Rulers' common position is sitting on the fence

ARAB OPINION: The Arab world has remained quieter than expected, reports Michael Jansen

ARAB OPINION: The Arab world has remained quieter than expected, reports Michael Jansen

The Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmad Maher, summed up the common position adopted by Arab rulers when he said this week: "Everybody is sitting on the fence."

The fence they are sitting on runs between the US, which dominates the region, and their own people, who oppose the war and are growing more anti-US by the day.

Mr Maher said the Arabs, rulers and people, are agreed on one thing: that a way must be found "to end this war".

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Egypt has permitted its people to express their anger over the war by staging the largest anti-war rallies in the Middle East.

The government's fence-sitting was exposed when the world's senior Sunni Muslim cleric, the rector of Cairo's al-Azhar University, Dr Muhammad Sid Tantawi, was permitted to issue a fatwa, a religious ruling, calling for a jihad against the powers prosecuting this war.However, Egyptian volunteers for the jihad have been prevented from departing for Baghdad and had their passports invalidated.

Since no US or British troops are in Egypt and no use is being made of the country's bases, Egypt is under much less popular political pressure than Jordan.

The government admits that US troops are in the kingdom, refuses to give numbers and says they are training Jordanians on new F-16 warplanes and manning Patriot anti-missile batteries defending the country.

Most Jordanians do not buy this line. Rumour has it that at the outset of the war some 6,000 US troops were in the east of the country and there is speculation that commando units based here were involved in the capture of two Iraqi airfields in the desert east of the Jordanian border.

While more than 5,000 Iraqi residents, the majority of military age, have been permitted to return home, Jordanian and Arab volunteers have not been allowed to enter Iraq from Jordan.

Concerned that the government's refusal to condemn the war and refuse facilities to the United States is harming Jordan's monarchical system of government, 95 Jordanian political figures of all persuasions signed a petition calling on King Abdullah to condemn the war and intensify efforts to end it.

Among the signatories were prime ministers, intelligence and army chiefs, former ministers and deputies, a communist and a thrice-jailed independent Islamist.

Mr Laith Shubeilat, the Islamist who was the prime mover behind the petition, summed up the situation of the Arab rulers.

President Bush, he said, "is so arrogant that he did not accommodate his secret allies among the Arabs by providing a UN fig leaf for the war. Now that there is no fig leaf, he expects them to stand by him and they are," at great political expense to themselves.

The Syrian Prime Minister, Mr Mustafa Miro, condemned the war as "illegal and unjustified and a violation of international legitimacy", terms used by Arab leaders except those of Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, the countries providing facilities for the prosecution of the campaign.

He also denied US charges that Damascus was allowing military supplies to transit across Syrian territory to Iraq. Syria has also permitted several thousand Iraqis to go home.

Arab volunteers have not been permitted to cross into Iraq by frontier posts but are said to be crossing by smugglers' routes.

Saudi Arabia has, according to US media reports, granted US forces the right to direct air and missile attacks from the Prince Sultan airbase south of Riyadh. The Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, also asked President Saddam Hussein to "sacrifice himself for his country," suggesting that he should stand down.

Qatar, which hosts the joint forces headquarters and has provided a major airbase, relies on Arab nationalist credentials provided by the highly popular Arabic satellite television station, al-Jazeera, which broadcasts war news from the Arab perspective.

The Gulf port of the US Fifth Fleet, Bahrain made a vain attempt to avert war as president of the Arab summit.

The rulers of Kuwait are unapologetic about allowing the US and Britain to use 60 per cent of the emirate's territory to launch their offensive and are co-operating fully with the US war effort in spite of rising resentment among Kuwaitis, particularly the Islamists.