Bleak Arab progress report

The latest in a series of hotly debated reports on Arab human development is long on criticism but short on ideas to solve the woes besetting the Arab world.

The 200-page Arab Human Development Report, the second of a planned series of four written by a group of Arab intellectuals and academics, is intended to generate debate among the 22 Arab states.

But critics say the report, like its predecessor last year, contains nothing Arabs don't know about their region: the absence of political freedoms, cultural stagnation, poor education, the failure to empower women, and submissive media.

"These are problems we in the Arab world have been talking about for decades. We need a plan of political action to address the problem and make it better," says Rami Khouri, executive editor of Lebanon's English-language Daily Star newspaper.

Last year's inaugural report sparked intense debate. Yet it was largely the West, not the Arab world, that found it revealing, some observers say. "People in the West jumped on the first report. But in the Arab world, the report was either ignored completely or embraced by leaders who promised to do something about it and then ignored it," says Mr. Khouri.

The second report, released Monday in Amman, Jordan, focuses on the poor quality of knowledge in the Arab world - education, media, culture, and research and development. Arab countries, it states, have fewer computers and newspapers compared with the world average.

Moreover, many of the existing media operate "in an environment that sharply restricts freedom of the press and freedom of expression and opinion."

Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, regional director of the UNDP's Regional Bureau for Arab states and a coauthor of the report, says it highlights the need of the Arab world to connect with the rest of the world if it is to overcome its development gap.

A number of historical factors are conspiring against that, she argues. Ms. Hunaidi speaks of a "collusion between certain political regimes and some Islamic scholars" - but adds that new factors are working against an open Arab society. They include the US clampdown on visas for students and academics from the region. The occupation of Iraq has also fueled an Arab rejection of the Western world.

"The report finds two recent trends - fear of cultural dissolution in globalization, and a tendency to close up and not accept the values of the rest of the world," she says. "That's why the report's authors find that in fact the way out for Arab countries is through the global experience."

Some analysts doubt such reports will have much long-term value, particularly given the Arab world's more pressing concerns over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the troubled US occupation of Iraq.

"The reports are very important because of their wide dissemination," says Chibli Mallat, professor of international law at St. Joseph University in Beirut. But, he adds, the latest one does not go far enough.

"Like the first report, it lacks the courage to question individual rulers and their apparatus of repression. The greatest change in the region, the collapse of Saddam Hussein, is not addressed even though it represents the first governmental change [in the Arab world] in 20 years," he says.

Analysts say that some of the report's authors once held senior positions in the very regimes that they now accuse of failing to bring in reform. And, rightly or wrongly, their association with the UNDP opens them to Arab charges of promoting Western policy ideas for the region, a contentious issue given the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

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