Challenges to the Saudi regime

LONDON: The two car bombs which exploded in Riyadh and Khobar, near Dharan, on Nov. 13, 1995 and June 25, 1996 respectively, and the stroke King Fahd suffered in November 1995, have focused attention on the stability of the regime in Saudi Arabia. The perpetrators of the Riyadh explosion, who were caught and executed, have been paraded by the Saudi authorities as extreme militant Islamists who drew their ideas from exiled dissidents such as Mohammed Al-Mas'ari. Those responsible for the second car bomb have not yet been apprehended, but assessments about their political affiliation also place them among fundamentalist opposition groups. These two explosions aroused fears that a grassroots religious backlash was gaining momentum, and generated an ominous analogy with the 1979 Iranian revolution in which the religious establishment supported by liberal groups ousted the Shah's regime.

The comparison, although tempting, may turn out to be misleading. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia have been ruled by ailing monarchs and, in both countries, the society is being torn apart by a bitter conflict between fundamentalist values and Western influences. But here the similarity ends. In Iran, the religious establishment was politically and financially independent, whereas in Saudi Arabia, it has always been part of, and financially dependent on, the regime.

No less important is the nature of the monarchy. In Iran, the last monarchy was hereditary, passing from father to son. In Saudi Arabia, it is a family business and the monarch is elected on a consensual basis by the senior members of the family. This procedure makes it harder for a coup d'etat or a popular revolution to take place.

The Al-Saud ruling family now faces one of its most critical periods ever. It is ruled by aging princes and fictionalized by internal rivalries over succession, while concurrently contending with the population's loss of confidence, exacerbated by the growing appeal of Islamic fervor and by reduced welfare benefits. Nevertheless, until now, the political system in Saudi Arabia has proved flexible enough to adjust to various challenges. Over the years, it has succeeded in overcoming family, internal and external crises.

To a large extent, the current crisis has originated from, and been triggered by, the 1991 Gulf War, although many of its roots can be traced back a decade or more. The traditional Saudi security policy, shaped by King lbn Saud and his son Crown Prince Faisal early in the 1950s, was based on acceptance of U.S. military protection, stationed 'beyond the horizon', for use in an emergency. A permanent U.S. military presence or a prepositioning of arms was vehemently rejected as an infringement on Saudi sovereignty. This policy changed during the Gulf War, when around 500,000 foreign troops operated from bases on Saudi soil, and afterwards, when a limited Western military force remained to enforce the implementation of UN resolutions on Iraq and to ensure the stability of the Gulf emirates. This policy shift played into the hands of the pro-Western groups, thereby upsetting the traditional balance in society between them and the conservatives. It was, therefore, only a question of time before the latter would increase pressure to return to the status quo ante.

The Saudi political system is characterized by the hegemony of the ruling Al-Saud family and its monopoly on political and economic power. The loyalty and obedience of the population had been guaranteed, through alliances between Al-Saud and leading merchant families and tribal sheiks, as well as with the u'lema (jurists), and later through the abundant welfare policy. This political system, improved and developed by Crown Prince Faisal in the early 1960s, has in many ways exhausted itself. The welfare policy ran into difficulties with the decline of oil revenues since 1982 and the subsequent decrease by approximately 50 percent in gross national product (GNP) per capita from 1982 to 1995, as well as the exhaustion of almost all the country's $115 billion liquid foreign reserves. Demographic changes which, as in other Arab states, have doubled the population over the past 30 years, and have strained the government's capacity to continue with its benevolent welfare policy.

The continuing exclusion of the Saudi people from participating in the political process, and the concentration of the political monopoly in the hands of the royal family, have been controversial issues in the outmoded political system. Nevertheless, the pressure on Al-Saud to end its monopoly on power is still endurable. This is because most Saudis are more accustomed to traditional tribal norms than Western democratic values.

Of greater risk to the prevailing political system are the strains within the royal family over the order of succession. King Fahd's natural successors, according to the order set up by Faisal in the early 1960s, are the conservative Crown Prince Abdullah, who will presumably become king if Fahd steps aside in the near future, and his half brother, the pro-U.S. Defense Minister, Prince Sultan, who will succeed Abdullah as crown prince.

Despite Fahd's illness and the advanced age of his agreed-upon successors, the royal family has not yet decided who will succeed Sultan as the next crown prince and designated king. This issue is further complicated by the need to maintain a certain internal balance among the various maternal branches of the family, and to retain an appropriate equal representation of conservative and Western-oriented princes in the government. King Fahd's inclination to defer crucial inter-family decisions, and perhaps to leave the broad issue of succession to his immediate successors, might aggravate what for now are subdued family rivalries.

Over the past 40 years, the opposition has failed to rally the population against the royal family. The various active opposition groups represented either centrifugal forces harking back to the tribal fabric of society, or local interests. The opposition also failed to suggest a sweeping ideology able to overcome the differences rooted in society, and thereby bridge the gaps among its more heterogeneous segments. Consequently, the opposition represented local interests such as that of the Shi'a minority - located in the oil-rich eastern region around Qatif, Hufuf, Dammam, Ras Tanura and Jubayl - whose messages were rejected by the Sunni majority, or that of the Western-educated population, from the western Hijaz region, who were more exposed to and influenced by national and liberal ideologies during the 1950s and 1960s.

In the central Najd region, the hub of the kingdom's strictly religious Wahhabi ideology, opposition to the Al-Saud realm has been smoldering over the years, but only broke out at the end of the 1970s with the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by an ultra orthodox group led by Juhaiman Al-Utaibi. The opposition that grew in Najd was more fundamentalist than groups in other regions. In Burayda, the capital of Al-Qassim province to the north of Riyadh, fundamentalist Moslems often challenged the religious practices of the government. In this atmosphere famous dissidents like Mohammed Al-Mas'ari, and the clergyman Salman Al- Awda, born and brought up in Al-Qassim province. Although their influence also extended to Riyadh, their real constituency and links remained in the Al-Qassim area.

The current Islamic opposition movement has gained momentum since the 1991 Gulf War. It is made up of various branches, including loosely organized underground militant groups trained in Afghanistan and apparently responsible for the latest terror activities. The Islamic movement highlights the need to: * end the corruption and nepotism of Al-Saud; * establish social justice based on the rulings of the Koran; * create a strong military force capable of defending the country; and * revive the Islamic concepts of accountability of the rulers and legitimate human rights under Islam.

These messages, which correspond to the main precepts disseminated by Juhaiman Al-Utaibi in 1979, have their appeal among low-ranking officials and university students, but not necessarily among the upper middle class of Hijaz or the Shi'a population in the east.

The 1991 Gulf War saw a brief rise in liberal groups, which tried to take advantage of the shift toward the West to promote their particular liberal messages. But their ideas of democracy, parliamentarianism and more liberty for women were withdrawn shortly after the war, when the liberals realized they were playing into the hands of the ultra orthodox groups.

The Najdi Islamic opposition movement does not differ essentially from previous opposition groups which promoted local interests and ideas. It reflects the endemic cultural struggle between conservative Islamic and Western-oriented segments of society, which so far have refrained from genuine dialogue to bridge the gap between them. On the contrary, they still refer to each other in terms of 'live or die'. The localized messages of the opposition groups, thus, hinder the emergence of an effective nationwide opposition that can pose a real danger to the survival of Al-Saud.

The major threat to the stability of the government lies within Al-Saud itself. If the family cannot agree on the continuation of consensual rule, it will have to devise a new internal order to cement its authority. Lack of agreement on succession and division of power within the family, in the near future, may put obstacles in the way of a smooth transfer of power from Fahd to his successors. It may also reopen the struggle between conservative and pro-U.S. princes. In this struggle, princes might be tempted to search for support outside the family, even among opposition groups. Such a move, though unlikely, would curtail the hegemony of Al-Saud and promote the idea of public participation in the government, thereby splitting the royal family between those who adhere to its traditional consensual basis, and those who might prefer a more progressive system. Such a development would create an unstable atmosphere both internally and throughout the Gulf region, as well as posing a threat to Western oil and economic interests.

Window: The continuing exclusion of the Saudi people from participating in the political process, and the concentration of the political monopoly in the hands of the royal family, have been controversial issues in the outmoded political system.