A meeting of foreign ministers of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) opened here on Saturday with a call to help Iraqis chose their government and to prepare to reform the Arab League.
"Developments in Iraq make it incumbent on us to assist our brethren in Iraq and to back international efforts to achieve security and stability there and enable its people to set up a political system that will preserve its unity," Kuwait Information Minister Mohammed Abu al-Hasan told the Gulf ministers.
Abu al-Hasan is representing Kuwait, which currently chairs the GCC, at the meeting. Kuwaiti FM Sheikh Mohammad al-Sabah is currently on a private visit to the United States.
The other GCC states - Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - are represented by their foreign ministers.
The minister said the meeting at the group's headquarters in Riyadh had "special importance" because it would discuss: "The Arab condition which we have long sought to develop so that it catches up with regional and international changes."
He was referring to meetings of Arab League foreign ministers starting in Cairo on Monday which are due to prepare the grounds for structural reform of their 22-member body ahead of a March 29-30 summit in Tunis.
But such Arab efforts, already facing scepticism earned from inaction on past crises, have been overshadowed by Washington's "Greater Middle East Initiative" to democratise the region.
The US plan was rebuffed in no uncertain terms in a joint Saudi-Egyptian statement issued after a visit by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to Riyadh on Tuesday. The two sides said the Arabs were proceeding with reform in keeping with their own interests and values, and would "not accept that a particular pattern of reform be imposed on Arab and Islamic countries from outside."
US officials, notably Secretary of State Colin Powell, have since defended themselves against the notion that they were trying to dictate to the Arab world.
"I agree with the Egyptians and the Saudis: (reform) can't be imposed from outside. It has to be accepted from the inside," Powell said Wednesday in an interview on US-funded, Arabic-language Alhurra television.
Abu al-Hasan described terrorism, "which worsened after the September 11, 2001 events and whose sparks reached our region and the whole world," as "one of the most serious challenges we face."
Riyadh, which is hosting the meeting, was struck by a series of bombings which killed 52 people in May and November last year.
"We renew our condemnation of all terrorist operations (under any) pretext, affirming that we will do our utmost to fight it and we strongly support all Arab, Islamic and international efforts," to that end, he said.
The Kuwaiti official slammed Israel's "repression" of the Palestinians and its building of a "segregation" wall on the West Bank saying a just settlement can only come about with the creation of the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and Israel's full withdrawal from occupied Arab territory.
The ministers then went into closed session and it was unclear if their deliberations would end Saturday or resume Sunday.
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