Stress fractures trip the divided house of Saud as desperation marks falling Monarchs

A growing divide in Saudi Arabia between rulers, ruled
By Karen Elliott House – 14 March, 2012 – WSJ

Karen Elliott House, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is most recently the author of “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future.”

The 10-year prison sentences a Saudi court handed down last weekend are more significant than the sad fate of two moderate political activists who persisted in calling for a constitutional monarchy and respect for human rights. The saga is a microcosm of the political dilemma facing the House of Saud and, by extension, a challenge to U.S. policy, which from one administration to the next supports the regime while remaining silent about Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses.

The two dissidents, Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani and Abdullah al-Hamid, were accused of, among other things, sedition, providing inaccurate information to the foreign media and founding an unlicensed human rights organization, the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (known as ACPRA). Saudi Arabia permits no civil society or political organizations. But Qahtani, a chubby, cherub-faced man in his mid-40s, determined long ago that he would seek to change the kingdom. In 2009 he told me that he would “challenge and change the system legally,” so that his young children would live in a freer society.

Qahtani is no bomb-thrower. During our interview, he recalled arriving at Philadelphia’s Temple University (where he earned his master’s in economics in 1993) so eager to avoid pork, which is forbidden to Muslims, that he asked a waitress whether each item on an unfamiliar American menu, including Coca-Cola, contained the offensive meat. While in the United States, he managed to avoid pork but picked up a penchant for freedom.

Qahtani and Saudi authorities have been playing cat and mouse almost since his return to Riyadh in 2003 to teach economics at the Saudi Foreign Ministry. The regime long has preferred to bribe or buy wayward citizens than to beat them. When its preferred methods fail, however, the Sauds, like most Arab autocrats, can be ruthless. In 2008, Qahtani hosted a current-affairs show on government television. But after he helped found ACPRA in 2009, his show was canceled. Such harassment is intended to alter behavior or at least ensure that opposition is limited to words, never actions.

Yet Qahtani and his colleagues persisted. In 2010 they wrote an open letter to King Abdullah asking for judicial reform and calling on the nation to “engage in a peaceful struggle to resist tyranny.”

Because most Saudis depend on government jobs, or outright largess, open defiance is rare. The regime may toy with and torment citizens, like a cat with a timid mouse, but it tries to avoid arousing ire. After the Arab Spring took hold, however, even in docile Saudi Arabia some citizens have become more assertive.

Qahtani and ACPRA finally crossed a red line in January 2012 by asking the king to remove his heir, Crown Prince Nayef, who during four decades overseeing internal security was responsible for imprisoning any number of Saudi citizens without charges or trials. This request defied an explicit ban (established after the Arab Spring began) on criticizing the royal family, or its compliant religious establishment. Nayef died soon after but his son quickly replaced him, and small-scale Saudi protests multiplied. …more