CAIRO: A US master plan for the democratization and economic liberalization of the Middle East is riling Arabs who fear direct meddling in their affairs. Washington wants to launch the international plan , dubbed the "Greater Middle East Initiative," at a summit of the Group of Eight industrialized nations in June.

But throughout the Middle East, the yet-to-be-unveiled project is already raising hackles. A senior US State Department official was dispatched to the Middle East on Friday to measure the response.

"Egypt does not wait for instructions from anyone to undertake (political) reforms and democratize its institutions," Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher told reporters.

Besides, he added, his country attaches "no importance" to what is currently being said about the subject. Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa denounced the US initiative, which he said ignores "the principal regional issues and affects the stability of the region".

Speaking in Cairo Saturday after meeting here with Lebanese Foreign Minister Jean Obeid, Mussa said the Arab states could adopt a united position on the Western reform proposals at a March 29-30 summit in Tunis.

Obeid said Sunday that the United States cannot "export prefabricated democratic regimes" to the Middle East. Moreover, he said, the broad US plan "includes no mention of an overall and just solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict, and we cannot accept such a plan".

"We cannot undertake reforms to please a certain party or forego reforms for fear of another party," he added. "There was an Arab agreement to say that these ideas (in the US plan) are dangerous," he said, noting that no official notification of the US project had been made to Arab states.

In an attempt to explain the initiative, the USundersecretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs, Alan Larson, left on Friday on a Middle East tour that will take him to Ramallah in the West Bank, Jerusalem, Amman, Riyadh and Cairo.

The Egyptian state newspaper Al-Ahram noted that the US official was going to "sound out the states in the region on the American Greater Middle East Initiative".

Mussa commented on Friday that it was "raining initiatives, as if the Middle East should turn into a test field, but all the initiatives presented are incomplete".

In Paris, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal and French President Jacques Chirac in talks on Saturday agreed that any democratic initiative for the Arab world should be pursued in parallel with a revival of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, according to Chirac's spokeswoman.

"France and Saudi Arabia share the view that an initiative aimed at backing modernization and reform in the Arab and Muslim world must necessarily be coupled with a revival of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem," said Catherine Colonna.

Earlier in Brussels the Saudi foreign minister had said: "If the Middle East is to change and if there is to be a role for the West... it is not to find ways and means to force reform on the world but to provide the example to everyone."

Prince Saud was on a European tour aimed at reviving the internationally drafted peace "roadmap", which targets the creation of a Palestinian state in 2005 but has made little progress since its launch last June.

Earlier this month, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington was considering a major international initiative aimed at encouraging democratic reforms in the greater Middle East and looking for ways to "institutionalize" such a project.

In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the project would promote deep transformations in a region that, if left untended, US officials say, could become in the long-term a cauldron of tension and terrorism.

To encourage the targeted countries to cooperate, Western governments would propose increasing political cooperation and aid, facilitating membership in the World Trade Organization and fostering security agreements, according to The Washington Post. -AFP