by George S. Hishmeh

Now Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has another Middle East feather in her hat for twisting Israeli arms and finalising the Rafah crossing agreement that would allow Palestinians to go back and forth freely to Egypt. The Palestinian people will thus have, for the first time, full control of one of their borders with a neighbouring country, a laudatory achievement.

Sharing the credit with the secretary of state is undoubtedly Mideast envoy and former World Bank president, James Wolfensohn, who had warned last week that the Gaza Strip was in danger of becoming a "giant prison" if a swift agreement is not reached. The Sharon government also agreed to the rebuilding of the Gaza seaport, as well as securing safe passage for Palestinians travelling between Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But the Israelis are still stalling on another related but all-important issue: the opening of the damaged Gaza Airport which Israel destroyed during the Intifada.

Rice's willingness to extend her stay in the region - she was on her way to the Far East - to bring the negotiations to fruition underlined the long-held view that Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations have little chance to progress without a serious and an active US role. Her achievement will no doubt boost the standing of the beleaguered Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose party, Fateh, is facing an uphill parliamentary election in January.

The American secretary showed her foresight and determination in the early months after her appointment when she admitted before a student audience at the American University in Cairo that "for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people".

But her objective received an unexpected setback last week at an international conference in Manama, Bahrain, where US plans for Middle East democracy suffered a severe blow at the hands of a key American ally, Egypt. Besides the American secretary of state, there were senior officials from major European countries and the Arab world at the conference which saw the launching of two new Mideast institutions, the Forum for the Future, which was founded last year as a joint initiative of the countries of the Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) and the Group of Eight (G-8) nations, and the Fund for the Future, a $100 million enterprise to stimulate economic growth and job creation.

The Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, left the conference early after failing to agree with his American counterpart on the criterion for funding indigenous non-governmental organisations by the Fund for the Future which will have a budget of $50 million. This nixed plans for a formal declaration that would have spelled out the focus of what is known here as President George W. Bush's democracy initiative in the Middle East.

The dispute centred on Egypt's view that any NGO receiving funds must be licensed by the local government. In other words, these organisations will be subjected to governmental control. In the American view, this would have "circumscribed NGO activity" since the forum's objective, according to a provision in the draft declaration, is "to expand democratic practices, to enlarge participation in political and public life, to foster roles of civil society, including NGOs and to widen women's participation in the political, economic, social, cultural and education fields and to reinforce their rights and status in society while understanding that each country is unique".

Although the Egyptian ambassador to Washington, Nabil Fahmy, dismissed the seriousness of the spat with the US, Ambassador Clovis Maksoud, member of the board of the Arab Human Development Report, published the UN Development Programme, underlined that generally speaking reform in the Arab world has to be "self-generated and cannot be imposed". He continued: "It does not mean that it has to be insular ... (and) can be influenced by values that are supposedly universal freedom, right of participation, satisfaction of human needs and rights, and the right to design the architecture of the priorities in a particular country."

Likewise, Jordan's Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher cautioned in a recent op-ed in The New York Times that "force-feeding democracy will lead not to reform but radicalisation (and) a wiser approach would be to respect the ability of Arab countries to take matters into their own hands".

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This article was published in the Friday-Saturday, November 18-19, 2005 edition of the Jordan Times. It is used here with permission.