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SEPTEMBER 1999, pages 132-134 Diplomatic Doings
On June 29 at Blair House in Washington, DC, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from St. John’s University in recognition of his efforts to promote peace in the Middle East. Rev. Donald J. Harrington, C.M., president of St. John’s, which has campuses in Queens and Staten Island in New York and also a campus in Rome, decided to confer the degree two years ago to recognize President Mubarak’s extraordinary dedication to the cause of peace and his significant achievements as Egypt’s leader. After a distinguished military career, Hosni Mubarak became “a statesman and a man of peace,” Harrington said. Mubarak became vice president of Egypt in 1975 and visited every Arab capital to explain then-President Anwar Sadat’s policy and Egypt’s peace initiative with Israel, paving the way for the Camp David accord. Mubarak managed to preserve unity and restore cordial relationships with Arab states after forging diplomatic ties with Israel had caused Egypt to be ostracized in the Arab world. Following Sadat’s assassination, Mubarak became president of Egypt, vowing in his inaugural address to honor the Camp David accord and pursue a comprehensive Middle East peace. Rev. Harrington said Mubarak has been “particularly concerned about the wide gulf between the rich and poor in his country, unwavering in his belief that ‘social justice is the first rule for peace and stability in society.’ President Mubarak also has undertaken a comprehensive plan for educational reform that has included a review of all school programs at every level, improving teacher preparation and development.” St. John’s enjoys academic partnership with Cairo University and Ain-Shams University, providing more than 300 Egyptian secondary school teachers with advanced training at St. John’s campuses. Rev. Harrington added that by hosting Egyptian students St. John’s benefits from “the addition to our university community of the rich Egyptian culture, which now comes to us by virtue of the very presence and participation of these men and women from your country.” —Delinda Hanley Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Mack, vice president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, briefed 29 Bahraini officials, businessmen and bankers on U.S. Middle East policy formulation at the Bahrain Embassy on July 14. In brief opening remarks Bahraini Ambassador Abdul Ghaffar Abdalla, who hosted the program for an invited audience of retired and serving U.S. civilian and military officials and business people concerned with the Middle East, described the program that had brought the Bahrainis to the United States as part of an executive development project. In his talk Mack, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, said there are two competing currents, realism and idealism, in U.S. foreign policymaking. In the Arabian Gulf, Mack said, the U.S. interest is to safeguard the free flow of petroleum and to prevent any one power from dominating the area, which contains about 60 percent of the world’s reserves of oil and natural gas. Career foreign affairs professionals have a lot to do with forming and carrying out policy there. On the Arab-Israel issue, domestic American politics prevail. The Congress, the media and the pro-Israel lobby are generally dominant. Referring to the imminent visit to Washington by new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, however, Mack expressed the hope that President Bill Clinton would read President George Washington’s farewell address, in which the first American president warned against “passionate attachments” to any foreign country. Ambassador Mack referred to instances in which the United States had forced Israel’s hand rather than letting friends of Israel drive U.S. policy, but noted that conditions had to be just so for this to happen. One such occasion was in 1957 when President Dwight Eisenhower, who enjoyed such immense personal popularity that he could defy pro-Israel elements in the media and elsewhere, forced Israel to evacuate the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, which Israeli forces had seized the previous year. Another such occasion involved President George Bush and Secretary of State James Baker, who enjoyed great public approval because of their handling of the Gulf war, pushing a reluctant Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to attend the 1991 Arab-Israeli peace conference in Madrid, which began the current Middle East peace process. On the other hand, President Clinton’s efforts to further that process came to an abrupt halt when Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres was unable to win in Israel’s 1995 election, although it was clear to Mack that Clinton had tried hard but unsuccessfully to support the Peres campaign. —Andrew I. Killgore
President Ahmad Yousef (standing below) of the United Association for Studies and Research (UASR), a Muslim think tank headquartered in Springfield, VA, a suburb of the U.S. national capital, is pictured welcoming a delegation of Iranian journalists on a get-acquainted visit to the U.S national capital. USAR held a small reception for the journalists, who had visited the National Press Club the previous evening and were accompanied by two diplomats from the Iranian Interests section of the Embassy of Pakistan. The group listened to warm welcoming remarks by some of the Arab-American, African-American and Pakistani-American Muslims assembled to greet them, thanked their non-Farsi-speaking hosts through an interpreter for the meal and friendly hospitality, and left without further comment, pleading another engagement. Puzzled American participants were left no wiser about the prospects of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement, and may have to await the arrival of Iranian newspapers to learn whether the journalists’ reticence was due to U.S. or Iranian diplomatic constraints, or maybe just jet lag. —Richard Curtiss
The Tunisian Embassy and the Hannibal Club USA held an award dinner honoring Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI) June 21 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. Ambassador of Tunisia Noureddine Mejdoub welcomed the guests and briefly described the historical ties between his country and the United States. Senator Ted Stevens also discussed Tunisia’s contributions as well as Senator Inouye’s service to his country. The audience watched a film that told the story of Hannibal Club USA and then another film describing Sen. Inouye’s lifetime achievements. The film noted that Pearl Harbor was the last day of the senator’s boyhood and it described his distinguished military career. He went from soldier to statesman, representing his state with 36years of service. He may have one of the longest commutes to the office from his home in Hawaii, 5,000 miles from DC. The film went on to describe the senator’s pivotal role in both the Nixon Watergate and Iran-Contra proceedings. The president of the Hannibal Club USA, Ambassador Robert H. Pelletreau, Jr., introduced Senator Inouye, who thanked his hosts for the award. Inouye said that though few Americans know very much about Tunisia or could find it on a map, Tunisia’s help in trying to help liberate Europe in World War II and restart the stalled Middle East peace talks will always be remembered. He thanked Tunisia for its past efforts and continuing work for peace. “Sometimes superpowers conveniently forget lesser powers, but the U.S. remembers friends big and small,” Inouye said. “That’s what makes the U.S. great. We have not forgotten Tunisia and will not forget,” Sen. Inouye concluded. —Delinda Hanley SIDEBAR
(Left to Right) U.S. Representative of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Soona Samsani, and Representatives James Traficant (D-OH), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) and Gary Ackerman (D-NY) at July 1 meeting in the Rayburn House Office Building to protest U.S. State Department policy on Iran. The meeting followed a decision by a federal appeals court panel upholding the State Department listing of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran as a terrorist organization. The judges said that although they upheld Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s decision, the law gave them little authority to do otherwise, because they have “no way of judging” the accuracy of the materials presented by the State Department to support the decision. The three legislators called upon the State Department to support organizations fighting for democracy in Iran. “Organizations such as the Mojahedin should be afforded the opportunity to argue their case prior to any State Department designations,” Traficant said. “The process must and should be changed so that future designations are based on facts—not hearsay or politics.” —Richard Curtiss |
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