Brussels, 06/01/2010 (Agence Europe) - The foreign affairs ministers of France and Egypt (co-president of the Union for the Mediterranean, UfM), Spain, Jordan and Tunisia met in Cairo on the evening of Tuesday 5 January, to attempt to relaunch dialogue between the countries of the two sides of the Mediterranean, which had stalled due to blockages in the negotiation process between the Israelis and the Arabs and problems in clarifying the stakes and mode of functioning of the UfM since its inception at the Paris summit in July 2008.
A consensus which consists for the time being of just five countries appears to have emerged in favour of convening the group of high-level civil servants in Brussels on Tuesday 12 January, to finalise the decision - which has been pending for several months - on the appointment of a secretary general, six deputies and the statutes of the UfM. The secretary general may therefore be operational by the end of February, according to an Egyptian press agency.
The ministers present announced via the press that the obstacle to the appointment of the Jordanian diplomat Ahmed Massadah, currently ambassador to Brussels, has been removed, but this choice will still have to be confirmed on 12 January. There was no more news on the various aspects on which differences of opinion have been recorded, such as the number of deputy secretaries general (Turkey and Cyprus are working towards a compromise to be placed within the framework of their generally troublesome relationship) and the division of competences between the appointed persons (Lebanon keeps in place its reservation on the mission to be entrusted to an Israeli deputy secretary general, but its position is not set in stone as it does not have Syria's support). The Cairo meeting however confirmed that the position adopted at recent meetings of the high-level civil servants in Brussels by Tunisia for a political overhaul did not manage to resist the pressure from France and Spain.
On another level, what is clear is that nobody in Brussels, within the institutions or the diplomatic representations, was capable of providing useful indications on the content of the meetings or precise orientation to ensure a credible and sustainable relaunch of the process. Spain, although it is president-in-exercise of the EU, did not involve any of the Community institutions in the meeting. This attitude appears to confirm a slide towards the intergovernmental in a process in which the Community institutions, particularly the European Commission, seem to have been confined to a role of "internal consultant" within the secretariat general of the UfM. (F.B./transl.fl)