Brussels, 13/10/2008 (Agence Europe) - A meeting of top ranking Euromed officials due to take place in Brussels on 17 October has been cancelled, and not just because of an overcrowded timetable. The cancellation of this meeting scarcely three weeks before the ministerial conference in Marseilles at the start of November, which it was supposed to be preparing, testifies to a definite deterioration of the atmosphere in meetings since the Union for the Mediterranean was launched. A first meeting of the Ambassadors on the monitoring committee took place on 9 September, but was very short, with Israel hotly challenging the presence of the ambassador of the Arab League. An attempt to hold another meeting on 15 September failed. The scheduled monthly meeting on 17 October has been cancelled “because there has been no agreement on conditions allowing the Arab League to take part”. A note sent to all Arab diplomatic missions confirms that the Arab group position, that the Arab League should be involved as a full member of the process, has considerably hardened. The Arab group believes it has been “betrayed” by Paris. It is claimed that President Sarkozy formally promised the Arab League would be a player and not just an observer from now on. According to various sources, this issue was the subject of “stormy” discussions between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Bernard Kouchner in Cairo last weekend and between Kouchner and the Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. The Arab group is also unhappy with the French authorities over a number of points in the “Paris Declaration” on the Middle East, which Paris had promised to amend in order to make reference to the “Arab peace initiative” omitted from the version issued on 13 July. (F.B./transl.rt)