On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

government laid bloody siege to the holiest site in Islam for nearly two weeks, severely damaging the mosque and finally destroying Juhayman and his compatriots with help from the Western infidels he decried: French commandos deployed CB, a deadly chemical that blocks breathing and inhibits aggressiveness, immobilizing the religious rebels, who were rounded up by Saudi troops.But the siege claimed at least one thousand lives. Juhayman and his compatriots were quickly executed. The traumatized royal family soon curbed the societal liberties Juhayman had condemned. Women announcers were ordered off television, women were forced to wear the veil, and cinemas were closed (except at Saudi ARAMCO). In short, the Al Saud killed Juhayman and his cohorts but adopted their agenda of intolerance, spawning yet moreradical Islamists and eventually their deadly attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and on Saudis in 2003.
    This incident marked the beginning of a now widespread sense among Saudis that their government was incompetent. That sense only grew in 1990, when the kingdom’s rulers, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in defense purchases over the decades, nonetheless concluded they needed U.S. troops to protect the country from Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait and had his eye on Saudi oil fields as well. That cynicism continues to compound to this day, with incidents like the repeated floods in Jeddah in 2009 and 2011 and with the government’s inability to diversify the Saudi economy to create jobs for the growing number of unemployed youth.
    In the wake of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers by Saudi nationals, both political reformers and religious fundamentalists began to call for reforms inside the kingdom. Fundamentalists sought reforms that essentially would make religious leaders full partners of the Al Saud. Seeing the regime on the defensive, Saudi intellectuals and other moderates too began to press for political pluralism, including a constitution limiting the government’s powers and even direct elections to the country’s Potemkin parliament, the Majlis Ash Shura, or Consultative Council.
    Faced with these mounting and seemingly irreconcilable demands, Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler (as King Fahd lay dying), deftly sought to defuse both threats. The regime imprisoned some of its critics and co-opted others. In 2003 Abdullah launched what he called “National Dialogues” that moved the debate from substantive political reform of the monarchy to superficial reform of the society. The articulate activists from the religious and the reformer ranks soon were subsumed and diluted by a broader and far less threatening group of public representatives selected by the government to participate in the nationally televised “dialogue.” In short, the government picked the topics for discussion, such as the role of women, youth, tolerance, and unemployment, and selected those who would discuss them. These National Dialogues soon sucked the energyout of the incipient reform movement and within a year had become just another somnolent event under royal sponsorship, ignored by most of society and viewed with cynicism by more politically aware Saudis. The recommendations of the National Dialogues were bound in expensive volumes at the conclusion of each session but most were never acted upon. As so often happens in Saudi Arabia, a large new building called the Center for National Dialogue is the only remaining monument to that latest reform movement.
    As delicately as the regime co-opted demands for power sharing, it met the violent attacks of extremists on Saudi citizens with matching brutality. For two years after the attack on the World Trade Center, as the United States pressured Riyadh to cut Saudi citizens’ financing of terrorists, the Saudi government largely denied that extremism was a problem. But when frustrated extremists turned to violent attacks on Saudi civilians in 2003,