Saudi Arabia
The Taliban, the Shari’a and the Pipeline
Underlying the appearance of the Taliban movement, first of all, are factors internal to Afghan society, in particular the discrediting of the government and the “commandos” born out of the resistance to Soviet intervention. The rapid expansion of the militia, culminating with the conquest of Kabul on September 26, 1996, cannot be understood without considering the direct support of Pakistan, abetted by the US and Saudi Arabia, as part of a larger project to export fossil fuels from Central Asia to Western markets via Afghanistan and Pakistan, bypassing Iran and Russia.
Gun Belt in the Beltway
On August 22 and 23, 1993, Saudi Arabia’s finances received rare front-page coverage in the New York Times, inaugurating a period of hand wringing inside the Beltway and among the academy’s consulting class over the kingdom’s future. This is a tradition going back decades, to the 1940s, when the Saudi treasury was managed by a decrepit alcoholic and the Americans created the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority to replace him. Nostalgia was probably unavoidable among the ranks of Saudi watchers “present at the creation,” like Herman Eilts, then a young US embassy official, or Phebe Marr, an ambitious analyst in what the American ambassador called Aramco’s private intelligence service.
The Most Obscure Dictatorship
The camera avoids faces, except those of the plainclothes police. The black-and-white images are hazy, jumpy. They evoke the antiquated style of negatives that have escaped the censor and customs searches. “This could be any country,” says the commentator — Chile under Gen. Pinochet, or Burma under the military. But here the men who gather wear long white robes and checkered headdresses, held in place by an ‘iqal, a black silk tress. The women remain invisible.
Column: Globalization and Its Discontents
“Globalization” is currently fashionable among privileged quarters of American society. It stands as the umbrella term for contemporary trends in culture, production, finance, marketing, technology, consumption, ideas, values and institutions that are variously celebrated, denounced, dissected and deconstructed.
The Saudis, the French and the Embargo
The successful maintenance of a near total embargo on Iraq owes to a number of factors, ranging from geography to post-Cold War global economies. Iraq’s limited access to the sea can be easily monitored, while its record of regional aggression has deprived Baghdad of local friends. Despite some breaches of the export embargo involving high-ranking officials in both countries, Iran is not going to give Iraq much economic relief. The same goes for Syria. Turkey and Jordan, Iraq’s two lifelines to the outside world, cannot risk more than limited and calibrated breaches of the embargo because of their own susceptibility to US pressures.
Pride and Prejudice in Saudi Arabia
Ahmad and Fatima Abdallah (not their real names) are an Arab professional couple who worked in Saudi Arabia for four years in the 1980s. They discussed their impressions with a Middle East Report editor in September 1993.
Coming from elsewhere in the Arab world, what were your first impressions of Saudi Arabia?
Politics and Media in the Arab World
Hisham Milhem is the Washington correspondent of the Beirut daily al-Safir. Born in Lebanon, Milhem has lived and worked in Washington since 1976. Joe Stork and Sally Ethelston spoke with him in Washington in September 1992.
What are the salient features of the power structure of the Arab media? Who controls it? Who sets the tone?
Any generalization is problematic. We’ve been involved in journalism in Lebanon-Syria and Egypt for more than a century. That is why the Lebanese, the Egyptians and the Palestinians have been predominant in the Arab press.
Women and the Stability of Saudi Arabia
On November 6, 1990, some 50 women met in a supermarket parking lot in Riyadh. The women dismissed their drivers and drove their cars in tandem through the streets of Riyadh, defying publicly an unofficial but strictly observed ban on women’s driving. In Saudi Arabia, where women may not travel without permission from their nearest male relative, work where men are present or even enter most government ministries, and where political gatherings for everyone, men and women, are illegal, the driving demonstration was viewed as revolutionary.
Saudi Arabia and the Reagan Doctrine
President Reagan came to office with a bold commitment to roll back Soviet gains in the Third World without risking the trauma or cost of another Vietnam-style intervention. The “Reagan Doctrine,” as his policy came to be known, ironically took its cue from Soviet support in the 1970s for leftist insurgencies in Africa and Central America. But the beneficiaries of the Reagan Doctrine were anti-communist resistance and counterrevolutionary insurgencies in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua.
The Rabita Affair
The Rabita affair underlines the extent to which the post-1980 regime in Turkey has turned to Islam as a bulwark against the left. “Rabita” — the Saudi-based Rabit’at al-Alam al-Islami (World Islamic League) — advocates the establishment of a pan-Islamic federation based on the shari‘a. One would have expected it to be among the last allies sought by Turkey’s Atatürkist generals, since it promotes a political system anathema to the military and funds publications which denounce Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his secular policies.
Peterson, Defending Arabia
J. E. Peterson, Defending Arabia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).
Books on Saudi Arabian Economics
Michael Field, The Merchants (London: John Murray, 1984).
John R. Presley, A Guide to the Saudi Arabian Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984).
“We Are Rebuilding Our Organization”
“Ahmad” is a representative of the Socialist Labor Party in the Arabian Peninsula. MERIP interviewed him in February 1984.
What were the origins of your party?
Letter from Bangkok
In 1975, around 1,000 Thai workers left for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia; by 1982, 108,520 workers, over one third of all Thailand’s expatriate work force, had left for 11 different countries in the Middle East region. Their remittances, totaling over $450 million, amounted to the equivalent of half the foreign exchange brought into Thailand by its foreign visitors and exceeded revenues from the country’s main commodity exports except rice and tapioca. Many of the Thais employed in the region are skilled workers, mechanics, engineers and drivers, and their absence is blamed for shortages of skilled labor in Thailand’s domestic labor market. The majority are unskilled manual laborers drawn by the lure of wages often five times higher than Thailand’s.
