Arab foreign ministers were keeping their discussions under tight wraps Saturday as they met to thrash out a consensus on a new annual summit after the fiasco of a last-minute cancellation in Tunis in late March.
Reporters were entirely excluded and the meeting's chairman, Habib Ben Yahia of Tunisia, asked photographers to leave straight after a 10-minute opening session.
Ben Yahia announced that the size of the delegations would also be limited in a bid to preserve the confidentiality of the discussions.
Member states would be limited to delegations of four, while the Arab League secretariat would be allowed just a single representative alongside Secretary General Amr Mussa.
The abrupt cancellation of the planned summit in Tunis even as foreign ministers held preparatory talks was a major embarrassment for the Arab League.
In the aftermath, the 22-member bloc split down the middle over Egyptian proposals to switch the venue from Cairo, which sparked howls of protest from Tunis.
Saturday's meeting was the fruit of a compromise brokered by the league's secretariat under which Egypt would host the preparatory talks and Tunisia the actual summit, tentatively scheduled for May 22-23.
"Our current meeting is a resumption of that held in Tunis in March," Ben Yahia told ministers Saturday.
But Tunisia's right to host the reconvened summit has been openly questioned in the Gulf despite Mussa's announcement of agreement on the rescheduling last month.
"Bahrain believes that the date and venue for the Arab summit should be fixed by the council of (ministers) of the Arab League," Information Minister Nabil al-Hamar told AFP the day after the league chief spoke.
Two other Gulf states - the United Arab Emirates and Qatar - were represented only by deputy foreign ministers at Saturday's talks.
After the debacle in Tunis, many analysts pointed the finger at Saudi Arabia which announced in advance that its de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah would not attend the summit but be represented by Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.
Saudi Arabia and Tunisia were reportedly at odds over an Arab League reform blueprint designed to meet US-led demands for democratisation and economic liberalisation across the region.
Meanwhile a diplomatic source said Iraq's interim foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari showed the meeting photographs of abuse of prisoners by US occupation troops in Iraq.
The source quoted the minister as telling his counterparts that "what has happened is even more horrible than what is depicted in these photographs".
The Arab world has been outraged by revelations of rape, murder and torture at US-run prisons in Iraq since last year's US-led invasion.
Photographs of the abuse have been shown in the US media and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday there were "many more photographs" showing "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman".
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