Arab leaders meeting at a summit next month in Tunis will study US and European attempts to introduce democracy to the region amid misgivings over the plans, an Arab official said Thursday.
"These initiatives and ideas will certainly be on the agenda of the summit" scheduled for the end of March in Tunis, Hesham Yussef, a senior official at the Arab League, told AFP.
The different proposals will be "evaluated" by leaders of the 22-member Arab League, according to Yussef, the director of the office of League Secretary General Amr Mussa.
Arab states could welcome the plans "if they are consulted on and included in" the drafting process, but "any initiative or idea imported and proposed from outside without consultations .... will not succeed," Yussef warned.
Yussef said the Arabs are wondering whether the Western ideas will address their demands for resolving fairly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, amid broad Arab anger over the close US alliance with Israel.
It was unacceptable to "speak of any initiative or vision which ignores or relegates the Palestinian cause" and to "discuss security questions without speaking of Israeli weapons of mass destruction," Yussef said.
The US government is preparing to use the G-8 summit of industrialised countries in June to launch a bid to promote democracy in the Middle East and clinch security agreements with Arab countries.
A year after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, Washington announced a campaign for democracy in the Middle East after studies showed Arab political repression was breeding terrorism.
Following the US-led overthrow of dictator Saddam Hussein in April last year, US officials say they are pushing for a new democratic Iraq that will set an example for the entire region.
European countries are meanwhile following with their own ideas.
On February 7, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer proposed a new transatlantic initiative to foster prosperity in the Middle East and cut terrorism off at its roots.
"Security is a broader concept. Social development and democracy ... are just as important," Fischer said.
Yussef said reform projects were raised when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak made a visit to Turkey last week and then on a trip to Gulf Arab countries earlier this week. They were also discussed between Mussa and several Arab officials, he said.
Yussef added that there was "a dialogue with the United States" about their initiative but not in a "formal framework."
In Brussels, Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal rejected talk from Washington of a new attempt to anchor democratic reforms in the Arab world, saying reform could not be forced on peoples via any new document.
"If the Middle East is to change and if there is to be a role for the West ... it is not to find ways and means to force reform on the world but to provide the example to everyone," the prince said Thursday.
Commentators in Cairo said the Western initiatives amounted to a return to the colonial period.
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