US pressure to block the publication of the Arab Human Development Report will fail, the report's chief author tells Omayma Abdel-Latif The chief author of the Arab Human Development Report said on Monday that the 2004 report will be issued despite US attempts to block its publication. The drama unfolded last week when the New York Times disclosed that both the US administration and the Egyptian government were putting pressure on the UNDP -- the key funder of the report -- to block its publication. The reason, according to the New York Times, is because of the particularly harsh and critical language used to describe both the US occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The report, which is entitled Freedom and Good Governance, was due to come out last October, but it was delayed for a few months, and questions began to be raised as to whether it was going to be published at all. While Nader Fergany, who heads the team of one hundred Arab researchers who have worked on the report, acknowledged that "heavy pressure was being exerted on the UNDP to distance itself from the report", he confirmed that the report would still see the light, most likely in the last week of January 2005. "The American government has indeed been putting a lot of pressure on the UNDP," said Fergany, who went on to explain that initially the Americans wanted to water down the language of the report regarding American and Israeli brutalities in Iraq and Palestine. "Now the situation has changed, and the Americans want to block the publication of the report altogether," he added. However, a State Department official denied on Tuesday that his country was opposing the publication of the report. Fergany explained that the UNDP is in a very critical position, because the Americans have threatened to withdraw their funding from the whole programme, which amounts to $100 million. This money, he said, is needed to combat poverty in Asia and Africa. Subsequent to Fergany's interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, the UNDP did indeed announce Tuesday that they would not finance the publication of the report. Yet the report's authors were already prepared for this eventuality, and the report should soon be issued independently. According to Fergany, the researchers involved had already made contingency plans to privately fund the publication. The UNDP has spent $700,000 on the report to date, and the outstanding cost of publication is no more than $60,000. Fergany explained that there was an implicit agreement among the research team that in case the UNDP withdrew their funding, the report would still come out at the end of January, "because of the very important issues it deals with this time". "So much effort has been invested in this year's report, and the issues it addresses are so important, they have to get public exposure," he said. Fergany pointed out that the US' stance reflects the administration's double standards and throws into doubt its interest in seeing a genuinely democratic evolution in the Arab world. Ironically, when the first Arab Human Development Report was published in 2002, it was quoted extensively in speeches by many Bush administration officials, and even by the president himself, as damning proof of the Arab world's dire need for change and reform. The Egyptian government objected to the parts of the 2004 report which were critical of the government's approach to issues such as freedom of expression and association. Yet Fergany denied that the Egyptian government had been singled out, and insisted that all Arab regimes have had their fair share of criticism at the hands of his team. "This report was not about picking on certain regimes or governments, it was about the whole Arab political system. So I can't understand why the Egyptian government in particular decided to ally itself with the US against it." Fergany suspects that a copy of this year's report must have been leaked to the American administration, which has led to the US's last-ditch attempt to block the publication or influence the outcome. Fergany argued that the controversy was not so much about certain parts of the reports which the Americans believe to be laden with anti-US and anti-Israeli rhetoric, but rather concerned the report's general stance on the issue of occupation and national liberation movements, of which Palestine and Iraq are two examples. This is not the first time the US administration has sought to blackmail the UNDP by threatening to withdraw funding. Last year, a disgruntled US administration punished the programme by cutting off $12 million.
