MOSCOW, May 21 (RIA Novosti) - Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will attend an Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting during his Middle East tour on May 23-25, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday.
"On May 23-25, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will attend the 36th session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers in Damascus as an observer," Andrei Nesterenko said.
On top of the OIC meeting in the Syrian capital, Nesterenko also said Russia's top diplomat would meet with the Syrian leadership and pay a working visit to neighboring Lebanon.
The OIC is an international organization with a permanent delegation at the United Nations. It groups 57 member states, from the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, the Caucasus region, the Balkans, Southeast Asia, South Asia and South America.
The Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers meets once a year to examine a progress report on the implementation of its decisions taken within the framework of policy defined by the Islamic Summit.
Russia became a permanent observer at the OIC in 2005, two years after then-president Vladimir Putin had declared at an Islamic Summit in Malaysia that Russia was a "Muslim power" which wanted to play a role as such among Muslim countries.
"We believe that Sergei Lavrov's participation in the work of the 36th session of the Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers will be a new major step in the development of friendship and cooperation between Russia and the Islamic world," Nesterenko said.
He added that the agenda of Lavrov's working visits to Syria and Lebanon would focus on the overall situation in the Middle East and Palestinian-Israeli peace efforts.
