Arabs meet with promises to help Lebanon

CAIRO, Aug 20 (Reuters) Arab foreign ministers met at the seat of the Arab League in Cairo today with promises of reconstruction help for Lebanon and some expressions of support for an urgent Arab summit.

Seventeen of the 22 Arab League members sent foreign ministers to the meeting, the first since a truce last week brought an end to a month of fighting between Israel and the Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah.

But Hizbollah-ally Syria's foreign minister was conspicuously absent from the event. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad irritated many of his fellow Arab leaders last week in a speech they read as critical of their conduct during the war.

Five of about 10 ministers who spoke in the opening session -- from Algeria, Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen and the Palestinian territories -- said they favoured a summit proposal by Saudi Arabia, which has offered to host the event in the Muslim holy city of Mecca.

The Kuwaiti foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammad al-Salem al-Sabah, told reporters on arrival in Cairo today that his government had decided to set aside 800 million dollar to help Lebanon rebuild after the damage from the war.

The Lebanese government has estimated that the damage, mainly from Israeli air raids against civilian infrastructure, will cost 3.6 billion dollar to repair.

In Tehran, a senior Foreign Ministry official said Iran also is working on an aid package to help rebuild Lebanon.

But none of the Arab League member governments have offered to send troops to south Lebanon, for fear of being dragged into conflict with either the Israelis or Hizbollah.

The Arab foreign ministers also are discussing their plan to refer the Arab-Israeli conflict back to the UN Security Council, which they say has failed to fulfil its mandate to preserve international peace and security.

In their last meeting, three days after the July 12 start of the Lebanon war, the ministers said the West Asia peace process was dead and the Security Council must revive it.

They plan to send a mission to New York in September to put their case for a comprehensive West Asia settlement based on their own 2002 peace initiative, rejected by Israel.

The proposal offers peace and normal relations with Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal to the borders as they stood on the eve of the 1967 West Asia war.

In the opening session, the leader of the Palestinian delegation, Farouk Kaddoumi, revived the idea of sending UN troops to act as a buffer between Israel and a Palestinian state in all of the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The war in Lebanon ended with a UN resolution to deploy more international forces along the Israel-Lebanon frontier.

''These forces would stay for a year to take part at the end of this period in holding democratic general elections and the formation of a national government,'' Kaddoumi said.

''These ideas, even if we have proposed them before, need an Arab summit to study them and lay out a pan-Arab mechanism to implement them,'' he added.

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