Stifled of political freedom, isolated from the world of ideas, repressing their women and with science and development stunted, the Arab world will find it difficult to fault the conclusions of a United Nations report that all too accurately sums up the barren, ossified life of so many Arab countries.

The UN's Arab Development Report was prepared by Arab intellectuals and partly sponsored by the Arab League, so there is no way the Arab dictators and oligarchs can pretend to ignore its findings.

But they will. For although the report does not say so in quite these words, it is the dead, often cruel rule of their regimes that have used the pretext of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to postpone indefinitely any democratic reform.

The document, released in Cairo this week and covering 22 Arab countries containing 280 million people, says damningly that the Arab world is "richer than it is developed".

With appropriate irony, the report coincided with a Unesco conference in Beirut that drew almost identical conclusions. Speakers condemned the "backward narcissism" of the Arab world, the failure to produce a society which has room for self-doubt, which forbids the teaching of philosophy in universities because - in the words of Mohamed Sbila, a Moroccan academic - "it epitomises awareness and doesn't hold anything sacred".

The UN report talks about a less tolerant social environment, thus avoiding any discussion of Islam and its fundamentalist believers, in which per capita income growth has shrunk over the past two decades. Productivity is declining.

Science, in a part of the world that was technically highly sophisticated when the much cruder Crusaders first invaded the Holy Land, is comatose, along with technology. Research and development are often non-existent. Intellectuals shun the repressive, closed societies of the Arab world.

Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, head of the UN's Arab section and leader of the team that wrote the ground-breaking report - a first UN Development Programme report on Arabs by Arabs - said gender, knowledge and political freedom were paramount.

"The report aims to start a dialogue in the region - it won't make many friends there, but that wasn't the intention," she said.

The report, which took 18 months to compile, praises the nations it puts under the spotlight for raising the life expectancy of their peoples, cutting infant mortality and reducing extreme poverty.

But growth in per capita income in the region in the past two decades, at an average of just 0.5 per cent, was the lowest in the world, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and labour productivity had declined at an annual average of 0.2 per cent.

Added together, the gross domestic product of the 22 nations was less than a medium-sized European country, such as Spain.

While more people had entered the educational system, the quality of that education was crumbling, leading to what the report described as deficits in opportunity and capability.

"The way forward involves tackling human capabilities and knowledge," it said. "It also involves promoting systems of good governance, those that promote, support and sustain human well-being, based on expanding human capabilities, choices, opportunities and freedoms."

Yet 65 million adults, mostly women, remained illiterate, 10 million children were not enrolled in schools, and unemployment averaging 15 per cent across the region was three times the world average.

Half of all Arab women are illiterate and the maternal mortality rate is four times that of east Asia. Rima Hunaidi, a former Jordanian minister, says she asked the authors of the report "to come and look at this problem and decide - why is Arab culture, why are Arab countries, lagging behind?"

Most Arabs, however, will wonder why it took a one-year study to come up with the answers. Indeed, just a look at the past week's developments in the Arab world should be enough.

Kuwait, despite repeated pleas for clemency from Amnesty International, hanged three Bangladeshis convicted of murder - one of them took 13 minutes to die on the rope - and then displayed the corpses on the gibbet for public viewing.

In Egypt, policemen beat back Islamist voters trying to cast their ballots in a rigged election in Alexandria.

Syria sent another intellectual to prison for daring to suggest that the country should be more open to democratic debate.

In Jordan, trade unionists were warned by the Prime Minister not to involve themselves in politics after demonstrations calling for an American boycott.

With the exception only of Syria, they are all among the "friends" of the West whose emirs and kings and presidents have the political support and military protection of the West.

Even in France, we now have the spectacle of General Khaled Nezzar, perhaps the most important military man in the Algerian regime, taking to court a 30-year-old second lieutenant in the Algerian Army for "slandering" him in a book on Algeria's dirty war.

Already Habib Souaida, the former soldier, has given evidence of watching a squad of soldiers throwing petrol over a 15-year-old boy and burning him alive.

Yet Nezzar, who fled Paris when civil suits were filed against him for torture, is now allowed back to France, while the Spanish Foreign Minister, representing the EU, has - in Algeria itself - welcomed "notable progress in the protection of human rights".

- INDEPENDENT, additional reporting by REUTERS