post he assumed after he left the helm of Egypt’s Foreign Ministry. However, he has also spoken about the possibility of running for the 2011 Egyptian presidential elections.
Though he didn’t explicitly say that he intended to put his name forward as a presidential candidate, Moussa said that it was every citizen’s right to do so and hinted that he might contemplate running himself.
There was a clamor for Moussa to run in 2005 but he did not do so. Now the opposition’s hopes are pinned on former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, a former colleague of Moussa in the Egyptian foreign service.
Aboul Gheit said appointing a secretary general for the Arab League from the country where it is headquartered, made it easier for the head to carry out his tasks.
