U.S. Democratic Reforms Program: New Interference in Mideast

WASHINGTON, August 21 (IslamOmline & News Agencies) - As a complementary part to its role as the world policeman and its interference in other countries’ internal affairs, the United States, the Washington Post reported Wednesday, August 21, plans to launch a program to promote democratic reforms in the Middle East later this year in a bid to lessen anti-American sentiment in the region.

As early as next month, Secretary of State Colin Powell will unveil the program with the central goal of developing economic opportunities and political safety valves in the region, U.S. officials told the daily.

The program will promote economic, education and political reform, including 25 million dollars for pilot projects and additional millions for training political activists, journalists and trade union leaders, the officials said, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

The program will also include a review of the effectiveness of the one billion dollars in foreign aid the United States gives to countries in the Middle East.

The U.S. has used its foreign aid as a tool to pressure countries in the region who voiced an open rejection of a fresh U.S. strike on Iraq, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who said it will not allow the U.S. military to use its soil for launching attacks on Iraq.

The U.S. has announced halting any new aid to Egypt following Egypt’s refusal to support U.S. plans against Iraq, and said its decision was in response to a 7-year jail sentence handed down to an Egyptian-American last month.

American anti-Saudi rhetoric heightened now of late, with the U.S. accusing Saudi royals of allegedly financing Al-Qaeda network, and U.S. threats to seize Saudi oil in punishment.

The September 11 terrorist attacks, said U.S. officials, boosted the message of advocates within the administration of President George W. Bush who favored democracy-building programs in the Middle East.

The officials didn’t mention that their program will do anything to solve the crisis of the Palestinian population suffering under the only occupation in the world, namely the Israeli.

The threat of Middle Eastern poverty and autocracy to U.S. interests seemed suddenly clear, they added.

"It's this whole change in the parameters of how we look at the Middle East, that it's no longer off-limits," said a senior State Department official. "The state of affairs in these countries has to be a matter of interest to us."

He described the goal of the funding effort as: "Greater citizen involvement in the political process so they don't feel frustrated at home."

U.S. ambitions for the program, however, remain modest because the Bush administration is wary of jeopardizing U.S. relations with key allies in the region like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who have been criticized for their human rights records, the daily said.

"You have to be realistic," said one U.S. official. "Clearly we have important strategic relationships. What we're talking about doing is working together to encourage these changes, but saying more clearly than we have before that these are changes the region needs to make if it is to receive the benefits of globalization."

The Bush administration intends to launch an effort this fall to promote democracy in the Middle East, combining the president's ambitious rhetoric, and moves such as last week's rebuke of Egypt's human rights performance, with dollars meant to improve political institutions and public debate in often repressive societies, the Post said.

Although the governments of the Arab countries are the same ones, the U.S. didn’t criticize Egypt or Saudi Arabia before, especially during the second Gulf war during which both governments supported the Americans.

The administration's ambitions remain modest, officials said, however, adding that the president and his foreign policy advisers are wary of jeopardizing U.S. relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, accused of a bad human rights record.

"In poverty, they struggle. In tyranny, they suffer," Bush said at West Point in June. "The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation, and their governments should listen to their hopes."

Since then, Bush has offered words of support to pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran, demanded political reforms from the Palestinian Authority as a condition for statehood and has called for a democratic successor to President Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Last week, Bush notified Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that he opposed additional U.S. aid to Egypt because of its treatment of Saad Eddin Ibrahim an American-Egyptian sociology professor at the American University in Cairo.

Ibrahim was sentenced Monday, July 29, to seven years in jail on charges of receiving money from the European Commission illegally to supervise parliamentary elections and of libeling Egypt in a legal report on relations between Muslims and Christian minority.

"There has clearly been a sense that the United States stood for these things [democratic reforms] in the rest of the world and not in the Arab world," said a senior State Department official. "September 11th really focused people on this part of the world in a way we hadn't before, and focused people on the fact that the Mideast has not performed economically or politically the way it should have."

The challenges are formidable for a project that encompasses societies from Iran to Morocco. Rulers are hardly eager to change the political formulas that preserve their power, and large segments of Middle Eastern society remain suspicious of U.S. motives.

"To do this, the door has to be open," said Youssef Ibrahim, a Middle Eastern specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Right now, there is nothing but hostility to the United States."

Yet some officials also cited a danger in pushing too hard. Bush's July 12 statement supporting reform movements in Iran "by all indications has strengthened the conservatives and weakened the forces of democracy," said Edward S. Walker Jr., former President Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary for near eastern affairs.

The Bush administration's agenda embraces the view of neo-conservatives that U.S. power should be harnessed to spread U.S. influence abroad, and attracts figures such as Powell who thinks the United States should do more as a world force.

The State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has chosen to concentrate $13 million in pro-democracy funding this year in two areas: China and the Muslim world, including Central Asia.

One project will be training sessions for democratic activists, to be held in Morocco, Bahrain and Lebanon. People from across the region will be taught about grass-roots advocacy, election monitoring, political party building and communication. Also planned are seminars for journalists from 11 Middle Eastern countries and a project to train trade union leaders as advocates for political liberty, openness and accountability.

Another $25 million in State Department money, received in a special appropriation from Congress after September 11, will be used for an array of projects to be discussed by Powell in his upcoming speech. The program includes voter education, loan funds, financial training and classes in advocacy skills for workers in non-governmental organizations.