building gtk+ 3 on rhel6

[Ted Toth <txtoth gmail com>]

I'm trying to build gtk+ 3 on RHEL6 but have run into a problem while
following the instruction on
http://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/gtk-building.html when building
pango. The glib build went fine but pango is a problem:

./configure --prefix=/opt/gtk
      :
checking for CoreText availability... no
checking for CAIRO... yes
checking which cairo font backends could be used... none
configure: Disabling cairo support
configure: error: *** Could not enable any backends.
*** Must have at least one backend to build Pango.

cairo and cairo-devel are installed and as best I can tell the font
backends are included. Anyone done this yet? If so what did you have
to do to get by this issue.

Ted