KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 23: Thanks to Arab disunity, the Non-Aligned Movement Summit conference is likely to adopt a highly watered-down declaration on Iraq, dropping the word “US aggression” and replacing it with “war against Iraq,” conference sources said on Sunday.

The original declaration presented to the senior officials meeting (SOM) condemned the United States for aggression and called for a peaceful solution to the question of Iraqi disarmament. However, dissensions among the Arab ranks merely said the “war against Iraq is not a solution,” and that this “will be a destabilizing factor for the whole region.”

The declaration on Iraq, which will form part of the final document “as against the final declaration called the Kuala Lumpur Declaration — was passed on Sunday by the SOM. The foreign ministers “whose original two-day meeting continued for the fourth day today” — approved the resolution on Sunday for adoption in the final document.

The resolution, however, did refer to NAM’s commitment to a multilateral approach “as opposed to unilateral actions” — a dig at America, without naming the superpower.

The motion called for lifting the sanctions against Iraq by hoping that “the current disarmament efforts in Iraq should not be an end in itself but should constitute a step toward the lifting of sanctions in accordance with Security Council Resolution 687.”

The last paragraph of the resolution seems to cover Israel indirectly by saying that NAM conference hoped that a peaceful resolution of the Iraq crisis will lead to the compliance of paragraph 14 of Security Council Resolution on the establishment in the Middle East of a zone free of the weapons of mass destruction.

The final document to be issued at the end of the summit will deal with specific issues — globalization, terrorism and causes that promote terrorism, and social issues.