What the Dead Sea meeting was all about

Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi assembled and held informal talks with the foreign ministers of Egypt, Kuwait, the UAE, Bahraini and Saudi Arabia on Thursday at a Dead Sea retreat.

The most that was disclosed about the "fraternal" meeting was that it was held at the King Hussein Bin Talal Convention Centre at the Dead Sea, and that it was some sort of a "retreat gathering", with no agenda.

Convening a high level Arab meeting without any agenda in mind sounds surprising and counterproductive. Yet, this is how Safadi described his meeting with five Arab foreign ministers! The scope of the brotherly get together, we were told, covered regional and bilateral relations. This does not say very much really! What is worse is that the meeting ended without a final communiqué.

It is all well and good to hold informal talks between six Arab foreign ministers, but convening such a gathering without a specific purpose in mind sounds that it was too informal and inconclusive to serve any specific purpose.

Of course, Foreign Minister Safadi had held talks with each and every Arab foreign minister who attended the Dead Sea retreat before, and what he may have discussed this time cannot go beyond what he had already discussed and agreed upon before.

Yet, there can be no harm in having six select Arab foreign ministers get together and engage in a colloquium of sorts to sort out their stances on major regional conflicts, and consolidate their positions on them. Small talk can often lead to big talks, and maybe the Dead Sea colloquium, if that is what it was, was just that.

If, in fact, there was in the six-party gathering more than meets the eye, the six foreign ministers should have made a statement of sorts about the nature and scope of their informal small talks. Keeping the Arab world in suspense about what the six foreign ministers had agreed upon would be counterproductive to say the least.

It is no longer enough to say that the six foreign ministers discussed and agreed upon major regional issues. The region expects much more than that. The expression of some vague description of what the Dead Sea talks was all about is not what the Arab world expects.