ANDRES OPPENHEIMER Summit went far off the track

The first-ever South American-Arab summit ended last Wednesday in Brazil with a dubious achievement: It put out a declaration that can be read as tacitly justifying terrorism and introduced Middle Eastern politics into Latin America, a region where Jews and Arabs have lived in remarkable harmony for centuries.
It wasn't supposed to end this way. Back in January, when we disclosed a first draft of the summit's proposed declaration in this column and alerted that it contained Arab-proposed paragraphs that amounted to an endorsement of terrorism, Brazilian officials told me they would not allow such language to prevail in the final declaration.
The two-day summit of 34 foreign ministers and several heads of state from Latin America and the Arab League would be aimed at fostering economic and trade relations, they said. Brazil also wanted to use the occasion to bolster its diplomatic push to win a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, they said.
Well, guess what? The summit, in which South American leaders talked mostly about trade and Arab leaders talked mostly about Israel, produced a final declaration that only mildly tones down the original draft. It reads like a one-sided catalog of Arab complaints against Israel and can be interpreted as a justification for violence against civilians.
Foreign occupation
Granted, the declaration contains a broad-based condemnation of terrorism. But it immediately "reaffirms ... the right of the states and peoples to resist foreign occupation, in accordance with the principles of international legality and in compliance with international humanitarian law."
Problem is, "the right to resist foreign occupation" is the code word used by Arab extremist groups to blow up markets filled with civilians in Iraq or buses full of school children in Tel Aviv. It has also been used by Colombia's Marxist guerrillas to set off car bombs in Bogota streets, and by anti-Castro guerrillas to blow up a Cuban commercial airliner in 1976.
Asked whether the declaration doesn't amount to an endorsement of terrorism, Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, told reporters that support for "the right to resist foreign occupation" was counterbalanced with a requirement to follow international law. "Everyone can read it the way he wants," Amorim said.
That's precisely the problem, critics say. In a telephone interview from Brasilia, where he was observing the summit, Wiesenthal Center Latin American director Sergio Widder told me that "the fact that Brazil's foreign minister legitimizes this ambiguity, saying that anybody can read the final declaration the way he wants, opens the doors for terrorist groups to feel supported by the South American community."
"It's a major disappointment," said Dina Siegel Vann, Latin American director of the American Jewish Committee, a New York-based advocacy group. "It was an excellent opportunity to deal with common South American-Arab development issues, and it was used to advance political agendas that don't have anything to do with Latin America."
Alarm bells
In addition, the summit's final declaration calls for the United Nations to convene an international conference "to study" terrorism and "define the terrorist crime." That language raises alarm bells among human rights groups, because it suggests there could be such a thing as "good" terrorism.
My conclusion: The Brazilian-organized summit and its follow-ups -- the next one is scheduled to be held in Morocco in 2008 -- will draw the Middle Eastern conflict closer to Latin America. An estimated 450,000 Jews and 17 million Arabs have long lived in exemplary harmony in the region, in the understanding that the place to solve the Middle Eastern war is the United Nations, and in the Middle East itself.
Only minutes after the summit ended, Brazil's Jewish Confederation condemned the summit for "importing to our region a war that isn't ours," and for "endorsing" terrorism. It added that its declaration failed to mention democracy, human rights or women's rights, "which are systematically violated" by most participating Arab nations.
That may be only the beginning. Brazil started this bi-regional summits process in hopes of improving trade ties, but it may have gotten itself -- and its neighbors -- entangled in a big mess.
X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.