18 December 2004	Saturday	05 Ziqa'ad 1425

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 17: A UN report on reform in the Arab world has been delayed and is being rewritten after the United States and some Arab nations pressured the world body to tone down its findings, diplomats said on Thursday.

Officials of the UN Development Programme, which financed the survey and is managing the project, said, however, that they had not buckled to pressure from a member state and the report was undergoing a normal editing process.

US officials, for their part, denied trying to delay or kill the study, as had been reported in the New York Times on Thursday. Egypt was also said in the report by Times columnist Thomas Friedman to have tried to kill the report. A spokesman in the Egyptian UN mission in New York said his government had no comment on the matter.

Friedman said Egypt was angered by some statements about its government while Washington was irritated by harsh criticism of last year's US-led invasion of Iraq and Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories.

UNDP spokesman William Orme acknowledged that both Washington and the Egyptians had raised concerns about various parts of the report. But he said both had based their comments based on early drafts of the report which had now been discarded or revised.

The report, the third in a series prepared by a group of Arab academics, had been due out in late 2004 but now would now not be issued until next year, if ever, UN officials said.

"At this point it is still a draft and its authors are working on the text," a UN spokesman said. Past reports in the Arab Human Development series have been explosive, saying Arab nations suffered from a lack of freedom, repression of women and isolation from the world at large that stifled creativity as well as economic growth and development.

Diplomats who have seen drafts of the latest report said it aimed to be an objective, up-to-date report on government reforms, country by country, throughout the Arab world.

The parts criticized by the Americans argued that the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had made it more difficult for Arab states to carry out government reforms, said one diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.

While the report's latest draft still reflected these views, they had been toned down, the diplomat said. One US official said the administration had tried to avoid getting involved in the report because of past criticism in the Arab world of President George W. Bush's "Greater Middle East" initiative, which calls for free elections, empowerment of women, modernization and fighting poverty.

"We are completely hands-off on this because we know that if we get involved in it, we will become the issue," this official said, speaking on condition he not be identified. The two reports in the series that have already appeared created a sensation in the Middle East.

The first, released in 2002, blamed the region's change-resistant governments for its lagging economic performance. The second, out last year, focused on the region's educational problems. -Reuters