UNITED NATIONS, April 5: A UN report says that pressure for political change is intensifying within the Arab world and unless Arab governments move much more quickly towards reform they could face chaotic social upheaval and violence.

The report, released simultaneously from New York and Jordan, calls for a rapid acceleration of democratic reforms in the region.

The “Arab Human Development Report 2004” also calls for many far-reaching legal and political changes to fortify

the institutional foundations

of freedom, limit the monopoly on power currently enjoyed

by the executive in most

countries and ensure an independent judiciary and total free speech.

“In the absence of peaceful and effective mechanisms to address injustice and achieve political alternation, some might be tempted to embrace violent protest, with the risk of internal disorder,” the report warns.

“This could lead to chaotic upheavals that might force a transfer of power in Arab countries, but such a transfer could well involve armed violence and human losses that, however small, would be unacceptable. Nor would a transfer of power through violence guarantee that successor governance regimes would be any more desirable,” it adds.

The study, written by an independent group of leading Arab intellectuals and sponsored by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) together with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the Arab Gulf Programme for UN Development Organizations, dismisses the notion that the problem is one of culture, rooting it in politics.

Throughout the region, the concentration of power in the hands of the executive — be it a monarchy, military dictatorship, or a civilian president elected without competition — has created a kind of political “black hole” at the centre of Arab political life, it says.