BY ROHAN PEARCE
At midnight on November 8, an explosion rocked the al Muhaya complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital. Nearly 20 people were killed, and more than 100 were wounded by the car bomb blast.
The November 8 terrorist attack was the biggest in the country since the May 12 attacks on residential compounds in the capital, which killed around 35. The earlier attacks had targeted compounds housing employees of US mercenary corporation Vinnell, which trains the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
The victims of the November 8 attack were also mainly expatriate workers. Victims were of almost 20 nationalities, including a handful of Saudis and Americans. The majority of the wounded were workers from Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan.
In the months following the May bombings there were a series of shoot-outs between oppositionists and Saudi police, claiming the lives of at least 14 "suspected terrorists" and three police officers.
On October 22, Prince Turki al Faisal, the Saudi Arabian envoy in London, claimed that the government had arrested close to 600 opponents of the regime since the May attacks.
There is no doubt that the US "war on terror", particularly the invasion and occupation of Iraq, played a role in precipitating the heightened violent conflict between government forces and Islamic opposition groups. Those who carried out the attacks were probably at least broadly sympathetic with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, most likely identifying with the reactionary ideology of al Qaeda than actually being members of Bin Ladin's relatively small group.
Since the attacks on New York's Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, Saudi Arabia has become a focus of sustained media attention. As a June article in Le Monde Diplomatique wryly noted, after 9/11, "US journalists discovered to their amazement that the kingdom was not a democracy: that human rights were flouted and women were forced to wear veils".
The deep-seated crisis which has been gradually unfolding in Saudi Arabia through the 1980s and '90s is closely linked to its role as the agent of US oil corporations within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and as the home of a significant US military presence since the 1990-91 Gulf War, when it acted as a staging post for US attacks on Iraq. (Its role in the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq had a far lower profile — the Saudi government allowed the US to use the Prince Sultan base as a command centre.)
But the country's problems go beyond this, and include Saudi Arabia's shaky economy, the erosion of the country's historical insularity, through both the decline in the royal family's ability to control information flowing into the kingdom and the impact of world events (in particular, the two Iraq wars, the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in the US), and the lack of democratic channels of dissent to challenge the royal family's policies.
Following revelations of the preponderance of Saudis among the hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks, as well as the hints of al Qaeda or its associates receiving financial aid from members of the royal family, many corporate media commentators assumed that Washington would end its whole-hearted support for the Saudi regime.
This impression was reinforced by concerns expressed by Bush administration officials about the need for Saudi Arabia to have "more democratic" institutions.
However, Washington's real concern is that unless the Saudi monarchy relinquishes some of its rigid control over the country's political life it will be unable to defuse the Islamist opposition, and that an Islamist revolt could topple the pro-US monarchist regime turning Saudi Arabia into another Iran.
The survival of the monarchist regime in Saudi Arabia is vital to US corporate control over the marketing of Saudi Arabia's oil output. And US corporate control over the export, refining and marketing of Saudi Arabian oil is vital to the US capitalist class's global interests.
Saudi Arabia's spare oil production capacity of 2 million barrels per day allows the US oil corporations to regulate world market prices for petroleum — maintaining them at a level far exceeding production costs, and helping to prevent unwanted fluctuations in price.
Concerns over the political stability of Saudi Arabia are hardly new. In July 2000, the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom released a report titled America's National Interests. Those involved in drafting the report included ChevronTexaco board of directors member Condoleezza Rice (now US President George Bush's national security advisor) and current deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage.
The report noted that Saudi Arabia remained strategically important to Washington because of Saudi Arabia's role as a producer of one out of every eight barrels of oil exported to international markets. "While there is currently little evidence of instability in Saudi Arabia", the report noted, "an upheaval in the Persian Gulf as disruptive as the Iranian revolution of the 1980s cannot be excluded".
Whether Washington and Riyadh are able to stamp out the potential for more widespread rebellion in Saudi Arabia is still an open question. During the 1970s, profits from the exploitation of oil reserves allowed the Saudi regime to buy social passivity by providing citizens with free health care and education and a relatively high standard of living. But a combination of a drop in oil prices in the 1980s and rapid population growth has eroded the regime's ability to continue with this policy.
From 1998 to 2002, the rate of population growth increased from 2.6% to 3.3%. Economic growth rates have not kept pace. As a result, in the 10 years after 1984, the per capita GDP dropped from US$11,450 to $6725. More than 40% of the country's population is under 15 years old (by comparison, only about one-fifth of Australia's population falls into the same age range).
Most of these young people are unlikely to have the same comfortable government jobs that were available to previous generations. In 1994, only one-third of university graduates were employed in the kingdom's public sector, which is still largely staffed by workers from other Third World countries — who carry out the less skilled work — and highly-paid professionals from First World countries..
A 1999 Rand Corporation report on political violence in the northern Persian Gulf noted that "expectations from government of the ever-growing numbers of these youths are escalating at a time when government revenues are diminishing. These younger citizens tend to favor radical causes while otherwise engaging in anti-establishment activities. Moreover, in contrast to their parents and grandparents, these youths have grown up in countries whose governments promised cradle-to-grave services. They bitterly resent cutbacks in benefits they view as entitlements..."
The report warned: "In the Gulf, there is a gap between popular expectations of government and the regimes' ability to provide for their citizens... Specific problems include demographic changes, corruption, a lack of government accountability, profligate royal-family spending, wealth disparities, poor economic performance, a lack of public participation in decision making, and uncontrolled social change. All these grievances can lead to dissent and, eventually, to violence."
In an attempt to head off growing resentment at the total domination of political life by the monarchy, on October 13 Saudi Arabia's Consultative Council (controlled by the royal family) announced that limited municipal elections would be held within a year. The following day, the government opened a conference on human rights sponsored by the Saudi Red Crescent Society.
However, a November 13 analysis by Toby Jones for the Middle East Research and Information Project pointed out: "Whatever optimism these two events may have generated was crushed at the gates of the conference, where Saudi riot police used live ammunition to break up a march of peaceful demonstrators protesting the slow pace of reform. The authorities detained hundreds, administered beatings and affirmed that, in spite of suggestions to the contrary, it is business as usual in the desert kingdom."
From Green Left Weekly, November 19, 2003.
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