by Dr. James M. Dorsey
Prince Muhammad is attempting to stamp out any form of opposition to his mercurial rise, economic and social reform plans, and conduct of the Yemen war.
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman al Saud, photo via Office of the President of Russia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 635, November 6, 2017
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Few
noticed a rare protest that took place in Saudi Arabia in late January
2011 as a wave of popular uprisings swept the Middle East and North
Africa, toppling the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Yet
that protest, as well as criticism of the government’s handling of
floods in the Red Sea port of Jeddah in 2009, play an important role in
Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s extension of his crackdown to
members of the ruling family and the military. Prince Muhammad is
attempting to stamp out any form of opposition to his mercurial rise,
economic and social reform plans, and conduct of the Yemen war.
Prince Muhammad has dismissed and/or detained
eleven princes, various senior government officials, top military
officers, and an unidentified number of prominent businessmen largely
linked to different factions within the ruling family. He will also be
heading a new anti-corruption committee that will be looking into the handling of the Jeddah floods of 2009.
Those floods killed 120 people and caused
destruction as well as prolonged power outages in Jeddah. The floods
triggered an unusual public debate about the management of public funds
and infrastructure defects. The Saudis said the port city’s poor
infrastructure was the reason why the floods had such a devastating
effect, prompting dozens to protest.
In 2011, another protest arose in response to a
mass Blackberry message campaign calling on residents to gather on the
city’s main shopping street. Up to 50 protestors are believed to have
been arrested.
The government, in a bid to address the
frustration in Jeddah, this year contracted China’s state-owned Chinese
Communication Construction Group (CCCG) to build a 37-kilometer channel
to catch rain and flood water. “It might be an ordinary channel in
another area, but it isn’t the same in Saudi Arabia and it has special
importance and came after painful lessons,” said Ma Chifeng, the director of CCCG’s Jeddah City Project for Flood Drainage.
The political crackdown
is of course about much more than the Jeddah floods, even if making
them one of the anti-corruption committee’s initial focal points is
significant. Among those dismissed and/or detained were National Guard
head Prince Meteb bin Abdullah; economy minister and former Jeddah mayor
Adel bin Mohammad Fakeih; and navy commander Abdullah al-Sultan, as
well as reportedly businessmen such
as multi-billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz, a major
shareholder in some of the world’s best-known blue chips and a media
mogul who is widely seen as a liberal. Also swept up in the crackdown
were Waleed bin Ibrahim al-Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of King Fahd;
Abdulaziz bin Fahd, the late king’s son and owner of the Middle East
Broadcasting Company (MBC), which operates the Al Arabiya television
network; and Saleh Kamel, head of one of the Middle East’s largest
conglomerates, who in the past had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Prince Meteb, a son of the late King Abdullah, was
the last senior member of the ruling family unconnected to King
Salman’s branch of the family to be in a position of power. The tribally
rooted guard, a military unit founded alongside the military to protect
the ruling family rather than the country, was long seen as a
stronghold of King Abdullah and his closest associates.
The crackdown on National Guard and military commanders coincided with the firing of a missile
by Houthi rebels at Riyadh, a signal that the Saudi capital is now
within their range. The firing suggested that Saudi Arabia’s strategy in
the two and one-half year-long Yemen war, based on an air campaign
rather than the commitment of Saudi ground troops, has so far failed to
achieve its declared goal of ensuring the kingdom’s security.
The crackdown also follows the disappearance and alleged kidnapping of
three of four known dissident members of the Saudi ruling family who
had gone into exile in Europe. Among the four were Prince Turki bin
Bandar, a former senior police officer responsible for policing the
ruling family; and Prince Sultan bin Turki, the husband of a late
daughter of King Abdullah.
It also follows a wave of earlier arrests of
scores of Islamic scholars, judges, and intellectuals whose views run
the gamut from ultra-conservative to liberal. Among those arrested were
scholars Salman al-Odah, Aaidh al-Qarni, and Ali al-Omari; poet Ziyad
bin Naheet, and economist Essam al-Zamil, some of whom have more than 17 million followers on Twitter.
The detentions were designed to silence 1) alleged
support in the kingdom for an end to the almost four-month old Gulf
crisis that has pitted Saudi Arabia and its allies against Qatar; 2)
mounting criticism of the kingdom’s conduct in the Yemen war; and 3)
criticism of Prince Muhammad’s reforms.
Beyond grandiose plans, Prince Muhammad has yet to
deliver on the economic aspects of his reform plans articulated in
his Vision 2030. He has so far delivered on limited, headline-grabbing
social changes, such as lifting the ban on women’s driving and the
granting of access for women to sports stadia. These changes were needed
for his economic reforms as well as for the encouragement of greater
entertainment opportunities that contribute to economic growth and
address grievances among youth, who account for a majority of the
kingdom’s population. Prince Muhammad has yet to deliver on jobs in a
country that has high un- and under-employment and whose population has
been weaned on cradle-to-grave welfare.
The most recent crackdown breaks with the
tradition of consensus within the ruling family, whose secretive inner
workings are equivalent to those of the Kremlin at the time of the
Soviet Union. The dismissals and detentions suggest that Prince
Muhammad, rather than forging alliances, is extending his iron grip to
the ruling family, the military, and the National Guard to counter what
appears to be widespread opposition within the family as well as the
military to his reforms and the Yemen war.
This raises questions about a reform process that
is increasingly based on a unilateral rather than a consensual rewriting
of the kingdom’s social contract. “It is hard to envisage MBS [Prince
Muhammad] succeeding in his ambitious plans by royal decree. He needs to
garner more consent. To obtain it, he must learn to tolerate debate and
disagreement,” wrote The Economist.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/saudi-crackdown/
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