UN report writer rejects US’s Mideast reform plan

[DuctapeFatwa]

The lead writer of Washington’s favourite UN report on the Arab world trashed a US democracy initiative for the Middle East and said the Bush administration had abused his report to give its ideas some credibility.

Nader Fergani, the Egyptian social scientist who has worked on three successive Arab Human Development reports, said in an article published on Thursday that the US initiative depended on the UN reports “like a drunkard leaning on a lamppost, to save himself from falling and not for enlightenment”. “Arabs have the right to ask about the credentials of those who drew out this reform project, given that the defining characteristic of their history is to have laid waste Arab territory and wrecked the interests of the Arab nation,” Fergani wrote in the London-based Arabic language al-Hayat. The US draft, which the United States wants to put to a Group of Eight meeting in Sea Island, Georgia, in June does not mention the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or Iraq.

Fergani said reformers in the Arab world should decisively reject the US proposals, because they took the approach of imposing reform on the region from outside. “But this rejection will become devoid of meaning as long as there is a delay in drafting an authentic (Arab) plan for an Arab renaissance,” he added.

Arab officials have complained that the United States rushed its reform project without consulting the people in the region. Fergani agreed, and said this stemmed from “the mentality of condescension which the current US administration exhibits”.

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