U.S. READIES PUSH FOR MIDEAST DEMOCRACY PLAN
Informe de Robin Wright en “The Washington Post” del 28-2-04
The United States will launch a diplomatic drive next week to win support for its new democracy initiative in the Arab world, officials said yesterday, sending a senior diplomat on a regionwide tour to convince regimes that have expressed skepticism of the emerging U.S. campaign.
The Bush administration's Greater Middle East Initiative, the most ambitious U.S. democracy effort since the end of the Cold War, encompasses a wide range of diplomatic, cultural and economic measures, according to a draft of the plan.
It calls for the United States and Europe to press for and assist free elections, foster new independent media, help create a "literate generation," establish a greater Middle East Development Bank modeled on Europe's postwar model, translate Western classics into Arabic, and give $500 million in loans to small entrepreneurs, especially women, according to the draft report.
Citing a "unique challenge and opportunity for the international community," the report cites three "deficits" -- freedom, knowledge and women's empowerment -- that have "contributed to conditions that threaten the national interests" of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.
"So long as the region's pool of politically and economically disenfranchised individuals grows, we will witness an increase in extremism, terrorism, international crime and illegal migration," the report said.
Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, is scheduled to leave this weekend to discuss the initiative with governments and private groups in Morocco, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan and Turkey. That tour will be followed by talks in Brussels with officials from NATO and the European Union, the State Department said.
The United States plans to formally issue the proposal at three summit meetings to be held in June by the Group of Eight industrialized nations, NATO and the European Union.
Grossman's tour comes after leaders in Arab countries said they will reject the plan if it appears to originate from outside the region. The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram reported Thursday that in an interview President Hosni Mubarak had "denounced with force the ready-for-use prescriptions proposed abroad under cover of what are called reforms."
And some Arab and European leaders warn that a U.S. campaign to promote democracy will fail unless the Bush administration accompanies it with a more determined effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
U.S. officials say they have no intention of imposing any plan on the region. The working definition of the "greater Middle East" includes the 22 nations of the Arab world, plus Turkey in Europe, Israel, and Pakistan and Afghanistan in South Asia.
"As the president has said, ideas for reform must come from the region. The Greater Middle East Initiative is designed to respond to the region's needs," State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said yesterday in announcing Grossman's trip. "These are sovereign nations. They have their own interests to protect," he said.
An eight-page draft of the plan -- a version of which was first published on the Web site of the London newspaper Al Hayat -- calls for the G-8 to forge a long-term partnership with the region's "reform leaders" to launch a "coordinated response" to promote democratic change. It outlines a wide range of actions the West would foster.
On elections, the working draft calls for assistance in civic education, the creation of independent election commissions, and voter registration, particularly of women. To press judicial reforms, the West could create or fund legal defense centers to provide advice on civil, criminal or Islamic law and access to defense lawyers.
To generate new independent interest groups, the United States and its European allies could increase funding of democracy, human rights, media, women's and other groups, as well as train groups in defining agendas, lobbying governments and developing strategies.
On education, the goal should be to complement the U.N. program aimed at cutting the illiteracy rate in half by 2010, the report said, with special emphasis on providing computer technology to schools and on teacher-training institutes to target women. The goal would be to train a "literacy corps" of about 100,000 female teachers by 2008.
The preliminary draft also lays out wide-ranging economic goals, including G-8 funding for a Greater Middle East Finance Corp., modeled on the International Finance Corp., to foster new medium-size and large businesses. It also suggests that providing $500 million in micro-loans -- of about $400 each -- would spur 1.2 million small entrepreneurs out of poverty.
"Closing the Greater Middle East region's prosperity gap will require an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe," the draft says.
Not all the ideas outlined in the draft may end up in the final summit documents, U.S. officials note. The goal at the June summits, European diplomats say, is a general declaration outlining agreed-upon principles. They would be modeled in some respects on the Helsinki Accords of the 1970s, which provided a framework for pressing democracy in the communist East Bloc.
The intent of the initiative is to deal with the economic and political challenges in the region. The combined gross domestic product of the 22 Arab countries is smaller than that of Spain, and 40 percent of adult Arabs are illiterate, the draft plan notes.
Staff writer Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.