'Time to bring home Arab human development'

by Rami G. Khouri

For all those activists and reformers in the Arab world who have worked for years to promote democracy, civil society and political freedoms throughout the Middle East, this may be the moment to act decisively to promote their goals in a practical manner. The opportunity at hand arises from the behind-the-scenes dispute between the United States government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), who are locked in a delicate diplomatic tango over the contents of the UNDP's third annual Arab Human Development Report (AHDR).

The US State Department has made it clear to the UNDP that American funding will drop precipitously if the report is published in its present form. Washington last year cut its funding to UNDP by $12 million (down to $89 million) to signal its annoyance with the AHDR pointing out the obvious reality that Arab extremism and anti-Americanism often are a consequence of American, Israeli and Arab government policies in the region. The counter message from the US government is that no criticism of American or Israeli policies is acceptable these days. Washington wants the whole world to call Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a "man of peace", and the Anglo-American war and occupation in Iraq an act of liberation to promote Arab democracy.

The irony is that this third AHDR, which is now ready for printing but is still being held up by UNDP until the diplomatic controversy is resolved, focuses on political freedoms in the Arab world - an issue that the US government has pushed in the past three years with exuberance and militarism that have sometimes verged on hysteria.

The report, which is written by respected Arab scholars and activists, represents precisely what the US wants to see happen in this region - free-thinking Arabs analysing their societies and proposing means to make them more free, democratic, pluralistic, accountable, transparent and happy all over. For the US government to speak of promoting Arab liberty, on the one hand, while using financial blackmail to squash this exercise of free-thinking Arab activism, on the other, is a sign of precisely Washington's double standards, presumptuous arrogance, and pro-Israeli bias that cause so many people in the Middle East - and the rest of the world - to criticise the US these days.

So what does the Arab world do in the face of this difficult situation? The urgent aim must be twofold: the Arab world itself must move quickly to prevent damage to UNDP's credibility and programmes because of its courage in publishing the first two AHDRs, and, the Arab world must find a way to continue this series of useful reports and make them more effective as instruments of Arab modernisation, reform and democratisation. For, in the final analysis, these reports are not about the US or UNDP. They are about us, the people, societies, identities and power flows in the Arab world.

If UNDP publishes the third AHDR in its present form, it suffers severe financial cuts by the US and hinders its ability to operate worldwide; if it shelves the report, its integrity and credibility drop, as the world would view it as a passive instrument of American foreign policy. The solution must be to publish the existing report outside the realm of UNDP, to spare the UN Washington's destructive and intemperate wrath.

The most sensible option to do this would be to establish a new, independent, pan-Arab think tank - an Arab Human Development Centre - in the Middle East that would publish this report and subsequent ones every year. The talent and policy-making direction for such a centre would come from the group of respected Arab individuals who have written the first three AHDRs.

The key element is funding for the new centre, and this is where Arab activists and democrats must step forward quickly and decisively. It takes only about one million dollars a year to produce and publish each report. Activist, reform-minded, democratic and wealthy Arab businessmen and women should get on the phones with one another in the coming week, round up $5 million to fund a new Arab Human Development Centre for its initial three years or so, publish the third AHDR on time in January 2005, and announce the next three reports that will come out in subsequent years. The fourth report is scheduled to focus on women and the gender deficit in the region (I would suggest that the fifth and sixth reports focus on youth, and civilian control of the military-security systems in the area).

An indigenous research centre publishing the AHDR annually should also initiate other activities to promote pan-Arab reform, including publishing annual surveys of political, press and personal freedoms, annual reviews of Arab military vs. human development spending, educational quality, gender- and youth-related rights, and other elements of modernity and sustainable national development. Civil society and, in some cases, possibly some government institutions, might join forces to monitor trends in these key areas, diagnose persistent problems and constraints, propose reform policies, and generate the coalitions in society needed to implement such policies.

Arab private businesses and individual investors have earned tens of billions of dollars in profits in recent decades and it is time for them to repay their societies by funding an independent research institution for pan-Arab human development. All those reform-minded Arab businessmen and women who have spoken out so eloquently at reform-focused gatherings in Dubai, Sanaa, Alexandria, Doha, Beirut and Amman must now step forward and take this process to the next critical level: establishing an independent, indigenous Arab human development research centre that would provide quality research as well as play a critical advocacy and monitoring role in Arab societies. It is time for Arabs to protect the Arab human development reports, and to bring them home.

This article was published in the Wednesday, December 22, 2004 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.