Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prodded Middle Eastern leaders on Monday to reform their governments, declaring that the U.S. was no longer willing to accept regional stability at the expense of political freedom.
“We believe any reform will expose the fact that there are universal values and freedoms that people aspire to,” Rice said with the foreign minister of dynastic Saudi Arabia at her side. “We believe the people of the Middle East, we believe the people of Saudi Arabia, are no different in that regard.”
Earlier in the day in Cairo, Rice took her case for wider political freedom directly to the Arab public with an address as notable for its setting – Egypt, an important U.S. ally – as its content.
“Throughout the Middle East, the fear of free choices can no longer justify the denial of liberty,” Rice said at Cairo’s American University. “It is time to abandon the excuses that are made to avoid the hard work of democracy.”
Democracy is the “ideal path for every nation,” Rice told a polite but restrained audience of about 600 invited government officials, academics and others.
Both Saudi Arabia and Egypt have taken some steps toward political change while insisting that reform must be on their terms and timetables.
Egypt will hold its first multiparty election this fall, but opposition groups say the voting is a sham set up to favor the ruling party of President Hosni Mubarak. Saudi Arabia recently held limited municipal elections, but women cannot vote and only some of the municipal seats were open for balloting.
As she has done in speeches in the U.S. and elsewhere since taking over from Colin Powell in January, Rice said the U.S. is just as committed to democratic change and open elections in the Middle East as elsewhere in the world. She pointed to elections in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon.
“For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,” she said. “Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspiration of all people.”
Her message was mixed, however. For all of Rice’s forceful rhetoric, she pulled some punches when addressing the progress of democratic change in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And she refused to see representatives of Egypt’s largest Islamic opposition movement, the Muslim Brotherhood, because the group is banned by the Mubarak government.
At a news conference in Riyadh, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal sounded irritated by questions about the pace and progress of reform. “The row is really meaningless,” he said. “The assessment that is important for any country in the development of its political reform is the judgment of its own people.”
The foreign minister said he had not read Rice’s Cairo speech because he was busy preparing for her visit.
In her remarks, Rice strongly rebuked two countries – Syria and Iran – that have long been on the outs with Washington.
She called Syria a “police state” that has acted as a foreign master in neighboring Lebanon. On Iran, she said, “The appearance of elections does not mask the organized cruelty of Iran’s theocratic state.”
Rice drew no applause during the university address. But there was applause for audience questions about alleged Israeli human-rights abuses against the Palestinians and about mistreatment of the Koran at U.S. military prisons.
One protester who demonstrated during Rice’s appearance said the United States is not serious about democracy.
“The American regime has to be boycotted as long as they are occupying Arab and Islamic lands,” said activist Abdel Hamid Kandil. “Today, Condoleezza Rice was talking about free and fair elections. How can this be serious if there are no candidates and no elections in the first place?”
Among those who attended Rice’s speech, Sanaa Eid, an American University alumna and former banker, said the secretary’s talk left her hoping for more answers. “We are very, very eager to be like them in democracy,” she said of the United States. “But I don’t feel that this brings results.”
Middle East governments are mostly monarchies or family dynasties, as in Saudi Arabia, or centralized nearly one-party regimes, as in Egypt. The United States lists both Saudi Arabia and Egypt as human-rights abusers and has cited Saudi Arabia as a nation that does little to combat human trafficking.
Rice praised Mubarak for moving to hold elections but said she is concerned for the future of Egypt’s reform because of violence visited on “peaceful supporters of democracy.” Last month, Mubarak supporters pulled and kicked opposition activists in the street during a preparatory referendum.
