March 18, 2010 - The Daily Star - Lebanon Moussa tries to coax Lebanon into attending summit

BEIRUT: Arab League chief Amr Moussa arrived in Beirut on Wednesday hoping to resolve a diplomatic dispute with Libya over the disappearance of an influential Lebanese cleric 32 years ago.
Moussa’s two-day visit kicked off to a bad start with a press conference in which he and Foreign Minister Ali Shami disagreed over whether Lebanon had formally requested the issue of Imam Musa al-Sadr’s disappearance be added to the Arab summit’s agenda. The summit is due to be held in Libya for the first time ever from March 27-28.
“If Lebanon wants the issue of Sadr to be on the agenda, it should ask. Lebanon has full membership in the Arab League,” Moussa told reporters.
Shami said he had indeed requested Sadr’s disappearance be added at a recent meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo. “I repeat that in the meeting … I added the issue of Imam Sadr onto the agenda,” he said, prompting a denial from the Arab League official.
Sadr, together with his two companions Abbas Badreddine and Mohammad Yaqoub, disappeared during an official trip to Libya in August 1978. The Lebanese widely blame Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi for ordering the men’s disappearance, but Tripoli denies the allegations. Libya has repeatedly claimed Sadr, the spiritual and political leader of the Movement of the Deprived in Lebanon (Amal), had already left for Italy before going missing.
Rome has maintained Sadr never arrived there, though in 2004 the Italian authorities returned a passport found in Italy belonging to the cleric.
The row over Sadr’s disappearance prompted Libya to close its embassy in Lebanon.
Gadhafi, who has not visited Beirut since Sadr vanished, was indicted by the Lebanese authorities along with six other Libyans in August 2008 for the imam’s disappearance.
When queried over whether Sadr’s whereabouts would be discussed at the summit if Lebanon did not attend, Moussa asked: “Why would Lebanon be absent?”
He later added that representation was being “contemplated” by Lebanese officials. “Lebanon’s attendance is necessary, especially in light of the dangerous and possibly unprecedented regional circumstances,” he said, urging the media not interfere in the issue.
On Friday, a top official said President Michel Sleiman would skip the summit in protest against Libya’s handling of the Sadr case. Beirut will not send any lower-level officials either, a well-informed ministerial source told The Daily Star this week.
Speaker and head of the Amal movement Nabih Berri on Wednesday said a boycott of the Arab summit should be supported by all Lebanese people, noting that Sadr was a man who transcended sectarian lines. A boycott “concerns Lebanon’s dignity,” he said. “We as Amal movement and sons of Musa Sadr have a responsibility to raise awareness about Sadr among the Lebanese people.”
The Lebanese Embassy in Damascus on Monday received the invitation to the Arab summit but rejected it “for administrative reasons,” the Foreign Ministry said. The Lebanese Embassy in Damascus was “not authorized to receive and respond” to the invitation, the ministry said. On the same day, Sleiman reportedly ordered the invitation be returned to Tripoli.
On Wednesday, the pan-Arab newspaper Ash-Sharq al-Awsat quoted well-informed Libyan sources as saying Tripoli had sent the invitation to the embassy in Syria after learning of “secret and public threats by Shiite parties against Libya.” It wasn’t possible for a Libyan official to visit Beirut to hand an invitation to Sleiman as diplomatic ties had been severed, the source added.
The sources said Libyan authorities recently discovered death threats by Shiite groups in Lebanon against Gadhafi, his family and senior aides, adding they hoped Moussa would be able to contain Shiite extremism in Lebanon during his visit.
An Arab source meanwhile told the paper the Lebanese-Libyan crisis could escalate in the coming days, saying Tripoli could “take punitive measures against Lebanese nationals residing in Libya.” – The Daily Star