After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies (35 page)

Having served as Saudi Arabia’s minister for the interior since 1975, Nayef was believed by many to be responsible for a large number of human rights abuses and incidents of torture. Further illustrating the precariousness of Saudi succession prospects, Nayef was known to be one of the most conservative members of the ruling family and was thought to have cultivated many opponents. According to a 2003
New York Times
article, Nayef’s alleged promotion of extremist elements in the kingdom was sufficiently extensive to prompt a US Senator
¹³¹
to write a letter to the Saudi Ambassador to the US asking that Nayef be removed from office due to his ‘well-documented history of suborning terrorist financing and ignoring the evidence when it comes to investigating terrorist attacks on Americans’.
¹³²

More recent criticism focused on Nayef’s apparent stance on conservative values and women, with one diplomat remarking that ‘He [Nayef] is a conservative who will give more rope to the religious establishment than any of his brothers would’ while others have speculated that recent reforms that have made it easier for women to work and have aimed to curb extremism in the education system would have been abandoned if he had succeeded. Certainly there was evidence that Nayef had obstructed some economic reforms in his earlier role as minister for the interior and, a month after Abdullah’s announced appointment of the first female deputy minister, Nayef was reported to have publicly stated that he saw no need for female members of the Consultative Council.
¹³³
Indeed, a leaked US diplomatic cable from 2009 claimed that ‘Nayef is widely seen as a hard-line conservative who at best is lukewarm to King Abdullah’s reform initiatives’ and at a gathering for foreign journalists held in late 2011 at
his house in Riyadh he was reported to have ‘…answered a question about whether Saudi Arabia would improve its relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was surely coming to prominence in Egypt… by lambasting the questioning journalist, excoriating him as a terrorist sympathiser and raging on until 4am about the many plots targeting the House of Saud’.
¹³⁴

With Nayef’s death in June 2012, the immediate succession crisis seems to have passed, as Abdullah has now been able to appoint his seventy-six year-old brother Salman bin Adul-Aziz Al-Saud as crown prince. As the kingdom’s long serving governor of Riyadh and with a reputation as a good diplomat and peacemaker,
¹³⁵
Salman seems to have to have managed his relationship with the religious establishment more carefully than Nayef. And more recently, as minister of defence since 2011, he appears to have enjoyed much better relations with the Western powers than his predecessor. Overall, he is expected to continue with many of Abdullah’s policies and reforms.
¹³⁶
Nevertheless, given that the combined age of the Saudi king and crown prince is now 164, the prospect of several further rapid successions in the next few years or months is all but certain. With a very large number of contenders and competing factions within the higher echelons of the Al-Saud dynasty, the likelihood of destabilising disputes or unsuitable and unpopular office-holders is very high. In particular, at some point in the very near future there will need to be a generational shift from the sons to the grandsons of the former patriarch Abdul-Aziz bin Saud. With several ‘branches’ having formed around Abdul-Aziz’s forty-five sons, many of which have forged relationships with other Gulf states and foreign powers, such a struggle could easily tear the monarchy apart. Both Nayef and Salman, for example, were part of a powerful seven member bloc of full brothers—the Sudairi Seven.
¹³⁷
Now there are only five left, but their number includes the new minister for the interior
¹³⁸
and they can serve as one of many counterweights to the king’s power. Already there have been key defections from Abdullah’s aforementioned ‘Allegiance Commission’, which was set up in 2005 to help choose successors in an orderly manner and avoid such problems. Notably, in late 2011 Talal bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud resigned his membership, having earlier criticised what he referred to as a ‘monopoly on Saudi power by an unnamed faction within the royal family’.
¹³⁹

6
THE COMING COLLAPSE

The Gulf monarchies have faced down different opposition movements over the years, but these have not been broad-based and represented only narrow sections of the indigenous populations. Moreover, the Gulf monarchies have generally been strong and confident enough to placate or sideline any opposition before it has gained too much traction. The Gulf monarchies have also been very effective in demonising opponents, either branding them as foreign-backed fifth columnists, as religious fundamentalists, or even as terrorists. In turn this has allowed rulers and their governments to portray themselves to the majority of citizens and most international observers as being safe, reliable upholders of the status quo, and thus far preferable to any dangerous and unpredictable alternatives. When reformist forces have affected their populations—often improving communications between citizens or their access to education—the Gulf monarchies have been effective at cooption, often bringing such forces under the umbrella of the state or members of ruling families, and thus continuing to apply the mosaic model of traditional loyalties alongside modernisation even in the first few years of the twenty-first century.

More recently, however, powerful opposition movements have emerged that have proved less easy to contain, not least because they are making the most of potent new modernising forces that have been less easy for governments to co-opt. As a result an increasing number of regular Gulf nationals have become emboldened enough to protest against and, often
for the first time, openly question their rulers. In 2011, spurred on by developments elsewhere in the region, these opponents and critics have presented the most serious challenges yet to the ruling families. In something of a perfect storm for the incumbent regimes, the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria have not only given hope for those Gulf nationals and Gulf-based movements committed to serious political reform and to unseating the current autocracies, but they have also made it harder for the Gulf monarchies to depict their new enemies as anything other than pro-democracy activists or disillusioned citizens who have recognised the inevitable collapse of the political and economic structures underpinning their rulers. Furthermore, the 2011 revolutions—or at least the first few waves of protest in Tunisia and Egypt—have also helped expose the Gulf monarchies’ strong preference for supporting other authoritarian states in the region and their fear of having democratic, representative governments take shape in neighbouring states. The initial responses of most of the Gulf monarchies were markedly anti-Arab Spring, even if they later tried to change tack. This had a massive delegitimising effect on the ruling families and governments involved, as in the eyes of many of their citizens they positioned themselves as part of a distinct and anachronistic counter-revolutionary bloc.

Unsurprisingly the new, post-2011 opposition in the Gulf monarchies has manifested itself in different ways depending on the circumstances and pressures in each state. This has ranged from full-blown street riots complete with killings and martyrs in the poorer Gulf monarchies to more subtle intellectual and even internet-led ‘cyber opposition’ in the wealthier Gulf monarchies. But in all cases the regimes have responded with more repression than ever before, thus further exposing the ruling families. In some instances brutal police crackdowns have taken place and foreign mercenaries have been deployed while in others political prisoners have been held, judicial systems manipulated, and civil society further stymied. Thus far only Qatar has avoided such heavy-handedness, mostly due to its more favourable circumstances and its rather different stance on the Arab Spring. Nevertheless even its ruling family is not without critics, and there are already indications that opposition is building and greater repression may follow.

Evolving opposition

Much of the early opposition in the Gulf monarchies focused on the economic grievances and frustration of merchant or worker communities in the post-pearling industry era, and—especially in the 1960s and early 1970s—the ruling families’ perceived connections to non-Arab, non-Muslim powers and the need to bring these states closer into line with the region’s Arab nationalist republics. Particular hotbeds were in Dubai, Bahrain, and Kuwait, although there were also some protests in Qatar from indigenous oil workers concerned with the excesses of their ruling family.
¹
Several national fronts were established, but only one of these—the Dhofar Liberation Front, later the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf—ever led to an armed insurrection. In many ways the Gulf monarchies were well placed to counter these threats, as Israel’s victories over the main Arab military powers in 1967 and 1973 had taken much of the gloss off Arab nationalism. Moreover, with increasing oil exports and expanding state treasuries this was also the period when many of the region’s wealth distribution practices were inaugurated. Not only were most Gulf nationals enjoying better lifestyles than hitherto, but many were kept busy with the new activities and opportunities resulting from the first major oil booms. In Dubai’s case, many of the families that had been involved in national front activity and opposition to the ruling family in the 1960s became massively enriched in the 1970s, mostly due to being granted exclusive import licenses for the various products demanded by the emirate’s fast growing economy. And today their descendants, now regarded as key allies of the ruling family, are at the helm of some of the region’s biggest trade and retail empires.
²

Subsequent opposition movements have been more difficult to contain, as most have focused on the illegitimacy of the Gulf monarchies and in particular their manipulation of Islam. Given that they have often been based on religious platforms, or led by disillusioned or discriminated against sections of the populations, these movements have not been entirely placated with material benefits. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the most serious opposition to the ruling family in the 1990s came from a diffuse movement of young religious dissidents and conservative university students. Critical of the official religious establishment’s seemingly hypocritical support for American bases on Saudi territory following
the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, this
Sahwa
or awakening movement was only dealt with by granting more control over social institutions and the education sector to religious conservatives. Confirming a long held view in the ruling family that their main opposition would eventually come from religious circles rather than liberal reformers, this was deemed a necessary if unpleasant manoeuvre in order to head off further criticism.
³
Similarly in the UAE and Kuwait, where Muslim Brotherhood organisations or ‘reform associations’ have existed for many years, there was a tacit understanding in place that these groups would be tolerated and given some influence over the religious and educational establishments. In the UAE this led to the Brotherhood’s de facto control over the Ministries for Education and Social Affairs, with its members presiding over curriculum committees and—for many years—dominating the UAE’s principal university.
⁴
Up until 2003 senior members of the Abu Dhabi ruling family were even holding meetings with Brotherhood representatives, trying to establish a set of compromises.
⁵

Following 9/11, the subsequent US-led War on Terror, the CIA’s capture of a major al-Qaeda figure in the UAE in 2002,
⁶
and a violent campaign launched against the Saudi oil industry and western expatriates in 2003 by ‘Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula’, the Gulf monarchies have made a volte-face on such Islamist opposition movements. Partly this has been out of fear, with unpublished polls in Saudi Arabia after 2001 indicating that most young Saudi men sympathised with Osama bin Laden and opposed any form of Saudi cooperation with the US over the Iraq War.
⁷
But it has also been due to the increasing ease they have experienced in simply branding opponents as ‘terrorists’ or alleging their connections to ill-defined al-Qaeda plots. Indeed, in recent years the Gulf monarchies’ security services have usually been able to arrest activists and repress any Islamist organisations in their territories without fearing any international scrutiny. In many cases these crackdowns won praise from Western powers, being described as part of the Gulf monarchies’ ‘commitment to battling terrorism’.
⁸

In the UAE, for example, the previous concessions granted to the Muslim Brotherhood were soon reversed, with hundreds of teachers, academics, and ministry employees being fired in 2006 from their jobs on the grounds of Islamist affiliations. Some have since been accused of ‘dual loyalties’ or threatening ‘violent acts in the occupied Arab emirates’,
⁹
and in 2008 a large number of activists were imprisoned and accused of being
part of an ‘underground movement in the UAE trying to promote their own strict view of Islam’.
¹⁰
Meanwhile in Saudi Arabia new anti-terror legislation has been repeatedly used to imprison men who have been described by international human rights organisations as being political activists. In late 2010 Canada’s
Global Post
reported on sixteen Saudi nationals—including businessmen, university professors, and a judge—who were charged in a secret court with ‘supporting terrorism and plotting to overthrow the government’. Having been held in custody for more than four years, they were believed to be ‘widely known for peacefully demanding political reforms’. Their case was not reported in the Saudi press, although some Saudi nationals commented on the matter, claiming that the accused were only ‘…seeking reform and to open people’s minds’ and that they were ‘…extremely anti-Al Qaeda’. Moreover, fellow activists complained that such terrorism charges are now widespread in the kingdom as they are ‘…one of the most convenient charges [because] no one will defend you and you will become hopeless’.
¹¹
There are now countless other such examples in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, with a Saudi surgeon having been held in custody and accused of ‘backing and funding terrorism’ since appearing on Al-Jazeera television and criticising the government.
¹²
Similarly in Bahrain a trial was held in late 2010 for a group of twenty-five dissidents who were accused of ‘financing terrorism’ and ‘inciting hatred of the ruling family’. Reportedly beaten, tortured, and with the Bahraini media barred from covering their case, the men included prominent bloggers, journalists, and even a member of a human rights group.
¹³