02 March 2004	Tuesday	10 Muharram 1425

CAIRO, March 1: Egypt on Monday launched a counter-initiative for reform in Arab countries ahead of a US mission to the region to promote Washington's broad plan for political and economic change in the Middle East.

President Hosni Mubarak, who rejected any effort to impose foreign cultural models for change, said the Egyptian plan supported reforms that would respect Arab identities and that proceed at a comfortable pace.

"If we open the door completely before the people, it will be chaos," Mr Mubarak warned while on a tour of Cairo international airport. He was commenting on the Egyptian initiative that his top diplomat, Ahmed Maher, presented to Arab foreign ministers meeting at the Arab League, most of whose governments have rejected the US initiative.

The Arab ministers were preparing the agenda for a summit in Tunis at the end of this month. Egypt's state-run Middle East News Agency said the Egyptian draft states that Arab countries are ready "to cooperate with friendly countries" on reform on the basis of "complete equality" and without "pre-conceived models".

"In order to create a climate favourable to the success of the reform process ... it is necessary to ... settle the Palestinian question by ending the Israeli occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state," it said.

The proposal follows criticism from several Arab countries, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, over a US plan called the "Greater Middle East Initiative". Jordan refused on Monday to be drawn into the chorus of criticism, but government spokeswoman Asma Khodr warned that changes must reflect local aspirations.

"Any change or reform that does not reflect the will of the people cannot be accepted," she said in Amman. The US initiative aims to encourage democratic reform and economic opening in the Arab world and other Muslim countries in a bid to abate frustration and poverty on which international terrorism thrives, its architects say.

Marc Grossman, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, prepared for a week-long tour of Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Bahrain to advance the project.

Mr Mubarak said Egypt presented its own initiative for political and economic reform "because it is unacceptable for each (Western) country to publish a statement on the subject."

He mentioned initiatives from both Britain and Germany, but did not refer to the main push for change from Washington. On Monday, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Arab countries must urgently adopt more "participative and representative" forms of government, although he acknowledged it was not up to the West to tell the Arab world how their political systems should evolve.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell said after earlier criticism of the US initiative that he agreed any reform package "can't be imposed from outside. It has to be accepted from the inside".

Despite broad criticism in Egypt and in other Arab countries, one analyst at the Egyptian government newspaper Al Ahram on Monday suggested agreement with the broad outlines of the US plan by slamming Arab rejection of it.

Mohammed Salmawi said he had "tried but failed to find anything that could be rejected" in the initiative, which Washington wants to launch at a G7 meeting in the US state of Georgia of the world's leading industrialised powers.

He said the plan "neither attacks Islam, nor violates Arab identity or culture, or the characteristics of each Arab state, just as there is no trace of intervention by a foreign party to implement it.

"Who could reject freedom or democracy, the struggle against corruption, economic reforms, development of the sciences, reforms in education and strengthening the role of women?" he asked.

Education Minister Hussein Kamel Bahaeddin said in remarks published Monday that Egypt would take lessons from no one over reforming its school books in a bid to promote religious tolerance and stamp out sources of terror.

The foreign ministers meeting in Cairo are also looking at suggested reforms to the Arab League itself after criticism that differences between its 22 members have practically paralysed the body's institutions.

Arab diplomatic sources said the ministers might recommend that Arab leaders pursue the discussion of league reform and put it on the agenda for the Algiers summit next year. -AFP