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Rice Backs Riyadh's Pace of Reforms
 | Well, that's the way the Soddies are spinning it, anyway... |
Saudi Arabia should be allowed to experiment with democracy at its own pace and not be criticized as a dictatorship, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday. "Obviously countries are going to move at their own pace, they are going to move toward the liberalization of their politics in the context of their own traditions, religious, historical and others," she told a news conference at the end of her talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "No one can seek to impose a particular model or a particular set of solutions to the question of how one answers the universal aspirations of people for liberty, the simple right for people to be able to say what they think," she said.
"But we do expect that there should be movement toward reform in all of the countries of the Middle East." Rice said that building democracy often takes time, as it did in the United States, when equal rights were not immediately extended to groups such as women and blacks.
Posted by: Fred 2005-02-05 |
