Here are two interesting pieces from the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) for whom I do occasional, paid book reviews. The pieces appear in the current, Spring 2010 edition of the MEPC Journal.
The first, by former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles (Chas) Freeman, picks up on a phrase that drove US diplomats crazy: ‘Progress without Change’. This was a trope offered by Saudis that suggested that it was possible to modernize Saudi Arabia without any change in the social or governmental status quo. The concept was risible on its face, but one that many Saudis firmly believed… or at least hoped for. As Freeman points out, with the ascension of King Abdullah to the throne, the notion has been laid aside. Hopefully, it’s being relegated to the dustbin of history once and for all.
Saudi Arabia: The End of Progress without Change
Amb. Charles FreemanI have been asked to speak to you about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This is a topic I have never before addressed to an American audience. Why bother?
We Americans reserve the right to have strong opinions on the basis of little or no knowledge. There are few countries that better exemplify our assertive ignorance of foreign geography, history, and culture than Saudi Arabia. Most of us are convinced that Saudis are Muslim zealots, control the world’s oil prices, and are absurdly rich, anti-feminist, and undemocratic. They hate our values and want to destroy us. Talk radio confirms this. What more needs to be said?
On reflection, a lot does. Neither caricature nor a priori reasoning is a sound basis for policy. A distorted view of foreign realities precludes success at dealing with them. There is much at stake in our relationship with Saudi Arabia. We can ill afford to get it wrong.
That country is, of course, the heartland of Islam and the custodian of the world’s largest oil reserves. It lies athwart transport routes between Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is at the center of a growing concentration of global capital. Under any circumstances, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be important. It is all the more so in an era when we Americans are at war with ever more peoples in the Islamic world, depend on ever greater amounts of imported energy, and need ever larger foreign loans to run our government and sustain our life style.
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The second is the start of an article on Saudi Arabia’s quest for food security. It’s by Thomas Lippman, author of the commendable Inside the Mirage, a contemporary history of the Kingdom, and Arabian Knight, a biography of Col. William Eddy, who plaid an important role in early US-Saudi relations.
Unfortunately, the full article is only available to Journal subscribers at this time.
Saudi Arabia’s Quest for “Food Security”
Thomas LippmanOn the broad highway that runs southeast from Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, it takes less than an hour to reach the beginning of farm country.
The industrial zones peter out, and suddenly date palms are growing on both sides of the road, not in the random patterns of an oasis but in the long straight rows of cultivated orchards. Then the first chicken hatchery appears, and soon patches of green vegetables and alfalfa. East of the farm town of al-Kharj are vast operations of corporate agriculture, such as Al Safi, the world’s largest dairy farm, and Almarai, a dairy and juice conglomerate.
The landscape is unmistakably desert and hardly looks promising for farming. But agriculture is big business in Saudi Arabia, from Hail in the north to the valleys near Taif in the west to the terraced hillsides of the southwest, made possible mostly by decades of government subsidies and irrigation with water pumped out of caverns deep underground. In 2008, agriculture accounted for nearly 5 percent of the country’s annual GDP and employed about 12 percent of the work force.1
Saudi state television’s “This is Our Country” program features a documentary celebrating the achievements of Saudi agriculture: self-sufficiency in wheat and poultry, impressive harvests of figs, grapes and citrus fruits, increasing production of olive oil. The so-called “Desert Kingdom” is self-sufficient in potatoes — which is saying a lot, given the amount of french fries consumed at the ubiquitous fast-food restaurants — and even produces flowers for export.
Nevertheless, only about 2 percent of the country’s enormous land mass is arable, even with intensive irrigation and modern farming technology, and the country in modern times has always depended on imported food.
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Saudi Gazette runs this cartoon on young Saudis’ likelihood of finding a job…
Credit: Saudi Gazette
While the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) continues to roil Saudi society with its policy of co-education, women-only universities continue to develop. Arab News reports on the progress on constructing a new campus for Noura University, now being built in Riyadh. The campus will consolidate some 40 colleges under one roof.
What’s interesting is that when he was offered the opportunity to have the new university named after him, King Abdullah demurred, instead choosing the name of Princess Noura, beloved sister of the country’s founder King Abdulaziz. Histories, the ones that don’t make it into Saudi textbooks, relay that Abdulaziz relied on his sister for sound council and took great pride in her. He even went so far as to transgress a social taboo and referred to her in public by her name. Contemporary, educated, young Saudis still have problems in uttering the names of the women in their families in public.
One would never know it from published materials, but there is an alternative history in Saudi Arabia, one that demonstrates the power of Saudi women within families. The history is hidden by Saudis because of a culture that schizophrenically blends honor and shame toward women, hiding them from public view. It’s hidden by non-Saudis because of the stereotype of oppressed women. Saudi women are ‘oppressed’ in many regards from a Western viewpoint and some certainly do suffer from oppression at the hands of conservative and tribal practices. But within families, many Saudi women exert a surprising level of power.
Also noteworthy, the article says that 66% of Saudi university students are women.
Noura University, a landmark dedicated to a beloved aunt
SAEED AL-KHOTANI | ARAB NEWSRIYADH: Round-the-clock construction work has been taking place near King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh for the last few months.
On a 94-square kilometer-site, the new campus of the Princess Noura bint Abdul Rahman University is being built. It will be one of the largest higher education institutions for women in the world.
It is really hard for anyone not to notice the scaffolding, cranes, loaded trucks and intense activity at the site.
The workers were meant to have met a 2010 deadline, but this has now been pushed back to sometime next year.
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The women at Noura University might have cause to celebrate, those at Umm Al-Qura University in Mecca are not quite so happy. Saudi Gazette/Okaz report that crowding at that university’s facilities is getting unacceptable. Dorm rooms built for four students’ occupancy will soon see nine packed into the rooms, at least on a temporary basis. The women also complain that their protests to university officials results in a ’shut up and accept it’ rebuke, with threats of ’serious action’ if they don’t shut up.
9 students per room at Umm Al-Qura women’s hostel
Hatim Al-MasoudiMAKKAH – Over 70 female students are up in arms over a decision by the Umm Al-Qura University hostel authorities to increase the number of students from four to nine in a room of five square meters.
The decision has been taken because the university wants to accommodate medical students at the University’s Hostel in the Al-Nozha District situated in the center of the city.
The Housing Deanship has threatened to punish any student who fails to comply with the decision, the students said.
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The effects of the floods that swept through Jeddah last November are still playing out. Arab News reports that 75% of those who suffered damaged or lost real properties and buildings have been compensated by the government. Those who lost their vehicles aren’t quite so lucky. Only about 20% of those vehicles have been appraised and no one knows when the owners will be compensated. As is typically the case, everywhere, property owners aren’t entirely happy with the amount of compensation. They think the appraisers low-balled their estimates.
75% of Jeddah floods compensation paid out
JEDDAH: The Ministry of Finance has handed out 2,626 checks in compensation to people whose properties were lost or damaged during the flash floods in Jeddah last November, local Arabic daily and sister newspaper Al-Eqtisadiah reported on Friday.
A total of 3,519 checks are eventually expected to be distributed. The newspaper did not disclose the amount of money disbursed but quoted Maj. Ahmad Al-Harbi, Civil Defense media director for the flooding crisis, as saying that the checks represented 75 percent of the total compensation.
He said the compensation was for damaged homes, shops, warehouses, hospitals and other properties.
Al-Harbi said the search and rescue teams have searched in vain for 30 missing people for 117 days and will continue their operations in the most affected areas.
He added that a total of 2,071 out of about 10,000 damaged vehicles have been valued by special estimating committees so far. He did not say when the owners would be compensated.
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If owners are getting what’s due them, so are those alleged to have enabled the disaster. Also in Arab News is a report that a handful of notaries have resigned their positions rather than taking transfers. These individuals are among those being investigated for signing off on questionable property purchases in areas that had not been authorized for construction. The article points out that no criminal charges have been levied yet. The piece also quotes government officials’ saying that the men were not forced into resigning.
Ministry of Justice accepts resignation of four notaries
JEDDAH: The Ministry of Justice has accepted the resignation of four notaries, including a former chief of the notary office in Jeddah, Al-Madinah daily reported on Friday. The quartet was under orders to transfer to other offices or lower courts. Instead of accepting their new posts, they requested early retirement and then resigned when the ministry rejected their applications.
Their transfer orders coincided with the ongoing investigations of the committee headed by Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, set up following the Nov. 25 floods in Jeddah. However, no criminal charges were brought against the four notaries.
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Not blond, not female, but yet another American is linked with extremist Islam with the arrest of New Jersey-born Sharif Mobley in Yemen. Unlike to two women, Mobley also does not seem to have been a social misfit. He had a significant work record as a maintenance worker in several nuclear (!) power plants. This article from The Washington Post points out that that does not mean he had any access to sensitive information, but if nothing else, he’d have a pretty good idea of plant layouts.
While the US Embassy’s Consular Section in Sanaa says it has yet to be able to make a ‘consular visit’ to verify his identity and nationality, it appears from the reporting that some USG element has been in touch. In case it needs to be noted, this story reports allegations, not proven facts.
U.S. citizen accused in Yemen killing had been under FBI watch
Karen DeYoungSharif Mobley, a U.S. citizen accused of killing a hospital guard in Yemen, is believed to be a homegrown radical who left this country to make direct contact with al-Qaeda, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials, making him the latest in a string of such suspects.
Mobley, 26, first came to public attention Wednesday, when Yemeni authorities reported that he had grabbed a guard’s gun during a medical visit last weekend after being arrested in a sweep of suspected al-Qaeda militants.
Several U.S. officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mobley had been in custody in Yemen for at least several weeks before the shooting and had been known to U.S. and Yemeni authorities for a considerable period before that. “He’s been a matter of some concern for a while,” according to one official.
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The story of ‘Jihad Jane’ has been all over the US news. Now, she has company. Another American convert to Islam, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, is in custody of the Irish police (along with others), accused of playing some role in the hair-brained plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist. Again, her story seems to be of a pretty messed up woman, searching for some meaning in her life, being recruited for her looks, looks that don’t fall within the range of racial profiling for would-be terrorists.
Is it now going to be the case that blonde American women who convert to Islam are going to be profiled? Or is it just those with little apparent control over their lives? How with those two classes be distinguished, if at all?
The Wall St. Journal has the story…
A Second American Woman Is Arrested in Cartoonist Case
VANESSA O’CONNELL in New York, STEPHANIE SIMON in Colorado and EVAN PEREZ in WashingtonLast Easter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, a 31-year-old mom with a $30,000-a-year job as a medical assistant, announced to her family that she had converted to Islam. A few months later, she began posting to Facebook forums whose headings included “STOP caLLing MUSLIMS TERRORISTS!”
On Sept. 11, she suddenly left Leadville, Colo., a small town in the Rocky Mountains, for Denver, then for New York, to meet and marry a Muslim man she connected with online, her family says. Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, who is 5-foot-11 and blonde, phoned her mother and stepfather in Leadville, providing them with an address in Waterford, Ireland, they say.
Now, she is in the custody of the Irish police, along with six other individuals, arrested as part of an investigation into a conspiracy to commit murder, according to officials familiar with the case. The nature of the authorities’ suspicions about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez couldn’t be determined on Friday.
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The US Department of State is required by Congress to issue annual reports on human rights around the world. Work on compiling the reports starts in the summer, with a deadline for the various embassies to submit their reporting in the Fall, a deadline that misses any new activity, pro or con. A process of editing and back-and-forth conversations between the Office of Democracy, Human Rights, and labor and the field posts continues over the Winter and the report is published in March.
As would be expected, Saudi Arabia fairs poorly when it comes to human rights. It’s not a black hole, but the gravity is severe. Problems range from torture and rape in prisons to jailing those expressing unpopular political opinion. Some problems are systemic; others appear to be miscarriages resulting from individual acts of government officials. And of course, religious freedom (itself the subject of another annual report) really doesn’t exist in the Kingdom.
From the Introduction of the 2009 Human Rights Report:
… Violence against women, violations of the rights of children, and discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, sect, and ethnicity were common in many countries in the Middle East region. In Saudi Arabia, for example, Muslim religious practices that conflict with the government’s interpretation of Sunni Islam are discriminated against and public religious expression by non-Muslims is prohibited. Human rights activists reported more progress in women’s rights than in other areas, and the government made efforts to integrate women into mainstream society, for example, through the founding of the Kingdom’s first coeducational university in September. However, discrimination against women was a significant problem, demonstrated by the lack of women’s autonomy, freedom of movement, and economic independence; discriminatory practices surrounding divorce and child custody; the absence of a law criminalizing violence against women; and difficulties preventing women from escaping abusive environments. There are no laws specifically prohibiting domestic violence. Under the country’s interpretation of Shari’a (Islamic law), rape is a punishable criminal offense with a wide range of penalties from flogging to execution. Statistics on incidents of rape were not available, but press reports and observers indicated rape against women and boys was a serious problem.
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The country-specific report for Saudi Arabia is pretty comprehensive. The negative and positive review is encapsulated in the two paragraphs below. Read the entire report for specifics and expanded discussion:
During the year the following significant human rights problems were reported: no right to change the government peacefully; disappearances; torture and physical abuse; poor prison and detention center conditions; arbitrary arrest and incommunicado detention; denial of public trials and lack of due process in the judicial system; political prisoners; restrictions on civil liberties such as freedoms of speech (including the Internet), assembly, association, movement, and severe restrictions on religious freedom; and corruption and lack of government transparency. Violence against women, violations of the rights of children, and discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, sect, and ethnicity were common. The employment sponsorship system limited the rights of foreign workers and remained a severe problem.
Significant human rights achievements during the year included implementation of the overhaul of the kingdom’s judicial system announced in 2007 that included the establishment of a new supreme court, regional appeals courts, and specialized courts for general, criminal, personal status, commercial, and labor cases; systematic review of judicial decisions; and transferring responsibility for hiring, training and supervision of judges from the Ministry of Justice to the reorganized Supreme Judicial Council. Supporting these reforms, the king reorganized the Senior Council of Religious Scholars to include representatives of all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence to broaden the sources for Shari’a (Islamic law) interpretations. The passage of a new Law to Combat Trafficking in Persons has led to training of law enforcement officials on the application of the law. The first coeducational university, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, opened its doors and the king appointed the first female cabinet-level official, a deputy minister for women’s education.
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For those interested, this is the 6,666 post at Crossroads Arabia.
Here’s a little story from Arab News with big meaning for the Saudi government. The country of Georgia has named as its ambassador to the Kingdom, a woman. Female ambassadors, while not exactly plentiful around the world, are exceedingly rare in the KSA; Ms Mayerling-Mikadze, in fact, is the first.
This is good because there are still Saudi ministries that get really shirty when a woman tries to enter their exalted headquarters. Even embassy officers—though not ambassadors—get to sit in waiting rooms while discussions go on in ministers’ offices. This appointment, quite literally, serves to kick the doors down.
The article notes that other countries have assigned women to their embassies in Saudi Arabia. It points to Susan Ziadeh, the Deputy Chief of Mission (effectively, the deputy ambassador) at the US Embassy, though there was a woman, Margaret Scobey, in that position when I was in Riyadh in 2001-03. She later went on to become ambassador to Syria.
As for Saudi Arabia itself, it is now including women among its diplomatic corps. It has yet to name a female ambassador, however.
Riyadh gets first woman envoy
GHAZANFAR ALI KHAN | ARAB NEWSRIYADH: A Georgian has become the first woman ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Yekaterina Mayering-Mikadze, who presented a copy of her credentials to Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, is the current Georgian ambassador to Kuwait. She also represents her country in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain and the UAE.
Ambassador Yekaterina said that cooperation with the Gulf states was a “paramount task” for Georgia, especially in agriculture, real estate, tourism and finance.
Georgia, a former Soviet republic nation that became independent in 1991 and admitted to the UN as its 179th member after a year, now has the distinction of sending the first female ambassador to Riyadh.
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Arab News reports on a survey conducted by ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller on attitudes held by Saudi youth. On the whole, they’re very optimistic about the future and feel themselves engaged in the world. They also feel that they’re as entitled to the freedoms enjoyed by their counterparts in the West.
Credit card woes hit youths
HAHEEN NAZAR | ARAB NEWSYoung Arabs modern in outlook, seek same privileges as in the West: Survey
JEDDAH: Misuse of credit cards by young people is a major problem in Saudi Arabia. According to a new survey, some 52 percent of Saudi youths struggle with debt because of this. The survey also says that 46 percent of Saudi youths favor working in the private sector rather than the government sector.
The Second Annual ASDA’A Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey, released this week, contains other interesting revelations. It negates common Western misperceptions of Arab youths as conservative and inward-looking and says that young Arab men and women see themselves as fully engaged global citizens and aspire to the same privileges and freedoms as those taken for granted in the West.
Generally, youths in the Middle East are confident about the direction in which the region is heading. Democracy is an important aspiration for them. Good infrastructure, access to the best universities, being paid a fair wage and living in a safe neighborhood were found to be equally important priorities, said the survey.
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The headline of the piece ‘buries the lede’, as they say. Young Saudis are reported to have trouble dealing with credit cards and their finances in general. That’s not surprising, nor is it unique to Saudi Arabia. But that is only a small part of the survey and among the least important factors.
Saudi media are reporting that the guy (name is being withheld in Saudi Arabia) who flounced around while wearing an official uniform, then posted a video of it on YouTube, has been sentenced. A year in jail and 1,000 lashes were the punishment meted out by the Saudi court. It seems that he’d been arrested last year for appearing in drag, but was pardoned by the King during a round of royal pardons at year’s end.
Interestingly, this Arab News article on the subject says that he was sentenced for ‘being a homosexual’. Now, there may be some Shariah law based on hadith that criminalize the state of being gay, but it’s not explicit in the Quran. Saudi Gazette/Okaz, in their coverage, say only that he was committing ‘acts improper and against Islamic teachings’ in addition to ‘impersonating an officer’. That’s a pretty wide net, open to being cast by any judge for nearly anything. Saudi Gazette/Okaz also says that he’s to receive 200 lashes, not 1,000.
The young man’s father says his son is suffering from ‘hormonal deficiencies’ and has psychological problems. Given that this video clip appeared on YouTube, I’m inclined to believe the latter. But there’s a long history of homosexuality being defined, prima facie, as a mental problem. The early-to-mid 20th C. in America saw people kept in mental institutions because their families, with the support of doctors, believed there was some mental wiring loose. It was sufficient in the USSR to earn a long (if not interminable) stay in a mental hospital. These measures, arguably a step up from the Biblical admonition that a gay man be stoned to death, are still seen as reasonable by those who can’t get their minds around the fact that some percentage of all humans (even Saudis) seem to be homosexual. Further, transvestitism, even absent homosexuality, seems to send the Saudi establishment into a frenzy. Saudi media have been reporting over the years about police busts of drag parties. ‘Gender-bending’ seems to be particularly offensive to Saudi sensibilities.
Homosexual-cum-impostor cop sentenced to jail, lashes
RIMA AL-MUKHTAR | ARAB NEWSPublished: Mar 11, 2010 00:21 Updated: Mar 11, 2010 00:43
JEDDAH: A 27-year-old man who was arrested in January on three charges, including homosexuality, was sentenced to one year in prison and 1,000 lashes and fined SR5,000, local media reported on Wednesday.
The man, who has not been named by officials, was arrested in January after a video was widely viewed locally. Rumors began circulating as to the origins of the video and the background of the man depicted in it, causing local police to release a statement this week confirming the arrest.
The video depicts a man with long hair dressed in a police uniform flirting with the man filming him. He asks for the cameraman’s driver’s license, then demands “physical comfort” after saying the license is expired. At one point the man displays a firearm.
Toward the end of the two-and-a-half minute clip, the man begins to partially undress and rub his chest to the sound of club music emanating from the car stereo.
He was charged with impersonating a police officer, committing a “general security” offense and being homosexual.
The man had previously been charged with homosexuality and was sentenced to counseling and memorizing a chapter of the Qur’an.
One newspaper interviewed the man’s father, who claims his son is mentally unstable and was seduced by his friend to perform for the camera. The father was unaware of the video before his son was arrested.
A new, Saudi group blog was brought to my attention, Saudi Life. It appears to address a wide range of issues, both Saudi and foreign, from a Saudi perspective. You might want to take a look.