A report released yesterday by the United Nations stated that no significant progress had been made in efforts to spread democracy through the Arab nations.
In a long-awaited report, intellectuals and reformers say they have seen no significant advances toward democracy in the Arab world in the past year.
The third Arab Human Development Report, released yesterday under United Nations auspices, says most measures have been “embryonic and fragmentary” and have not amounted to a serious effort to end repression in the region, which has some of the world’s most authoritarian governments.
The United States, which says it aims to promote democracy in the region, contributed to an international context that hampered progress through its policy toward Israel, its actions in Iraq and security measures affecting Arabs, according to the report.
The report, covering the year from October, 2003, was written before the election in Iraq and street protests in Lebanon that Washington cites as evidence of change.
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“Some of the views expressed by the authors are not shared by UNDP or the UN . . . [but the report] clearly reflects a very real anger and concern felt across the region,” UNDP administrator Mark Malloch Brown wrote.
The most controversial sections describe the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the occupation of Iraq by the United States and its allies as violations of freedom and obstacles to development.
During the launch address, Ms. Khalaf said that more than 10 per cent of Arabs live under occupation. “Occupation is a confiscation of rights by violence.”
The report says occupation has given governments an excuse to postpone democratization, forces Arab reformers to divert their energies and strengthens groups that advocate violence.
It accuses the United States of undermining the international system by repeatedly using or threatening to use its UN Security Council veto, enabling Israel to build Jewish settlements and extend its barrier in the West Bank.
The U.S. response to the September, 2001, attacks on the United States added to the ambiguity in the Western attitude to human rights in the Middle East, it says.
“The ‘war on terror’ has cut into many Arab freedoms. . . . An unfortunate byproduct in some countries has been that Arabs are increasingly the victims of stereotyping, disproportionately harassed or detained without cause.”
As always, the failures of the Arab world are always spun to either be caused by or prolonged by the Israelis and the Americans. It’s never the fault of those actually opposing democracy.
It’s a sign of the interesting times we live in when a brand new report is already shown to be obsolete and in great need of revision after events on the ground in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.