CHAPTER V - BRIGHT PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE

Modernization, slow and cautious in Saudi Arabia, quick and bold in the Gulf States, is opening up promising prospects and drawing a different face of the Arab world.

I. SAUDI ARABIA'S CAUTIOUS MODERNIZATION

Since 1995 a string of deadly attacks on oil facilities, foreigners, the security forces and justice officials has rocked Saudi Arabia, but the country has become more peaceful in the past few years. The global economic crisis affects it but has not caused any major destabilization. King Abdallah will go down in history as a great reformer. He has undertaken economic, social and political reforms to modernize the country in the paradoxical hopes of preserving the archaic monarchical system. Since his March 2002 Middle East peace initiative, Saudi Arabia has restored its leadership in the Arab world and appeared as a genuine partner for peace in the eyes of the West.

Saudi Arabia has come a long way. In the past 15 years conflicts in the royal family and growing discontent in the historic Hedjaz region of Mecca and Jeddah, as well as in the strategic area of Hassa (Dammam), with its oilfields and Shiite majority population, have weakened the country. Young people, literate but poor and jobless, unsuccessfully sought a place and a future in a society that had changed incredibly fast in the space of a generation despite poverty that still plagued two-fifths of households. The kingdom lost much of its shine in 2001, when it turned out that 15 of the 17 September 11 terrorists were Saudi.

The United States suddenly realized that the billions of dollars Saudi Arabia had paid the Muslim world's most fundamentalist movements were being used to finance acts of terror against its cities. Were it not for the network of personal ties between US and Saudi leaders, and Saudi Arabia's economic importance on the oil market, the kingdom would logically have been included in the "axis of evil", perhaps even invaded and occupied. That is probably what bin Laden wanted in order to get rid of the hated Saud family and spark a holy war against the United States.

Why was Saudi Arabia so fragile in the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries? How did it become stronger again? Has the pacification in recent years, obtained by a combination of repression and reforms, laid the groundwork for a veritable consolidation of the country?

A. THE INITIAL WEAKNESSES

The Sauds were sedentary merchants in Nadj, in the middle of the country. They had no legitimacy, be it religious--the Hashemites of Mecca, the Prophet's descendants, did--or political, which was held by the great nomadic tribes. Nevertheless, after two failed attempts in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, the family established its domination over most of the territory it coveted. To achieve that goal, in the late 18 th century the Sauds joined forces with Muhammed ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, a religious leader who espoused an ultra-fundamentalist version of Islam named after him. It could have been called an "alliance between the sword and the turban".

The Sauds relied on the tribes for their power by forcing them to form a national army in the service of their conquests (1913-1929) before putting down their uprising with British help. Then they undermined the tribes' desire for independence with a clever policy of marriages with the king, who chose wives from each one. Those alliances produced the 6,000-man princely class, which is exclusively made up of the Sauds' descendants and has supplanted the tribes in the midlevel civil service.

The Sauds forged the third alliance underpinning their regime with the educated merchants of Hedjaz, a social group that put its skills at creating, managing and administering wealth, which had made them powerful under the Ottoman Empire, at their service. Instead of being rewarded, the Hedjaz merchant class lost the democratic freedoms it had won before its region was integrated into the kingdom and never got them back 56 ( * ) .

Even before oil became virtually the country's only resource, the Saud family created the outlines of a modern State through "administrative, fiscal and monetary unification and gradual centralization" 57 ( * ) .

At the end of that relatively quick process, Saudi society found itself without a true civil society. Family solidarity, açabiyya , was the only bond between individuals, who were freed of tribal allegiances. The Saudi regime was able to gain complete domination over the new society by exerting moral pressure through the ulemas, religious authorities under their control, and through a ruthless judicial system ordering over 100 capital executions a year. In addition, the redistribution of oil wealth helped to ensure the submission of the majority of the population, which had become unproductive.

The windfall from the 1973 oil boom upset the balance. Royal family members and a small group of privileged individuals, who had the right to skim commissions off of international trade contracts, were at the core of a system of widespread corruption.

When oil prices collapsed after a period of speculation, the monarchy lacked the fiscal and administrative underpinnings of which it had carelessly deprived itself. It could not buy social peace, and working and middle class unrest was the result. Saudi Arabia's wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few privileged individuals involved in a web of corruption. There was nothing left to feed, care for and educate the people and defend the country.

When Saudi Arabia's crisis began in the early 1980s, the Saud family was confronted with a new people. The young, literate, urbanized Saudis of 1980 had little in common with their forebears in 1950 58 ( * ) . The tribal structure had lost its power, which was replaced by a restricted family solidarity. Collective property was outlawed between 1957 and 1968 and the nomadic tribes, forced to settle down, flocked to the cities. The urban population soared from 16% in 1950 to 85% in 2000. The tribes dissolved in the exodus but the families comprising them gained wages, health care and literacy, first for boys, then for girls. The adult literacy rate reached 83% 59 ( * ) .

The Saudis of 1980 read the Koran from cover to cover whereas the previous generation only knew a few suras learned by heart. They wanted access to the consumer society that the princes and bourgeoisie had turned into a benchmark. That is precisely the moment when Saudi Arabia's first economic crisis hit. The volatility of oil prices in the 1980s directly affected the population, whose daily resources depended on the irregular rate at which petrodollars flowed into the country.

As the demographic transition got under way, with the fertility rate dropping by half in two decades, young people under 20 accounted for 60% of the population. Nearly half of all families lived below the poverty line, especially in the outlying provinces.

Young people were disoriented. They left school without professional training, deprived of the wellbeing they had been promised. They were receptive to the language and concepts de fundamentalist Islam taught by schoolteachers, often Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood members in exile whose doctrine seamlessly dovetailed with Saudi Wahhabism. "Islamism is a revolt against the poor distribution of oil wealth", Pascal Ménoret wrote. The government was confronted by challenges based on the same religion it had instrumentalized with the ulemas' support to establish its power. Increasingly politicized intellectual movements, including a minority that drifted towards armed struggle, contested the official religion controlled by the monarchy. That is the political and religious maelstrom in which bin Laden found fertile ground.

On the eve of the crisis, a political trauma shook the monarchy's legitimacy to its foundations. In 1991 Saudi Arabia, incapable of defending itself against the threat of Saddam Hussein, asked the US army for help. This was the failure of a system of government that portrayed itself as the guardian of the sacred land where Islam was born and that must be kept free of military occupation by "infidels".

In 1995 and 1996 Saudi Al Qaeda members attacked US soldiers, first in Riyadh, then at the Al Khobar army base, killing 25 Americans and wounding 700. They opened a 10-year period of insurrection that endangered the monarchy. From 2000 to 2002 assassinations of foreigners and senior regime figures were commonplace. From 2003 to 2007 Saudis with links to Al Qaeda tried to wage a veritable war on the security forces. Dozens of people were killed and hundreds wounded in the fighting. The insurgents' arsenals, found in several parts of the country, included metric tons of explosives, bombs, chemicals and RPG7 rocket-launchers. The security forces started gaining ground in 2007. When peace was restored in 2008, the Saudi interior minister put the estimated number of potential fighters at 10,000 and of sympathizers at one million. The monarchy took back control of the country but opposition persisted.

B. THE CONSOLIDATION OF THE SAUDI REGIME

The State seems to have restored its authority. Several factors have achieved that result.

First, foreign advisors have reorganized, trained and supported the security forces, which are now capable of infiltrating fighting cells in order to prevent attacks, combat urban guerilla warfare situations and, if necessary, step up repression against the insurgents.

Second, rising oil prices between 2000 and 2007 have enabled the monarchy to buy social peace. In addition, the number of partially fictional jobs has increased in the public sectors and Saudi and foreign employees have been required to hire Saudi nationals, depriving them of the possibility of employing seven million skilled, hard-working immigrants with no rights.

The government has also revived an economic diversification policy, subsidizing investments in the petrochemical, fertilizer, plastic, glass and aluminum industries, sectors where a country with plentiful cheap energy has a competitive edge. The policy has generated productive jobs.

The government has become aware of the risk posed by an education system that, from primary school to university, instills young people with archaic religious ideas that are very distant from the measured concepts of the great schools of theological and legal thought recognized throughout the Muslim world. New generations are more conservative than their parents. Young people are becoming more permeable to extremist ideas because they lack the skills to play a productive role in society.

The government has implemented a policy to re-educate "stray sheep", a term referring to arrested terrorists and jihadists back from Iraq. If the re-education is deemed successful, in other words if "brainwashing" produces the expected results and repentance is considered genuine, the "stray sheep" are released and receive financial aid, a job, a house and even a wife. Two thousand "stray sheep", or almost all the prisoners incarcerated for terrorism, have been let out of jail. This policy, which borrows from Soviet or Chinese methods and combines them with paternalism, cares little about human rights. It fits in with a repressive system of imprisonment without charges, secrecy, systematic torture and degrading punishments such as flagellation. But it also helps reinsert Saudis who had turned towards violence, and the "stray sheep" receive better treatment than other prisoners in Saudi Arabia.

In a more strategic perspective, King Abdallah is trying to reform teaching programs and methods from primary school to university, and especially to develop professional and technical education. Some 30,000 Saudi students are currently training abroad. The king has met with fierce resistance from teachers and powerful militant Islamist universities in Medina and Riyadh as well as from a middle class that has been too recently urbanized to easily adjust to the constraints of salaried employment.

However, the policy has shown results. Pacification is widespread and Saudi Arabia is no longer in danger of destabilization. Will the situation be consolidated in the coming years so that a society can be built that, while keeping its originality, can offer its young people more fulfilling opportunities in the framework of the rule of law and prepare its economy for the day oil runs out?

C. FUTURE PROSPECTS

Saudi Arabia's future depends on political reforms, a better use of its assets and the ability to meet challenges whose importance it does not always seem to perceive.

The reforms started with a step intended to protect the royal family from the risks of a succession conflict that would weaken it. In 2006 King Abdallah set up a system of succession. An Allegiance Council in charge of designating the future king and crown prince was created.

After receiving an opinion from a medical commission, the Allegiance Council can declare that the king or crown prince is temporarily or permanently incapable of exercising power.

If the current heir to the throne, Prince Sultan, dies, the king would submit three names to replace him. The Allegiance Council can reject them and propose its own candidate. In the event of disagreement with the sovereign, the Allegiance Council must choose the crown prince by a secret ballot majority vote.

When King Abdallah dies the Allegiance Council will swear an oath to Prince Sultan, who will propose three candidates to succeed him as heir to the throne.

The people and the consultative body (Majlis al Shura) have no say in the process, which remains a family matter. The devolution system is just a way to reach consensus in a divided family. When the time comes, will it withstand the inevitable struggle for power and settling of scores inherent to the succession to a coveted throne?

The rough outline of institutional reforms announced on February 13, 2009 has few structural innovations but many appointments likely to modify the kingdom's policies in every key ministry except foreign affairs, defense and the interior, which remain in the hands of the king's brothers.

One of the king's sons-in-law, a former senior intelligence officer, is in charge of education, demonstrating the desire to combat the most radical teachers, who are deemed responsible for thousands of young Saudis' joining the jihad. The appointment of the first female minister in charge of women's education, Noura Fayez, is a signal to misogynous conservatives but also, given her eminent qualities, the proof of a sincere desire to raise the level of girls' schooling. The government does not touch the personal status of women but gives the greatest number of young women the means to win their own emancipation.

The religious and judicial apparatuses have been purged of their most radical elements. Sheikh Ibrahim al-Ghaith, head of the commission of virtue and the prevention of vice, assisted by the much-feared religious police (the motawwa ), was dismissed and replaced by the reputedly moderate Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Humaiyen. The head of the judicial supreme council, who had decreed that it was licit to kill the heads of allegedly immoral television networks, was also dismissed.

The Grand Ulema Commission's makeup takes the diversity of Saudi Islam into account (except Shiites). The four Sunni law schools are represented rather than just the Hanbalite school, which is the strictest.

The national assembly (Majlis al Shura) is still appointed but the king has drastically changed its composition. Seventy-nine of its 150 deputies have been replaced and members in their seventies have stepped down to make way for others in their forties. The new assembly includes representatives of the provinces, members of the main tribes and five Shiites, a minority that had been kept out of representative bodies until now.

The health and information ministries have been reorganized and a high administrative court and a Supreme Court created. Improvement of the health care system, more liberal regulation of information, control of the administration of justice and the establishment of the right of appeal are promising reforms.

Saudi Arabia's future also depends on making the most of its natural and human assets. It is twice as big as France and has 27 million people. The country has long kept to itself and does not take advantage of its strong points. Why couldn't Jeddah become a global trade hub like Dubai? After the failure of huge farms in the desert, why couldn't Saudi Arabia grow at least some of its food in the outlying regions conducive to agriculture and breeding, like Asir? And why would the old maritime traditions of trade and fishing be doomed to fade away?

The monarchy has attempted to transform the economic rent economy into a manufacturing economy on several occasions. Those efforts must not be abandoned. Saudi Arabia has a comparative lead on products whose raw material is oil and for which it supplies cheap energy. But whichever way the country goes, it must train young people for jobs and increase the number of universities and technology institutes. It must also modify the social status of the seven million foreigners who make up the productive labor force and not treat them like second-class citizens, allowed them to be punished at their employer's will, abused in the privacy of families, or sentenced to flogging or beheading for minor offenses after a trial during which they understood nothing because they had no interpreter to assist them. Saudi officials must also implement attractive labor law for Saudis. Their society cannot develop without those prerequisites.

Saudi Arabia can and must accelerate the emancipation of women after new, archaic, misogynous laws to please the most reactionary Wahhabite ulemas took them backwards during the crisis of the 1980s. In 1964 King Faisal called out the National Guard to force open the first girl's school. King Abdallah has recently taken steps to further the advancement of Saudi women: they can travel inside and outside the country without being accompanied by a guardian and stay alone in hotels. That is the minimum freedom of movement necessary for businesswomen, who own 20,000 companies and concentrate 40% of the kingdom's wealth in their hands 60 ( * ) .

Oil wealth is much better managed today: the Saudis have learned lessons from the backlash to the oil crises. The State budget is based on a minimum price per barrel. Investments focus on infrastructure, manufacturing and training.

For the moment, the government seems reluctant to consider some challenges. The royal family's place in Saudi Arabia's economic and political system will be challenged in the future. Is the army more capable of defending the country than in 1990 or will it remain above all an instrument of internal coercion? The government still seems to be relying on the United States to protect the country from dangers in the regional environment. It is worried about a nuclear Iran, but counts on the West to deal with the issue! Instead of actively backing the political forces capable of maintaining Iraq's cohesiveness and helping it rebuild, Saudi Arabia is still overly mistrustful of its important neighbor because of its traditional hostility to Shiites. Now that its checkbook diplomacy has failed in Yemen, the Saudi government is trying to build an electronic wall to stop smuggling and illegal immigration. It would probably be more useful to give the Yemenis a breath of fresh air by restoring the century-old migration of labor that was interrupted in 1991 and has resumed with a trickle since then. The Saudi regime has consolidated itself, recovered control of its hinterland and restored its prestige abroad. However, it might be feared that one day the monarchical political system will be caught by surprise if it does not adjust to changes in society. Saudi Arabia is doing much better but many Saudis are not.

* 56 Pascal Ménoret: L'énigme saoudienne Paris -Gallimard 2003

* 57 Pascal Ménoret: op cit.

* 58 Cf. La Ceinture, roman d'Ahmed Abodehman - Paris, Gallimard 2000.

* 59 Percentage quoted by Amnesty International in its 2009 report.

* 60 Figures quoted by Saudi sociologist Mona El Mounajeed.