Arab Nationalist Congress Gather in "Arabia Not-So-Felix"

The 19th annual Arab Nationalist Congress meeting, this year in Sanaa, has come and gone. A report from Al-Ahram offers some juicy tidbits from the Congress' proceedings:

The congress was formed in 1990 by a group of Arab nationalist intellectuals and politicians alarmed by the growing conviction within official -- and some non-official -- circles that the era of Arab nationalism had come to an end...

It is against this background of "Arab concessions" and "catastrophes" that the ANC -- the 700 members of the Congress includes a virtual roll call of the Arab world's leading thinkers -- has attempted to defend the "Arab nationalist project" independent of Arab governments...

During the ANC's 19th round in Sanaa, though, the conference appeared to be suffering from the symptoms of age. Inside the conference room of the lavish Sanaa Mövenpick Hotel, speaker after speaker hogged the podium to deliver speech after speech during which the audience yawned, snoozed or trickled outside for coffee, a cigarette, and to take part in the much livelier discussions going on in the hotel's lobby

While Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and Sudan were making headlines across the world the conference room seemed to be part of a parallel universe, with one speaker arguing that "drugs" constitute the main threat to the Arab world. And if some of the speeches gave the audience a sense of déjà vu, that was only to be expected. They had probably heard them before, word for word, at previous ANC rounds...

"Why," asked Yassin No'man, a socialist Yemeni politician, "is the ANC not talking about the many political detainees -- some of whom are conference members -- locked up in Arab jails? If this is a taboo then the ANC has to find another mechanism to justify itself."

Good question.

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During the ANC's 19th round in Sanaa, though, the conference appeared to be suffering from the symptoms of age.