Egypt thwarts agreement, leaving U.S. ‘not pleased’
MANAMA, Bahrain – An international conference intended to advance democracy in the Middle East ended Saturday without a formal declaration, eliciting expressions of disappointment from U.S. officials, who considered the conference a key part of President Bush’s regional democracy initiative.
In a surprise move, Egypt, which accounts for more than half the Arab world’s population and is the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid, derailed the Forum for the Future by demanding language that would have given Arab governments significant control over which pro-democracy groups would receive aid from a new fund.
Last-ditch diplomacy by the United States – which was represented at the conference by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – failed to get Egypt to budge, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit left before the conference broke up. “We made a very clear case,” a senior U.S. official at the conference said on condition of anonymity. “There were intensive negotiations. We made clear it would scuttle the declaration.”
Participants might have to wait another year for a regionwide declaration, said Bahrain’s foreign minister, Khalid bin Ahmed Khalifa.
The gathering of dozens of nations – including 22 Arab countries, members of the G8 industrialized countries, including the United States, and others – nevertheless agreed to set up two new groups to promote political and economic reform.
The U.S. delegation expressed disappointment with Egypt, a long-standing ally on such pivotal issues as the Arab-Israeli conflict and the administration’s international fight against terrorism. Egypt receives roughly $2 billion in U.S. military and economic assistance annually. Since it made peace with Israel more than a quarter-century ago, the aid it has received from the United States amounts to tens of billions of dollars.
“Obviously, we’re not pleased,” said a second senior State Department official attending the event.
The Forum for the Future, a joint U.S.-European initiative launched at the 2004 G8 summit hosted by Bush at Sea Island, Ga., is an element of the administration’s Broader Middle East and North Africa initiative. Along with the related issue of Iraq, promoting democracy in the Islamic world is the Bush administration’s top foreign policy priority. The first Forum for the Future was held last year in Morocco.
The dispute over the forum’s final declaration underscored broader differences between the West and Islamic nations of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia.
Several Arab delegates expressed concern that the norms of democracy – and the means of achieving it – are being imposed by the outside world, a sentiment deepened by the U.S. intervention in Iraq.
In her opening remarks at the conference, Rice voiced criticism of Syria and demanded it release all its political prisoners, specifically a democracy activist, Kamal Labwani, who was arrested Tuesday after he returned from talks at the White House.