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COMMENTARY
August 1, 2002
Royal flameout
It's getting crowded in King Fahd's suite at the university hospital in Geneva. The octogenarian Saudi king who suffers from arthritis diabetes cataracts a trick knee and the permanent effects of the massive stroke he suffered in 1995 is among the country's most grounded jetsetters. His full brothers Prince Salman and Prince Abdul Rahman are in there now. Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah II went through the other day. Any number of well-laundered Arabians come and go. To say nothing of the doctors: who removed a cataract Tuesday and a blood-clot last week if we believe press releases. Why the heavy deathwatch when the affairs of the Saudi state were transferred years ago into the hands of King Fahd's half-brother the sharp-tongued and generally wits-about-him Crown Prince Abdullah? The short answer is that Abdullah has lost it; lost his control over "the mob" (the 70 000 members of the heroically polygamous Saud family); lost his hold on his country's fanatic preachers; lost his ability to exile terrorists; lost the thread of regional diplomacy (with his failed peace proposal to Israel); lost the use of the oil weapon (to a supply glut); and made a hash of a proposed $30-billion development of Saudi Arabia's natural gas reserves. He is also losing a growing number of family members. In the last week or so: Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud Alkabeer age 25 was reported to have "died of thirst in the desert". Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki 41 crashed his car . Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz 43 had a heart attack . Coincidence or chariot of the gods? Rumours of political ambition followed each of these men to his grave. Among surviving princes (there are about 3 000 to go) two distinct camps have emerged according to Western intelligence sources and other close observers. From what I gather situation rooms have been established both in the Pentagon and the British foreign office to study these developments with great care and plan contingencies for the regime's disintegration. The split passes right through the "Sudairi Seven" -- an inner cabinet of King Fahd's full brothers. Prince Sultan the defence minister and Prince Naif who runs the intensely Koranic interior ministry are trying to overturn Prince Abdullah's very mildly pro-American stance; and the next generation of princes contains dozens of Islamist hotheads. There are also several Western-oriented liberal royals such as eloquent Prince Talal; but these find themselves increasingly obliged to observe a meditative silence. The nominal opponents of fanatic Islamism have no instinctive policy but fear and with it the desire to run to the Americans for protection. Like Iran Saudi Arabia is coming apart. The regime is leaning downwind and may suddenly collapse entirely. But unlike Iran it is most likely to fall directly on top of U.S. and Western interests. For while Iran's people have focused their disaffection on the ayatollahs and openly long for Western-style democracy and secular rule of law the Arab masses under Saudi rule have had their attention diffused and subverted. On the one hand large numbers are whipped into frenzies of anti-American and anti-Jewish hysteria in the mosques and from the airwaves. The regime long ago began its policy of installing and encouraging charismatic radical clergy to direct popular fury away from itself. The leading cleric Sheik Abdul Rahman Al Sudays imam of Mecca is an obvious nutjob who preaches an international conspiracy of Jews Christians and Hindus. On the other despite the regime's best efforts to systematically censor and control Internet servers and other media facts about the outside world freely circulate. Among the more prosperous middle classes and the foreign-educated elites the belief that the country's oil wealth has been squandered and its people mentally and spiritually crippled by an utterly corrupt and nepotistic regime is too unanswerable to suppress. Enter into this equation the operations of Al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates within Arabia's Muslim Brotherhood. For years the Saudi regime has been paying them off to go far away; now they are trapped in the choice between American wrath if the payments continue and the deal being off if they stop. Through hesitation and mixed signals they have achieved both results. To see this catastrophe in its full dimensions we must understand that Islam per se is not the root of the problem. It only looks that way because the puritanical and repugnant Wahabi version of Islam embraced from its beginnings by the House of Saud as a means to legitimate its power has possession of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It uses these to present itself as Islam's definitive voice. The Wahabi zealots would have had no great influence in the world except for the geological accident that another part of the Arabian peninsula adjoining the Persian Gulf is saturated with oil. It is not the bin Laden family (mere court retainers) but the Saud dynasty that has used its appropriated billions in a huge missionary effort abroad to spread Wahabi ideals and violent aspirations throughout the Muslim "umma". Al Qaeda began as only a little entrepreneurial experiment. But the chicks have now grown and come home to roost. Saudi citizens like the 15 of 19 hijackers on 9/11 no longer have an Afghanistan in which to vent their frustrations. While many under Iranian and Iraqi patronage have shifted their focus to Lebanon and the Israeli frontier and others have gone to ground in terrorist cells all over the world many more have been filtering home. And the easy supply of fresh terrorist recruits from Arabia's swollen population of unemployed young males (themselves the product of the Saudi failure to move the economy beyond sucking oil) -- have most of them nowhere to go. Per capita income has fallen by three-quarters since the heyday of OPEC and people can't even go out and see movies. Hence the growing number of terrorist incidents in Saudi Arabia itself. I shall leave the catalogue for another day but Westerners are no longer safe in the country. The economic consequences of this -- foreigners do almost all of the actual work in the kingdom from pampered Yankee oil-rig engineers down to abused Filipina housemaids -- are beginning to be felt. And the public relations fallout in the West is such that the Saudi police are desperately trying to pin car-bombings and similar incidents on the foreign workers themselves. (The Canadian William Sampson is among a growing number of foreigners under sentence of beheading on very unlikely charges. Alcohol smuggling yes -- all the Westerners are into that; car bombings no.) It is not however the uniformed police but the Mutawaun who are the real face of the Saudi regime at street level -- the agents of the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. They don't wear uniforms but like the Taliban in Afghanistan (which modelled itself on the Saudi regime) may be spotted by their austere robes and headgear and personal theatricality. Their job is to threaten women who are not covered head to toe in the plain black "abaya" prevent men and women from talking to each other see that shops are closed at prayer times herd the men into the mosques and beat up kids who look excessively happy. They patrol the streets in airconditioned SUVs or walk through the American-style shopping malls with their bullhorns and sticks. They finally triggered nation-wide demonstrations starting March 11 when they prevented at least 14 girls from escaping a fire in their school at Mecca lest they appear in the street without their abayas. While the story was suppressed in the state-controlled media it quickly travelled throughout the kingdom. (Only people who have lived in totalitarian states can understand the efficiency with which news can be distributed by word of mouth.) The same Arabian grapevine is now carrying numerous accounts of large public demonstrations. The Western media assume that these demonstrators are screaming for Al Qaeda and Palestine and indeed there is plenty of evidence that (the late?) Osama bin Laden enjoys a cult following. But my own sources insist that many of the demonstrators are women and that the protests are aimed almost entirely at the House of Saud and its Mutawaun. This hardly means the "good guys" will win. There are no good guys. For in a country as backward as Saudi Arabia where no form of civil opposition has ever been tolerated or been able to survive all this present disorganized protest plays into the hands of the worst elements within the regime and the worst elements outside it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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