US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday suggested setting up a "forum" grouping the Group of Eight industrialised nations and Arab states to encourage reform in the Arab world.
"We are looking forward to create a partnership for reforms," Powell told a joint news conference with his Jordanian counterpart, Marwan Moasher, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at this Dead Sea resort.
"We are interested in putting in place, as part of the G8 ministerial and G8 summit process, a forum for the future where on a regular basis we can get together with our friends in the region to talk about reform," he said.
Powell said the forum should not be "a new organisation with a secretariat ... but a forum where we can meet on a regular basis to review progress."
"We cannot impose reforms from the outside, neither do we want to. We have ideas, let's share our ideas with our friends," he said.
"Ultimately reform has to be done by each individual country... The United States can help, the G8 can help."
Powell said Arab foreign ministers "are sharing with us ideas that they have, coming out of their ministerial meeting" in Cairo last week.
On the sidelines of the forum, Powell met Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher as well as Moasher.
In an interview with CNN from the summit venue, Maher showed little enthusiasm for Powell's proposal for a formal mechanism to encourage reform, saying it should be left to individual Arab governments.
"Let them accept that what is required of them is to support initiatives for reform by Arab countries," he said.
Most Arab states are governed by authoritarian regimes that have rejected the US administration's "Greater Middle East Initiative" for democratic reforms as interference in their internal affairs.
The US initiative, to be presented at the June 8-10 G8 summit in the United States, did nevertheless put pressure on Arab states to put reform on the agenda of their upcoming summit in Tunis on May 22-23.
Arab diplomats have said the summit will likely approve a declaration confirming the need to promote reforms, while allowing each of the Arab League's 22 members to change at their own pace.
The United States has been emphasising the need for democratic and economic reforms in the Arab world, seeing in them remedies to frustration and repression which are seen as the root of terrorism.
But Arab states say the main causes of extremism and terrorism are Israel's occupation of Arab land, US support of the Jewish state and the US-led invasion of Iraq last year.
Arab League chief Amr Mussa said the US approach is "clumsy" because it is promoting reforms in the interest of outsiders rather than the Arabs themselves.
Arab reform is a central theme in the three-day forum which opened here Saturday, alongside the Iraq crisis and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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