Inside the Kingdom (33 page)

Sheikh Bin Baz came to see the king to explain the outrage that good, pious Muslims were feeling about the satellite dishes, and Fahd—whose every palace had at least one huge satellite dish—was all sympathy. Satellite television should be banned, he agreed. In 1994 an official decree made it illegal to manufacture, import, or install the dishes, and as the ban took effect a number of princes jumped into the now very profitable dish-importing business. For ordinary customers, buying a princely dish meant buying a certain immunity.

The biggest investment of all was in the production of television programming to be broadcast on the burgeoning satellite networks. The government controlled the Kingdom’s terrestrial TV channels through the Ministry of Information—the main studios were inside the ministry’s Riyadh compound, where the tall, onionlike TV tower provided a proud symbol for the ministry on all its letterheads and leaflets. Satellite television would obviously bring reporting and ideas into the Kingdom that were beyond royal control—unless the royal family controlled the satellite stations. So in the early 1990s Fahd began to invest in the TV business through Abdul Aziz and Khaled Al-Ibrahim, brothers of the king’s now favorite wife Al-Johara (and therefore uncles of young Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, the much indulged Azouzi).

“The king realized,” says one of his kitchen cabinet, “that television, and these satellite channels in particular, were going to have a profound effect on how Saudis came to think. It was their window to the outside world. It would open their eyes to everything. There was no way to stop it in the long run—banning satellite dishes was just a gesture. So why not try to have some sort of control or influence?”

Thinking of control and influence, Fahd also turned his gaze eastward. He had an inner circle of contacts that he would call, often in the small hours of the morning, to test out ideas or to request instant policy papers. It was the king’s telephone think tank, and in the months following the Gulf War Fahd started using his early-morning phone calls to solicit ideas on how to deal with the long-standing problem of his subjects who were Shia.

CHAPTER 18

In from the Cold

S
oon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, in the summer of 1990, Iraqi agents started appearing at the ancient, blue-tiled shrine of Zaynab in Damascus. Shias had been visiting the shrine for centuries to honor Zaynab, spirited sister of the martyred Husayn (see the glossary, page 342). Since leaving Iran, Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar, leader of the Saudi Shias in exile, had set up his headquarters here, and it was to the sheikh that the Iraqis now came with a message from their president.

Saddam had always had a special place in his heart for the interests of the Saudi Shias, explained his emissaries, and had decided to offer Sheikh Hassan a radio station of his own in Iraq. This would enable the sheikh to beam his spiritual messages directly to his oppressed followers inside the Kingdom, while also encouraging them to rise up against the tyranny of the House of Saud. Along with the radio station there would also be funds to help support the expenses of the sheikh and his movement—and, perhaps, even, the use of a plane. Sheikh Hassan and his group of Shia exiles were being recruited to join Saddam in his anti-Saudi war effort.

“It was not worth even the effort of responding”—says the sheikh today with a sniff—“the idea that Saddam Hussein genuinely cared about the rights and worship of the Shia people.”

“We rejected the approach out of hand,” says Tawfiq Al-Seif, who was then the sheikh’s deputy. “We’d left Iran in order to prove our independence. Our loyalty was not to Iraq, but to a reformed Saudi Arabia.”

By the summer of 1990, Sheikh Hassan was heading the most effective opposition the House of Saud had faced to that date, thanks to the movement’s change of emphasis following their departure from Iran. Al-Saffar and his followers had abandoned the theme of Islamic revolution with its connotations of Khomeini. They were now presenting themselves in more universal terms, as the International Committee for Human Rights in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula—a hot button to press in these months that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Our ‘Human Rights’ label attracted the American media like a magnet,” remembers Fouad Ibrahim, the historian of the dissident Shia movement. “Congressional researchers came asking for data. We received inquiries from the United Nations. We started working with activists like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—and we used our contacts inside the Kingdom to hand out news stories around the world on Saudi arrests and scandals.”

Jaffar Shayeb, one of the sheikh’s political advisers who was pursuing his studies in the United States, opened a Saudi human rights office in Washington, where he organized a roster of articulate young Shia Saudis who were available to present their case on radio and television. Using this data, the Minnesota Lawyers Human Rights Committee produced
Shame in the House of Saud,
a scattershot dossier that set out the charges, some true, some exaggerated, detailing the Kingdom’s mistreatment of Shias, women, and foreign laborers. But the movement’s greatest triumph had come in the early months of 1990, when a government propaganda exhibition, “Saudi Arabia Between Yesterday and Today,” toured Washington, New York, and a series of other cities. At several of the openings, a dozen Shia demonstrators, their faces swathed in red and white Saudi headdresses, invited visitors to sign anti-Saudi petitions and shouted aggressive slogans loudly through their bullhorns, taking the chance they would never have at home to confront Saudi worthies such as Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, who was accompanying the tour.

“Salman! Ya Salman!”
shouted the young Saudis angrily. “
Fain hugoog al-insaan?
Where are our human rights?”

“It was electrifying, and also scary,” remembers Faiza Ambah, one of the Saudi journalists covering the official party, looking out at the demonstrators. “It was a first. We knew they were Saudis behind the
shomagh
[headdresses]. We’d never seen Saudis demonstrating before.”

Local TV crews asked for interviews, the official Saudi delegation looked pompous as it refused to comment, and a multimillion-dollar PR initiative had the opposite effect.

“Then we jumped into our VW bus,” remembers one of the demonstrators happily, “and drove on to wait for them in the next city. They were trapped. They couldn’t cancel or refuse to appear, and they knew what was waiting for them when they arrived in town. It must have been a nightmare for them.”

That summer, however, the Gulf War brought a pause to the movement. The Shia exiles, like all other Saudis, were confronted with the prospect of Iraqi troops overrunning their homeland, and when they considered the options, Sheikh Hassan and his followers decided they were as patriotically Saudi as anyone else.

“We are ready to defend the nation and the independence of the nation,” declared a spokesman in response to Saddam’s invasion, adding that the sheikh and the movement’s leadership “urged Shia citizens to join military service for the purpose of defending the country.”

There was a little mischief in this second comment, since there were no Shia in the Saudi military, because the Saudi government had always refused to recruit them. But, in or out of the army, there was more than enough work to do, and the eight hundred thousand or so Shia of the Eastern Province set about it with gusto. They dug themselves in under the threat of Scuds and poison gas, and worked tirelessly providing food and shelter for the influx of half a million foreign fighting personnel. Meanwhile the Committee for Human Rights shut down its criticism outside the Kingdom for the time being, and supported Riyadh’s controversial alliance with America. The victory, when it came, owed not a little to Shia staunchness at home and discretion abroad.

From King Fahd’s point of view, the Shia support created a contrast that could hardly have been more stark. After a decade in which he had bet the shop on the Sunnis, lavishing money on the Wahhabis and giving them just about whatever they wanted, he found himself confronted by the petition-signing ingratitude of the Sahwah sheikhs and their criticism of the U.S. presence. He had financed his own opposition. Meanwhile the despised and supposedly untrustworthy Shia had committed themselves without reserve to the defense of the Kingdom. Occupying the most vulnerable part of the home front, they had not kicked up a moment’s distraction.

The king and his son Mohammed had been trying to speak, off the record, to Sheikh Hassan and the Shia leadership for years. They had dispatched emissaries to Iran, Syria, and Washington, though never with a suggestion of apology.

“It always ended up,” remembers one of their Shia interlocutors, “with the idea that the problem lay with
us
for being so extreme. As for ‘sorry’—that’s not a word you expect to hear from Saudi princes.”

But following the Gulf War there was a change of attitude: “They seemed more ready,” recalls Tawfiq Al-Seif, “to admit mistakes.” And the Shia side also shifted.

“We did not want to become governors,” says Sheikh Hassan. “It was not our target to remove the royal family. But we did want to eliminate racism and discrimination for the sake of our Shia people and for the sake of everyone in Saudi Arabia. We saw our movement like the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa. We felt that the time had come to talk.”

“By then,” says one government adviser, “they had worked out that, like a lot of minorities in this country, they would get a better deal from the Saudi monarchy than they would from any nonroyal government. The Al-Saud were the only horse to back. How could the Shia expect anything but oppression from the Wahhabis? The last thing they wanted was some sort of Islamist state with Sunni rule by the Sahwah sheikhs.”

The talking took place in London, with the Shia side represented by Al-Seif and Hamza Al-Hassan, a long-serving activist in exile, and the government by Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, chief adviser to Abdullah, the crown prince. A lively-minded and cleverly string-pulling man with a penchant for history, Al-Tuwayjri was nicknamed “T-1” by Western diplomats in Riyadh to distinguish him from the other members of his talented family. Ahmed Al-Tuwayjri, the activist and framer of the Memorandum of Advice, was one of his nephews.

“He was an inspiring and very clever person to talk to,” recalls Al-Seif, “and we were pleased to be meeting with someone we knew to be truly influential behind the scenes. He started by saying yes, he knew we had a problem, but that he did not want to raise our expectations. He was not certain he could deliver: we needed to realize that at that moment the government had a great deal on its plate.”

The first meeting took place in 1992 at the Knightsbridge Holiday Inn, where the three men sat in the coffee shop, chatting things out as if in a majlis at home. When they wanted some fresh air, they walked out to Hyde Park and continued their discussions, strolling beneath the trees.

“We talked from twelve until seven,” remembers Al-Seif, “and Al-Tuwayjri never took a single note. It was the first of several meetings, all of them pleasurable. He had a remarkable memory—every important detail we had agreed on was in the letters that he sent us later, after he’d reported to the crown prince, who had then gone to talk to the king.”