 The UN Development Programme (UNDP) will lend its name to a controversial report on freedom and governance in the Arab world despite US objections to parts of the text. Egyptian sociologist Nadir Fargany said the Arab Human Development Report, the third in an annual series, would come out in March under the UNDP logo without substantive changes. The nature of the dispute centred on differences between the US view that the Arab world's problems are mainly internal and the Arab consensus that external factors such as US foreign policy and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians have contributed significantly to oppression and poor governance in the region.
| No doubt that view makes sense in Arabic, since they keep repeating it. In English it's about the same thing as dribbling tea down the front of your shirt. |
Fargany said last year that Washington had pressed the UNDP not to back the report because it did not like sections on the US occupation of Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He said the US had threatened to cut its contribution to the UN agency if it published the report, though this was denied by the UNDP. |