CHAPTER 4

A Place Like No Other

The British call them lords; the French, Belgians and others prefer counts; the Poles and Spaniards favour dukes; regular Arabs have Sheikhs and Turkey and Iran have their agas, beys, pashas and the rest. Saudi Arabia's notable contribution in the field of titles is to call one of their princes Muhammad Twin-Evil, in Arabic Muhanmad Abu Sharain.

He died in 1988, the sixth of Ibn Saud's sons, and his nickname was so apt that it was used by members of his own family. The twin evils which earned him his reputation were booze and violence. He was an alcoholic who, in a rare moment of recognition, gave up his right to the throne in favour of his younger brother Khalid. So violent was his temper that he instilled fear in the hearts of members of his family, including all his brothers who became kings.

Twin-Evil's first memorable act happened in 1929. He person-ally machine-gunned dozens of Ikhwan rebels after they surrendered to his father. Afterwards his individual acts of violence continued unabated. In 1936, in L6ndon to attend the coronation of George VI, he slapped a bar girl so hard that he knocked out some of her teeth. (Naturally, there was a cover-up). Later, in 1945, he accompanied his father and the American Minister to Saudi Arabia, William Eddy, on the USS Murphy to meet President Roosevelt. On hearing that the ship had some risque films, he asked to see them and insisted on watching them all the time. When Eddy objected, Twin-Evil's response was to ask him whether he would like to be killed immediately or chopped in small pieces bit by bit later. Eddy smiled and accommodated him.

In the years which followed, the family overlooked Twin-Evil's murderous ways. When his older brothers died, this thug was elevated to the role of elder statesman of the family. He was the one who delivered the demand to his brother Saud to step down, and he did it by throwing the piece of paper in his face. Later he figured considerably in the succession process - again by issuing personal threats. He was a law unto himself and regularly demanded, and got, several hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil to sell on the free market to meet his expenses. And, following the maxim of like attracts like, he used ignorant people to carry his offers to international markets without knowing their significance. (See Oil, OPEC and the Overseers.)

Throughout all this, the local press was helpless and the Arab press feared that criticizing an important Saudi royal would affect their countries' relations with Saudi Arabia, while Western reporters and 'historians' maintained their conspiracy of silence. Then, out of nowhere, we got to know him. Twin-Evil ordered the execution of his own granddaughter.

The film Death of a Princess did more to expose the corruption of the House of Saud than any article, tract, book or documentary this century. It depicted the love affair and tragic end of Princess Mishaal, Prince Muhammad's granddaughter, and one Muhammad Al Shaer. The Princess had been educated in Beirut and exposed to modernity, and then was 'given away in marriage to a first cousin at the early age of 17. The cousin, in the true fashion of the House of Saud, proceeded to ignore her and, when she protested, divorced her. Traveling in Europe, the Princess fell in love with a young Lebanese whose family has solid Saudi connections (his uncle is the present Saudi Minister of Information).

When the Princess's family refused to grant her permission to marry her lover, she tried to escape the country disguised as a boy. She was recognized and brought home. Sometime later, her lover managed to enter the country and she met him in a Jeddah hotel using a pseudonym. They were caught and, on the orders of her grandfather, imprisoned.

Twin-Evil demanded that his brother, King Khalid, sentence the girl and her lover to death. Khalid demurred. Twin-Evil turned to Jeddah's head imam and demanded that he issue a sentence of death. The imam wanted to conduct an inquiry into the case but Muhammad lost all patience and issued a personal order to have his granddaughter executed. When the executioner expressed doubts about the procedure, claiming that he needed the order of a religious judge, Muhammad again acted on his own: he ordered his own guards to do the job.

It was July 1977 and Jeddah was obscured by haze, the heat and dust of the desert. Princess Mishaal was pushed into a square at the edge of town. Her lover, hands tied behind his back, followed her. To the surprise of the spectators who flocked to what people in Jeddah call 'Chop Square' to get the morbid satisfaction of seeing the justice of the House of Saud carried out, the unknown young girl was shot dead while her lover looked straight at her. A moment later, the young man was beheaded and dismembered. Shooting a person and dismembering a dead body were unusual, but nobody knew who they were and nobody cared. Two days later the royal family, without fanfare, announced that Princess Mishaal had died in a drowning accident.

Rosemary Beacheau, Princess Mishaal's German nanny, knew everything, including the fabricated drowning story. She had loved her little ward and in one of those blessed triumphs of the human spirit, she vowed to do something about her death. Beacheau found a kindred spirit in the estranged wife of one of the princes, an educated Lebanese woman with wide connections. They went to work.

Early in 1980 news began circulating in London of a mysterious diplomatic crisis between Britain and Saudi Arabia. Soon the crisis had a name: the television company ATV was planning to screen a film called Death of a Princess. The princess did not have a name, but the Saudi Government was applying diplomatic and economic pressures to stop the airing of the film.

When requests to the British Foreign Office to stop the televising of the film met with the usual response about Her Majesty's Government's inability to interfere with the freedom of the press, the Saudis approached the film's producer, Anthony Thomas. He screened the film for them, refused an offer of money to kill it and would not even entertain editorial suggestions. Even so, he tried to keep the peace and never discussed the Saudi pressure and offers until the situation got completely out of hand.

The Saudis' frustration and ignorance drove them to foolish action. They recalled their ambassador to the UK and asked it to recall its ambassador, Sir James Craig. They threatened economic retaliation, including the cancellation of defence contracts and a boycott of British companies. When the British press took exception to its high-handedness, the House of Saud spent tens of millions of dollars sponsoring Arab and Muslim press attacks on Britain. There were headlines such as 'A Snake Called Britain', 'A Film Full of Lies', 'A New Crusade Against Islam', 'A Racist Attack on the Arabs' and the whole mud-slinging match reached a new low. One Arabic newspaper claimed that the British were a nation of thieves and said that the contents of the British Museum were all stolen, while another hinted that all female members of the British royal family were tarts.

Simultaneously the Saudis continued to exert diplomatic pres-sure. They prevailed on the Arab ambassadors in London to make a joint diplomatic protest. The General Secretariat of the Islamic Conference and other Muslim organizations lodged more protests, claiming the film was an insult to Islam, a sponsored Pakistani film director spoke of making a film about the life of Princess Margaret and the number of Saudi tourists to London fell by 70 per cent.

The film was shown on London's Independent Television on 9 March 1980. When plans to show it in the Netherlands, America and other countries were announced, Saudi Arabia mounted fresh efforts to stop it. It threatened to stop shipping oil to Rotterdam, and in America, Mobil Oil suspended its donations to the Public Broadcasting System and ran a six-page advertising campaign criticizing the film and lamenting its effects on American-Saudi relations. Predictably, the Saudis lost the war of the film, though some local American affiliates of the Public Broadcasting Corpora-tion shamefully refused to carry it for fear of alienating the Saudis and causing an increase in oil prices.

It is worth examining the results of the execution and the consequent battle of the film. The Saudis demonstrated their ability to influence, or more accurately 'buy', Arab and Muslim private and public support. The prospect of economic pressure made the Arab countries afraid not to support Saudi Arabia and the Arab press followed a totally Saudi line. The Muslim countries and press were not far behind. With the Arabs and Muslims in harness, the Saudis tried to extend their influence to the Western press through the use of some sponsored Western journalists, economic blackmail and the influence of the oil companies.

It was one of the most expensive failures in the history of Saudi Arabia. A Lebanese journalist friend estimates that the payments to the Arab and Muslim press exceeded $50 million. Another source estimates at $300 million payments made to Arab and Muslim governments to gain their support. The partial break in trade relations with Britain was costly for the Saudis, and sending delegations to lobby against the film all over the world was not cheap either. The various Arab and Muslim film makers who threatened retaliation pocketed Saudi money and did nothing. By the time the episode was over, Death of a Princess had cost the Saudis a minimum of $500 million and exposed their brutal ways.

But the way the House of Saud behaved over the film was in character and, as chance would have it, it soon demonstrated that its members are people who never learn. Eight months after the airing of Death of a Princess, another prince approached King Khalid asking approval to have his adulterous daughter executed. The King, fearing a repeat publicity scandal, turned down the request, but suggested to his brother that he should handle the matter himself. The brother obliged. He took his daughter swimming in the sheltered pool of his palace and drowned her. The House of Saud claimed it was another accident. The murdering father has been married 36 times. The only attache at the American Embassy to talk about it was told to shut up.

On 4 June 1992, in a more typical incident involving money, the wire services carried a terse announcement by the Diners Club Division of Citicorp. According to this announcement, the Diners Club was ceasing to operate in Saudi Arabia forthwith and the reasons given alluded to financial instability in the country. Everybody who read the announcement gasped with amazement, until they discovered the reason for it and gasped even harder.

The prince behind this incident was Walid bin Tallal, holder of 4.85 per cent of the outstanding shares of Citicorp, which he had purchased for a staggering $585 million. The problem between the corporation and its major shareholder was simple: His Highness, who had been appointed an agent for Diners Club, refused to honour $30 million worth of charges in his country. Citicorp's response was equally simple: Prince Walid was responsible for these charges and they had to be paid.

Behind the Prince's response was typical House of Saud thinking. He stated that he had distributed a number of Diners Club cards to members of his family as a promotion and that the recipients proceeded to use them without knowing that they had to pay for their purchases. They bought everything in sight. Prince Walid, in sympathy with the ways of his relatives, for a long time felt no obligation to pay.

There is very little Diners Club can do except cease to operate in the kingdom. Suing the Prince in Saudi Arabia is useless: 'Saudi law' governs the agreement.

There are other startling examples of how this state-sponsored immunity from prosecution works. I am in possession of documents which reveal a new twist to the old game. Prince Muhammad bin Saud borrowed over $4 million from a French company to build the Nassaria Hotel in Riyadh and then sold it profitably, but decided not to repay the loan. The lawyer for the French lender and French Government guarantor, Credit Industriel et Commercial and Coface, had no recourse but to appeal to senior members of the family for settlement of the debt. Despite years of pleading, the creditors have so far got nowhere and Prince Muhammad is alive and well in Saudi Arabia.

On another occasion which documents the spread of this protection racket to include family friends, Prince Ahmad bin Abdel Aziz, the Deputy Minister of the Interior, used the power of his office to absolve one Muhammad Kaid, a Saudi businessman who had borrowed money from Lloyds Bank in London under false pretences and again over $4 million were lost to outside creditors. Kaid used phoney bank guarantees originating in Saudi Arabia to do the same in France. These are not isolated incidents and big and small examples of officially protected irresponsible behaviour abound. Some border on the unbelievably flagrant.

Two years ago, a sister-in-law of King Fahd bought £40,000 worth of knickers from a shop in London's Knightsbridge and had them delivered to her hotel suite. She proceeded to evade the shop's owners, who were demanding payment. They got their money only after a strongly worded complaint to the Saudi Embassy which raised the matter with His Majesty, who agreed to act as a knickers problem solver and paid the money. In 1986 in Paris, Princess Nouf, the daughter of the late King Khalid, and her entourage caused several million dollars' worth of damage to the St Regis Hotel which the Saudi Government paid. Some of these acts of extravagance represent an official approach to things, and in 1986 the Washington Post reported that Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the USA, gave a party that cost $500,000.

In Saudi Arabia itself, a province emir demanded a payment of $3 million from the Saudi agents of a Swedish building contractor because the company was doing good business in 'his territory'. When the agents objected, claiming that their total profit from dealing with this company amounted to $2 million, the emir told them that refusal to pay meant forcing the owner of the company to leave the country. The demand was met.

Today, in as contradictory a statement on human behaviour as is conceivable, it is the very few well-behaved members of the royal family who are pointed out as exceptions and who earn comments like, 'He's a Saudi prince but he's polite' or 'He's a Saudi prince but he doesn't gamble.' But the majority of them are covered by the sick joke of a Saudi businessman who told me: 'I am for executing adulterers - it's the surest way of getting rid of the whole royal family.'

There are other seemingly innocent manifestations of this overall royal lack of concern which are plentiful within Saudi Arabia and are not presently newsworthy, but which are full of unhappy auguries for the future. The maternity ward of the King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh has turned away emergency delivery cases because it was busy handling dozens of new arrivals of the House of Saud who have priority regardless of the seriousness of other cases. More interestingly, the females of the royal household, who usually occupy a background position, have come into their own as expressions of the royal malaise. Not only are they the pioneers of telephone sex, but according to doctors and others who have served in the kingdom they suffer from severe psychosomatic illnesses. Dr Seymour Gray, who practised in Saudi Arabia for several years, attributes their mental maladies to general boredom, insecurity because their husbands are always marrying additional women, sexual frustration and the closed nature of a society which forbids them to do anything - even social work. Dr Gray and others support a suggestion made in the film Death of a Princess and claim that many princesses take lovers from among their servants. There are other men who service them for money. A greater number of the princesses live on coffee and tranquilizers and some react to male neglect by turning lesbian. Most of this is caused by the maltreatment they suffer from male members of their family, who educate them and then expect them to become vegetables.

Perhaps a more important aspect of the lives of the princes and princesses of the royal household has to do with their education. Their parents follow family fashion and have them tutored but their tutors are afraid to ask them to study or to apply any discipline. In the words of a former tutor: 'How do you tell one of them to study harder and keep your job - or your head?' The results of this undisciplined education are obvious: the level of learning among members of the House of Saud remains appallingly low, and many foreign universities turn them down when they discover how ill-prepared for higher education they are. (Suspicion lurks that the level of education among the royal family is lower than that of Saudi Arabia as a whole.)

Personal behaviour is only one facet of how the Saudi royals manifest the inherent unsoundness of the 'system' over which King Fahd presides. Their official behaviour, though more subject to exposure, is unashamedly the same. Every House of Saud minister or province emir has a diwan in which he conducts a majlis, a royal court in which he dispenses justice once a week. Naturally, the King's diwan is the largest in the land, but the others have adopted this institution to enhance their status. An examination of how they conduct themselves in their open houses reveals a great deal.

Most diwans are the same, physically and in character and function. Most of them are 30 feet wide and 60 feet long and, with an abundance of chandeliers, they resemble what Ibn Saud started. The average number of people who come to a majlis is 150 and they attend to air their grievances and seek redress from the prince. The only things he cannot handle are some small commercial matters and things which go to whatever courts exist automatically. Otherwise, there are no limitations on his power as judge.

Some of the princes who administer this judicial power are in their twenties and thirties and their lack of experience is matched by a lack of education. One province prince who now plays judge was my classmate for a while, until he got stuck in the same form for four years and failed to finish high school. Another never went to school. These deficiencies do not seem to matter. Belonging to the family is the only qualification required.

In 1986 the general manager of a major Saudi hotel, part of an international chain, went to see the local province prince regarding one of his employees, a Filipino bellboy, who had been arrested by members of CAVES. The manager entered the diwan and sat down until his turn to speak came. He handed over a piece of paper containing his name and occupation and a statement about the case, but stood up and made an oral presentation which elaborated the paper's contents.

'May you live long, one of my employees, a poor Filipino boy of 17, was arrested by members of the Mutawa [another name for CAVES] three months ago for wearing indecent clothes. I do not question their right or judgement, but my initial enquiries indicated that he would be released in four weeks. My sub-sequent enquiries produced similar promises, but nothing has happened. May you live long, I am here to enquire about the boy's fate. And upon my honour, I'll see to it that the boy behaves in accordance with the blessed laws of Islam in the future.'

The man remained standing to hear the Prince's response. 'What was the exact nature of his crime, what kind of clothes did he wear?'

'May you live long, he wore his shirt immodestly. It was open in the front and exposed parts of his body it shouldn't have and he was wearing gold objects around his neck.'

'Is he a good looking boy?'

'He's not bad looking, sir.'

'Then you'll never see him again.'

The laughter was loud and long; the petitioner, still standing, joined in to protect himself. The Prince, visibly enjoying himself, spoke again.

'You need not bother about your employee. Sooner or later they'll find him and send him home to his mother. There is no question of his returning to work. We cannot permit loose men like him to infect our country with their ways.'

The manager thanked the Prince and left. To this day, he has no idea what happened to the boy. When not in Saudi Arabia, the Prince wears Western clothes, frequents nightclubs to chase blondes and drinks like a fish. In Saudi Arabia he drinks in private and marries often.

Two years later, in Riyadh, in the middle of the country, a Lebanese journalist who is in the pay of the House of Saud attended a majlis of Prince Salman, the Emir of Riyadh and head of the House of Saud's family council. Initially the journalist occupied the seat of honour, to the right of the Prince, but continued to make way for important people as they arrived and was soon at the other end of the diwan. Behind Prince Salman stood a tall black guard with a sword and a gun. Following is the report of the journalist:

'Everything big and small is handled in a majlis. Believe me, there was a blind man who was there to petition the Prince to allow him to have a driver's licence. He was questioned in an amusing way then dismissed. Some Bedoums spoke to the Prince and they addressed him by his first name, the way Bedoums have called rulers since the Prophet Muhammad. The House of Saud claim the majlis is their way of staying in direct touch with the people, and in a way an open house serves this purpose. But damn it, though Salman is probably the best among them, the whole thing is arbitrary and some aspects of it are most unattractive. Let me give you some examples.

'There was a seventy-year-old man, a Saudi from Riyadh. He had married a 15-year-old-girl in Cairo and, because marrying a foreigner needs special permission, he wanted to bring his Egyptian bride home. The old so-and-so turned out to be a regular at the majlis and it led to an amusing exchange between him and the Prince.

'The Prince: "But, old man, are you able to support your young bride?"

'The old man: "No, no, but 1 told her we have a generous Prince and she'll never need as long as he's alive."

'The Prince laughed. "How many times have you been mar-ried?"

"'A mere eleven, may you live long, but I promise this will be the last time."

"'But you have made this promise before?"

"'I do remember, Allah bless you, but I do not think I can go beyond this beautiful thing."

'Everybody laughed. The Prince issued an order approving the marriage and granted the old man funds to bring his bride home.

'But it isn't funny most of the time. Later, in the same majlis, there was a delegation of Korean and Filipino workers. They came to petition the Prince because their Saudi employer hadn't paid their salaries for two months and they didn't have money to eat. The Prince had heard about the case and he wasn't amused. He asked the spokesmen for the delegation whether it was true that they had demonstrated against their employer. When they admitted that they had, he ordered them deported from the country. He saw their action as a disturbance of the local peace which superseded the gravity of their grievance.

'Even later that day, an American banker appeared in front of the Prince and his case showed how uneven the majlis's ways can be. He had had an automobile accident with a Saudi in which the latter died.

'Unaccustomed to the way a majlis works, the banker proceeded to explain the accident; lie blamed the Saudi driver and claimed that he had no driver's licence. The Prince moved his hand in a motion which asked the American to stop and ordered him to pay a sum of money to the victim's family. In the final analysis, the rights and wrongs of the case as we understand them and as they would have been judged by an insurance company didn't matter-- what counted was the death of the Saudi driver.

'What is wrong with a majlis is beyond the obvious and by that I mean the lack of pattern, precedence and the competence of a prince. What is wrong with it is the freedom of the person who renders judgement, that he is not bound by a recognizable law. Take big cases where both sides of an argument are heard. If you analyze them, you'll find that their friends always come out ahead. And if their friends are ahead, then think of the fact that you can't lodge a complaint against any of them, or indeed about their officials. The closer you get to them the less effective the law becomes. So: who do you go to and how do you go about it? No way, they're immune.

'Yes, injustice is inherent in the system. It is completely out of date and certainly cannot cope with the complex problems of one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Do you remember the joke about the Saudi who snatched the purse of a woman with his right hand and when a policeman caught up with him the man kicked him with his left foot and they amputated his right arm and left leg. That's it, the majlis has no vision. What you need is something flexible to deal with a country racked by the pace of change.'

Another observer of the majlis and the pace of change racking the country was the writer Peter Theroux, whose book Sandstorm is one of the better existing records of the unreality of Saudi Arabia. Theroux's judgement. on the majlis supports and intellectualizes the opinions of my Lebanese journalist friend: 'They [the petitioners] gave the Prince all their rights. It was medieval sight, a tableau of cynical patronage.'

The new slave state started in the late 1950s. Egyptian teachers, Syrian and Lebanese doctors, Palestinian businessmen and Yemeni shop owners began arriving in Saudi Arabia in pursuit of the petro-dollar. Their numbers were small and most of the time they left their families behind because there was no accommodation for them and whatever existed was expensive. In addition, living in a country that lagged considerably behind their place of origin carried with it the prospect of sociological dislocation and shock. Those who made the move used to resurface from Saudi Arabia every year or so on long leaves, telling stories about the horror of it all. They spoke of the merciless heat: 'the sun is only a few yards away'; the summary executions carried out by bin Jalawi; rare diseases including a rampant non-fatal syphilis and general orthopaedic weaknesses (bone problems because of lack of calcium); the lack of sanitation and amenities, which did not bother the native Saudi; the strange ways of the majlis; and the loneliness of living in 'a desert camp'. Those among them who used alcoholic beverages came back behaving as if they were out to quench a desert thirst; they drank beer because alcohol was available through local stills. The Americans who worked for ARAMCO developed a local hooch called sidiki, or 'friend', and their attempts to make it drinkable went as far as flavouring it with mint and fruit tastes.

Overall, the expatriates looked down on the Saudis and their Bedouin ways, while their hosts accused them of greed, haughtiness and of being effete city slickers who 'ate with their mouths closed, just like goats'. Despite all the difficulties - and they were bad enough to warrant an unhappy report by the British diplomatic mission in 1955 - it was a clear-cut supply-and-demand relation-ship and both sides were joined by a common language and, for the most part, a common religion. Both sides had an interest in limiting the damage.

In the 1960s Saudi Arabia's need for human resources expanded and accountants, clerks, mechanics and artisans began arriving. This group was a mixture of Arabs and Muslims from Pakistan, India and Iran. Unlike teachers and doctors, these professional groups were employed by individuals and new Saudi companies and their activities were often subject to the whims of employers, which meant unreasonable demands as to the amount of time they spent working, less attractive job benefits and shorter holidays.

'He couldn't understand why I wouldn't spend 16 hours a day working on the books,' says an accountant about his former Saudi employer, and adds: 'to him, I was there to work and not to live.' A Kurdish Lebanese mechanic who managed to survive five years of lucrative hardship had a different problem: 'The higher up they were, the more unreasonable they were. They wanted their cars back in the shortest possible time, regardless of what was wrong with them or how badly they had bashed them. To them, if you're a mechanic then you should be able to fix any car problem in a few minutes.' Even a sympathetic Saudi offers his own lament and says: 'Most of us treated them like robots; it wasn't a healthy situation.

This group of new expatriates numbered about 300,000 and did not receive the respect accorded their predecessors. Also, because they reacted negatively to the demands of the work, social pressures and loneliness, their relationship with their hosts was openly unfriendly. There was no middle ground, and the worse one side behaved the worse was the reaction of the other. In the end the expats settled for calling the Saudis wohoush (beasts) or kiab (dogs) and the Saudis responded by refusing to use the polite 'brother', 'mister' or their professional appellations when addressing them. They lived in small rooms offering little comfort and no television set. In a way, the old slavery which was abolished in 1962 was replaced by this new version, almost simultaneously.

From the late 1960s, except for the suave Lebanese and Palestinian deal-makers and wheeler-dealers (see Big Deals and Dangerous Games), most of the arrivals were Yemenis or non-Arabs. The Yemenis, a proud, hardworking people, provided street sweepers, coffee and errand boys, servants and more shopkeepers. A high proportion of the rest were Thai nannies, Filipino bellboys and waiters, Korean construction workers and Somali and Ethiopian, Indian and Sri Lankan servants and menial workers. The numbers of this group multiplied in proportion to the growing wealth of the country and by the time of the 1973 oil shock, there were over a million of them.

The tensions which began with the first arrivals and were height-ened with the second wave of expatriates grew much worse. Often there were language and cultural problems. The Saudis could not understand the discipline of the Korean construction workers who lined up every morning to salute their flag; they saw the natural subservience of the Filipinos as licence to abuse them and did not understand the requests of Thai nannies to have time off, leave the house or visit other lonely compatriots. But it went further, for as usual having money led to xenophobia and arrogance, and people who had lived in a tent until recently did not know how to treat their helpers. To them they were real slaves. Now the total number of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia, the people commonly described as expatriates, is over three million people, over one third of the indigenous population of the country.

It was not merely a case of abuse by individual Saudis which created the new slavery. The inherent unkindness of the Saudi nouveaux riches was compounded by the laws enacted to govern this situation and by the emergence of a new class of labour suppliers who traded mercilessly in human commodities. A number of laws were introduced which purported to protect imported labour. The Saudi Government also went as far as to sign unilateral agreements with some countries, but essentially what superseded all the humane articles of the imported-labour laws were the articles which were aimed at protecting the rights of the Saudi employers. This overriding consideration made the laws exacerbate rather than ease the results of the master-and-slave relationship which had developed. The story of foreign workers is one of the saddest and cruellest episodes in the history of a country which has produced more than its share of sadness and cruelty.

There are two major elements of official Saudi policy which contribute to foreign workers' wretchedness. Saudi law allows the employer total control of his imported labour and definition of their job function and how it is to be performed. Some workers are brought in by Saudi employers in the thousands and then 'retailed' in smaller numbers to others. Workers cannot change employment without a 'release' from the employer who imports them, which means that they can be retailed a second and a third time after a certain job is finished and they revert to their importer. Sometimes the retailer's margin goes up with every transaction and a labourer gets less after spending five and six years in Saudi Arabia than when he or she first arrived. If we add the fact that imported labourers come from countries which, because of dependence on Saudi financial help or other considerations, cannot afford them the barest protection, and the fact that they receive considerably lower wages than their Saudi counterparts, then we end up with officially sanctioned slavery.

Individual horror stories, unhappily, are in ample supply, but it is more revealing to recall examples of abuse which occur frequently. Many women are enticed to work in Saudi Arabia by lucrative salaries and job descriptions of work which does not exist. Women from Pakistan have been hired as seamstresses at twice what they make at home plus accommodation and food. But in Saudi Arabia they discover that they are expected to work as maids for one third of what they had been promised and their lodgings and food are not fit for animals. Their embassies cannot help; most workers lack the wherewithal to make an official complaint and those able to lodge a complaint are either branded foreign troublemakers or seduced by the police officer. They cannot go home because they cannot get an exit visa without their employers' consent, nor can they seek other employment. At the end of their 18-hour day the scraps of food they are given to eat cannot sustain them to do the work of another day.

Some maids are beaten; others are sexually assaulted and some, because they speak no Arabic and are not allowed to get out to see their compatriots, spend months without exchanging a word with anybody. As a result of all this, the suicide rate among Oriental maids working in Saudi Arabia is high and Saudi newspapers are full of advertisements enquiring as to the whereabouts of missing maids who have escaped their servitude. (Even the royals abuse their help as in the already mentioned cases and Amnesty International recorded a case of Prince Saad Al Saud forcing his maid to work 18 hours a day and beating her up when she would not and indeed could not.)

Male labourers do not fare much better. Much of the time their retailers charge them a substantial part of their salary, up to 50 per cent, just for getting them visas - and this before they subtract their margin from what a labourer eventually realizes. Many are promised lodgings and made to sleep in discarded shipping containers. Even those who import labourers to work for them are not above forcing them to renegotiate contracts after threatening to send them back home to poverty or to report them for practising Christianity or whatever alien religion they profess. It goes beyond labourers, for even foreign shopkeepers and owners of other businesses must have Saudi guarantors to start their businesses. The latter charge exorbitant sums of money for providing guarantees.

In 1979 I was in Dhahran when Korean workers rioted against the local working conditions. The following day an Army unit lined them up, picked out three of them at random and executed them, to teach the rest a lesson'. I broached the subject of the summary executions with a prince, a pilot in the Saudi Air Force. 'But they were Korean workers. Why are you concerned about them?' was his answer. When I stated that they could have been innocent of any wrongdoing, he shrugged his shoulders and told me that there had not been any riots since and 'that's what matters'.

In December 1984 there was a similar incident involving Pakistani workers. Saudi Army officers shot a number of them and Pakistan, which receives some Saudi aid, made no protest. The Turkish workers around the Tubuk airbase were sent home for complaining about living conditions; Sudanese workers have been flogged publicly; Ethiopian workers have been deported for worshipping at home on Sundays and so have Muslim labourers who were suspected of being Shias.

More recently, during the Gulf crisis, on 2 February 1991 hundreds of foreign workers were arrested and tortured when a group fired on a bus full of American servicemen and slightly wounded two of them. As it turned out, the shots had been fired by dissident Saudis to protest about their government's pro-American policy. During the Gulf War the workers in the country's eastern province, the area nearest to Saddam Hussein's army, could not consider moving out of harm's way because their employers left them behind so that they could continue to work but took their passports with them.

The protests of international human rights organizations have been ignored, along with their repeated requests to conduct on-the-spot investigations. Not only has Saudi Arabia refused to adhere to international labour standards, but officially the Government has been taking serious steps backwards. In 1987 it rescinded the law which afforded foreign workers some social security coverage. Now a sick expatriate worker is at the mercy of his employer.

The problem is not one of laws and treaties, however. Deep down the Saudis would like to do without outsiders in their country and resent their dependence on them. This feeling, and the fact that theirs is a society whose oil-rich members derive satisfaction and status from enslaving others, are what shape the attitudes of the Saudi people and Government. As the following two incidents demonstrate, this climate matters more than the letter of the law. When a Yemeni shop owner quarrelled with a taxi driver over the fare, the driver told the police that the Yemeni was an ingrate who had criticized Saudi Arabia. The police accepted the story and deported the Yemeni. In an equally absurd incident, a Saudi involved in a car accident with a foreigner told the police: 'It is his mistake. The accident wouldn't have taken place had he not come to this country to work.' The police took this into consideration.

Ridiculous as these incidents may be, they do considerably less damage than Saudi Government actions against the citizens of a country which is opposed to Saudi policies. Not only are governments unable to protest over abuse of individual citizens, but, every once in a while, a country acts without total appreciation of the Saudi response to its people and the results can be disastrous. To the Saudi Government, citizens can be held responsible for the political behaviour of their country.

In one incident, this retaliatory Saudi policy was used against people who are not workers: the Iranian pilgrims performing the Hajj. The thousands of Iranians in Saudi Arabia in 1988 were subjected to considerable harassment by members of CAVES who acted in a manner which expressed the Saudi Government's anti-Shia, anti-Iranian attitude. The Saudi security officials behaved so intolerably that the Iranians finally rioted. The police opened fire on a large Iranian crowd and when they were done 400 Iranians lay dead and 600 were wounded. There was no serious investigation of the matter; King Fahd settled for expressing his government's regrets. The following year, in a totally apolitical incident, Saudi carelessness during the Hajj led to a tunnel incident and stampede in which 4026 people were killed, mostly Iranians. Again there was no serious investigation of the incident.

During the Gulf War, Palestinians, Jordanians and Yemenis were deported when the PLO and the two governments concerned sup-ported Saddam Hussein. The Palestinians and Jordanians, many of whom had spent over ten years in Saudi Arabia, were a sad enough case, but the story of the Yemenis was truly tragic. The Saudi Government, acting indiscriminately, deported 800,000 Yemeni workers, many of whom had been in the country for decades and some who were born there, at the rate of over 40,000 a week. Most had to leave without their belongings, scores were beaten and, according to Middle East Watch, 32 died for lack of medical attention. It was not simply a case of innocents paying the price of their own government's foolishness; Saudi Arabia itself came near to a standstill because the Yemenis owned all the groceries and retail outlets. In numbers and scale of cruelty, it was an act which surpasses what happened to the Neisei, the Japanese-Americans who were interned during the Second World War, and it is a foul example of ethnic cleansing. Yet what matters most is the total lack of official remorse and the prospect of a repeat performance.

There is a strong racial content to how the Saudis and their government view and treat foreign workers. This is because certain national groups are associated with certain functions and the amount of protection foreign governments are capable of providing their nationals varies. But while differences in treating outsiders exist and, in the past, Western governments were more likely to react to abuse of their nationals, Saudi xenophobia still affects the 60,000 American, British and other Western civilians who live there.

To begin with, the conditions under which Western diplomats in Saudi Arabia operate amount to an inhospitable atmosphere. They are confined to major cities, may not worship openly and accommodate local customs by operating according to Saudi ma'lesh time (even Saudi officials are always late and justify this by saying ma'Iesh, or 'never mind'). More importantly, as documented by bulletins issued by the American, British, French and other embassies, Western diplomats are more likely to blame their own citizens for not knowing how to behave and do not come forward to protect them except under extreme conditions.

That this occurs is demonstrated by the case of Helen Smith, a Jeddah-resident English nurse who, along with a Dutchman by the name of Johannes Otten, met a violent death while attending a party of Western expatriates. The investigation of her death by the Saudi authorities produced a verdict of accidental death from a 70-foot fall from the balcony of a fifth-floor apartment. Initially the British Embassy accepted the verdict and acted in an embarrassed way. After all, the Embassy was in the business of warning British citizens against attending parties where alcoholic beverages were served, let alone where the sexes mixed freely. The Embassy's posture amounted to a subdued she-shouldn't-have-been-there attitude.

What the British Embassy, and indeed the British Government, did not count on was the attitude of Helen's father. A former police detective in Leeds, Ron Smith rushed to Jeddah to claim the body of his daughter only to discover considerable evidence which cast doubt on the 'accident' verdict and convinced him that she had been raped and probably battered to death before 'falling'. In fact, the injuries did not suggest a fall.

Ron Smith refused to receive his daughter's body and began his own investigation. Many people at the Baksh Hospital, where Helen had worked, openly suggested that she had been murdered, but everyone at the party, though contradicting each other on important details, insisted it was an accident. Forgetting that the punishment for adultery is death by stoning, the hostess went as far as admitting that she was having sex with one of the guests during a critical time when, if she had been up and about, she could have shed some light on the circumstances of the couple's death.

Confronted with such nonsense, Smith, aggrieved and angry, returned to Britain and proceeded to badger the Foreign Office and the press with questions about the case. The Foreign Office held to the official Saudi and British Embassy line and hoped Smith would disappear, but the press rose to the occasion and began running stories which supported Smith's suspicions. In Britain, the case began to assume the shape of a national scandal, a lone father against a government determined to place its Saudi interests above justice.

Smith returned to Jeddah, but his second trip was less fruitful. Fearful members of the expatriate community, the British Embassy and the Saudi authorities would not cooperate with him and placed hurdles in his way. Meanwhile, given the circumstances of drinking and other violations of Saudi law, including adultery, the other expatriates at the party received exceptionally light sentences from a Saudi court, a maximum of a one-year prison sentence for the host and public floggings for the others.

This strengthened Smith's resolve and the press accommodated him by conducting their own investigations. With time, two vital pieces of evidence surfaced. The first was the fact that an attempt had been made to tamper with Johannes Otten's clothing and belongings to cover up his murder and suggest burglary as the motive. The second was the presence of a mysterious Saudi at the scene of the crime a few hours after it was discovered, when the Saudi police finally arrived to conduct their preliminary investigation.

The valiant efforts of Ron Smith met with relative success: he agreed to bring his daughter's body back to Britain after Leeds City Council agreed to hold an inquest to investigate the cause of death. Sadly, however, this too proved unproductive and there was an open verdict. Nevertheless, the open airing of the case did establish that Smith and the press had good reason to question the Saudi investigation of the case and to suspect British connivance in a cover-up. In my view, the mysterious Saudi is the key to the whole affair. The Saudis do not shy from extracting confessions from people and they got none from the expatriates involved in the case, and let them go with uncharacteristic lack of fuss. Beyond that, they did everything to create a cover-up, and they normally would not do that except to protect one of their own.

Lesser examples of how other Western expatriates are left to the whims of Saudi law occur every day. The British engineer Neville Norton was imprisoned for a period of three years over a contract dispute and was released only in 1991. It was the type of dispute which is normally handled by a commercial court and there was no reason to imprison him except for the fact that he had a money claim against a royal. In this case, the British Embassy pretended ignorance of the whole affair until the poor man was released. There have been many cases when British and American citizens working in Saudi Arabia were flogged publicly for selling alcohol or for lesser crimes and in all cases the concerned diplomatic missions had very little to say for themselves.

This relatively recent reluctance by Western governments to protect their citizens, which coincided with Saudi Arabia's rising importance as an oil supplier, has emboldened the Saudis and this has reflected itself in the activities of CAVES members. In November 1987 AT&T Saudi Arabia issued a letter to its American employees in the country which contained an admission that they could do very little to protect them against increasing harassment by CAVES. Simultaneously, another letter was sent to the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, citing examples of this harassment. This was followed by complaints by James Baroody, the President of the Association of American Workers in Saudi Arabia. This too produced no response.

In fact, besides international and regional human rights organi-zations, the only political entity to complain about the Saudi treatment of foreign workers was the European Community, which settled for a diplomatic expression of concern. The situation of workers in the country continues to deteriorate and what is happening now deserves close scrutiny if incidents similar to those which affected the Yemeni workers and led to the death of Helen Smith are to be avoided in the future.

Conduct of state affairs aside, even the emergence of a new slave state and the visible contradictions of everyday Saudi Arabian life, of comparing camels with cadillacs, do not tell enough of what is happening in the country. The social divisions racking the place touch and twist every aspect of ordinary life. Fahd has been king since 1982, and, as has been shown, more than anybody else he has proved that the only constant, unalterable Saudi facts of life are the way the royal family views itself and the way this vision is expressed. In fact, the background against which the royals conduct themselves has changed dramatically, but the commitment to family absolutism is so intact that it is difficult to imagine any curbs on their power taking place. In the words of a Lebanese journalist well acquainted with the country: 'They've had 90 years to change and they haven't done it; their attitude is part of them, even the most educated and enlightened among them believe their ways to be right and that they're beyond criticism. Crazy as it may sound, things are getting worse.'

But, while the family and the armed and paramilitary forces have always had priority claims on the finances of the country, the hugeness of the oil income has transformed the place, more in the way the people live than in the way they think, but measurably in both. This transformation began in the early 1960s, when the oil income exceeded first the family's and then the Army's needs and enough money filtered through to the people to create one of the longest-lasting and broadest economic booms in history, an economic explosion sustained by the needs which go with catapulting a seventeenth-century country into the twentieth century. To appreciate what this means, it is enough to consider that only 1 per cent of homes had bathrooms and now over 50 per cent of them do - and the most expensive and decorative types at that. (A character in Hilary Mantel's remarkable novel about Saudi Arabian life, Eight Months on Gaza Street, delivers the memorable and in all likelihood real-life line: 'I have witnessed the largest transportation of ready-mixed concrete in the history of the human race.')

As with all booms, this one created a rich merchant class, in this case an impressive Forbes and Fortune magazines list of billionaires made up of old trading families and new ones (the royals are ignored). The Olayans, Mahfouzes, bin Ladens, Kamels, Ali Rezas, Zamils, Ghoseibis and Jamils imported food, cars and construction equipment and built highways, housing for workers and whole towns, dozens of schools, hospitals and, naturally, palaces and chichi army barracks. Now they provide services which keep the country going, huge cleaning and maintenance contracts which employ thousands of people and run into billions of dollars, and they use their surplus funds to trade worldwide. They have substantial shareholdings in Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp, Hyatt Hotels, Whittaker, Mobil Oil and many other corporations; join major oil companies to prospect for 'black gold' in other countries; and own huge chunks of real estate in five continents. Naturally, nobody is ever big enough to forget what matters and, in order to continue, they all need the blessing if not the active support of the House of Saud.

The second way oil wealth produced results was through the creation of an educated class. Estimates vary, but in the late 1980s somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 Saudis graduated from universities every year. Yet this is a recent happening and, unlike in other Arab countries, the royal family acted only when their surpluses became huge and for years the educational benefits were limited to the upper crust of society who could afford it or had enough influence to get Government grants for their children. Furthermore, not all Saudis have participated in the universal Middle Eastern rush to become educated. As a result, literacy is still somewhere around 55 per cent, slightly lower than destitute India and considerably behind poor Jordan. Nevertheless, the composition of the educated class in Saudi Arabia differs little from those in other countries and there are electronic and oil engineers, doctors, sanitation specialists, city planners and even interior decorators. Of course, masses of people have graduated in the arts and humanities, though, understandably in view of the attitude of the House of Saud, the law still lags far behind.

Until the late 1980s, mostly because of a tenfold increase in the number of civil servants between 1965 and 1985, almost all college graduates have been able to secure lucrative jobs; in the words of a knowledgeable American who lived there for years, the Government has been able to 'absorb or bribe them - take your pick'. But the expansion in commerce and this bureaucratic build-up have reached saturation point: the ability of the Government to hire more people and to continue to pay civil servants over the odds is no longer a reality and the expansion of the trading houses is experiencing a slow-down. For the first time this century, educated Saudis are taking jobs below their level of competence and their unhappiness about this promises serious problems in this area, particularly in view of an emerging financial crisis brought about by serious mismanagement of the country's formerly huge surpluses and the cost of the Gulf War.

Naturally for a country which is a royal dictatorship, the third visible human component of change is the numbers and status of members of the armed forces and the paramilitary National Guard, the pampered but historically unreliable guardians of the throne. Together they officially total over 100,000, and in 1982 the yearly cost per Saudi soldier was $470,000, compared with $103,000 in America and less than half of that in Britain, Germany and France. More tellingly, in 1982 the defence cost per Saudi citizen was $3014, compared with $782 in America and $471 in Ger-many. The natural historical importance of the armed forces is exaggerated by local anomalies not subject to sound planning or financial controls. Officers are promoted and their already impressive houses upgraded. The salaries of all members of the forces are increased and they are given bonuses every time the country faces a crisis. Also, the West responds to these crises by supplying Saudi Arabia with more sophisticated and expensive weapons. The Gulf War saw the royal family hand out huge special financial rewards to officers, something other countries would never consider doing, and in amounts they could not afford. And even internal problems such as the suppression in 1979 of street demonstrations in some Shia towns produced a massive exercise in royal largesse and, ominously, a reaction by Saudi opposition groups who saw fit to publish a list of the recipients.

The colossally rich merchants, along with those who are extremely wealthy by normal standards, the bureaucrats, teachers and doctors and members of the armed forces, constitute the new Saudi class. (A Harvard University study calls them 'Middle Class' and claims that their numbers have increased from 2 per cent of the population to 11 per cent in the late 1980s.) They are the beneficiaries of the oil boom and the building of a modern army.

This new class and how it appears to outsiders, along with what is known about the royal family, merge to create the total image of today's Saudi Arabia. Despite lack of participation by large segments of the population, it is what some writers describe as the petro-personality. And the needs of this society and its excesses have transformed the country into a figurative Mecca for international salesmen and contractors and made it the home of over three million foreign workers.

This state of financial well-being is used to promote a pi~ure of Saudi Arabia where all is well. With their advocates, the members of the House of Saud equate the obvious economic advances with something more substantial which reflects favourably on the social and political situation within the country. But though the image of wealth, albeit often exaggerated, is a fact, the results are the opposite of what is assumed. The impact of wealth and the rush to modernity, whether skin-deep or real, have destroyed the social values of this Muslim society much faster than they could conceivably be replaced and have led to stresses which have produced a considerable loss of social cohesion. For example, the number of reported crimes rose from 1775 in 1966 to 21,826 in 1985 - many times more than in neighbouring countries and one of the highest increases in the world.

Furthermore, despite the economic benefits which were enjoyed by the merchant class, bureaucrats and army officers, any judge-ment of what they are all about must take into consideration the number of anti-Government conspiracies in which they have participated. This reveals ample signs of resentment against the absolutism of the royal household. Indeed, this is where a chasm between the Government - the royal family - and the people manifests itself. There is a conflict between how members of the new class live and their refusal to accept the House of Saud's attempt to stifle their wish for greater personal and political freedom. Whether the new class's political thinking is a reflection of rising expectations, their education, an inherent human wish to be free or, as generally suspected, a combination of all these things, matters less than the fact that it exists.

When the boxer Cassius Clay espoused Islam and became Muhammad Ali, he made a trip to Saudi Arabia to perform the pilgrimage and promote himself. He was received by all important members of the royal family, including the King. While with Prince Salman, the Governor of Riyadh and head of the important family council, Ah lapsed into his usual way of talking. 'Hey, Your Highness,' he is supposed to have cracked, 'doesn't anybody in this place smile?' Salman is reported to have stared at him without saying a word. Whether anybody told Ah that the Saudis keep their more bitter than sweet smiles to themselves is not known. Again the country and its inherent oddness are exposed in the words of another Hilary Mantel character: 'It's a stimulating place if you're in the construction business.'

But smiling openly is not the only thing which looks odd in the strange, contradictory atmosphere which envelops Saudi Arabia and which accounts for the continued unhappiness of all its people. Saudi Arabia is a country where old men pray five times a day while their sons listen to the Rolling Stones. It is a country where old people eat lamb and the young import 20,OOOlb of American-made Oreo cookies a year. It is a country where the punishment of serious crimes is publicized as a deterrent, but the crimes themselves are not mentioned, so nobody knows what they should avoid doing. True, dictatorships do not point out the flaws in their system, but in Saudi Arabia this maxim has been carried to extremes and rapists are beheaded in a town's 'Chop Square'. The press carries the gruesome pictures of the sordid affair along with the name, age and place of birth of the man without a word as to why the ultimate punishment is being meted out.

Contact between unrelated men and women is illegal and violating this rule can lead to severe punishment, but telephone sex is rampant. Among others, Peter Theroux, the American writer who spent three years teaching in the country while observing its ways, recorded instances of women telephoning him because he was a foreigner and hence more likely to indulge in the forbidden sport. And it goes further and women shop carrying little pieces of paper with their telephone numbers on them - just in case they run into deserving handsome men. According to the Saudi writer Anwar Abdallah, these petro-flirtations often lead to serious affairs which are consummated when the participants give content to their frustrations by meeting outside the country. But when they go to see the doctor, the same frustrated women who participate in telephone sex and its extensions have been known to bare everything but keep their faces covered. Most women who live in cities spend hours making themselves up to look pretty and wear expensive Chanel and Yves St Laurent dresses but hide their looks and dresses under full-length abas when they go out in the street. Many of these women are so smitten by the glamour of Princess Diana that they have named their daughters after her. They write anonymous letters to magazines complaining about their social status and the denial of their rights - but they still cannot leave home except in the company of males.

American-educated Saudi males greet each with, 'How you doin', man?' while wearing Arab robes and head-dresses and sacrilegiously shorten the name Muhammad to Mo. They indulge in other aspects of imported hipness, including the use of drugs, and they negotiate multi-million-dollar business deals while massaging their toes in an unattractive Bedoum way. Those who can afford it drink whisky secretly, at $100 a bottle, within a short distance of the Muslim muezzin calling for prayers.

During Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, activity in the whole country comes to a screeching halt, but any Saudi worth his barrel of oil takes off for London, Spain or the South of France to continue 'living', and effects a similar escape to join in the fun of Christmas and New Year. (A deputy director of Petromin, the country's oil marketing arm, chartered a plane from Dhahran to Paris so that he and his friends could spend New Year there. When Selim Louzi, the late brave Lebanese journalist, confronted King Fahd with this, the latter described the episode as 'regrettable'.)

Unsurprisingly, these escapes from Muslim constraints were pioneered by members of the royal family. And the Americans and other well-to-do expatriates in Saudi Arabia participate in the madnesses, confirming the living absurdity of the place. For example, an American woman had an art exhibition which con-tained nothing but the presents given her by princes of the realm who appreciated her beauty: Persian carpets, diamond necklaces, emerald rings, diamond earrings and an antique four-poster bed. None of the trophies exhibited was for sale.

Such absurd aspects of Saudi modernity often have weird conse-quences and I have experienced two telling instances at first hand. My over 20 trips to Saudi Arabia have instilled in me a morbid fascination with the number of road accidents and how they take place. I discovered that the total had gone up from 4047 in 1971 to 24,594 in 1983 but I could never look at the resulting wrecks and fathom how they happened - something the mind usually figures out automatically. I finally asked an old Saudi schoolmate of mine to decipher the accidents for me. 'The accidents are impossible to understand because people here drive like maniacs, don't observe any traffic rules and do nothing to clear the way before they leave the scene of the accident,' was the answer I got.

In the other incident I was stranded in Dhahran desperately trying to return to London. The clerk manning the flight desk was black with an Afro hairdo and spoke like an American from the Deep South. I tried to befriend him in the hope that he would get me a flight connection. In the course of our conversation, I asked him what part of the States he came from and was startled to be told: 'I'm Saudi, man, and I've never been to America. I learned my English listening to the radio station of ARAMCO.' (The American compound in Dhahran houses over 30,000 US citizens and they are entertained by radio and television stations which carry regular American programmes.)

Yet Saudi Arabia is very much the home of the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina and is ruled by members of the strict Wahhabi sect. Judged by the existence of 30,000 mosques, or one for about every 300 people, it remains the most Muslim country of them all. Like oil, Islam, the basis of family rule, is a commodity which is promoted by the Saudi Government, which contributes to the building of mosques, and it is a source of influence and power for the country among the Arabs and Muslims. But the part of this same ultra-Muslim country which has been affected by oil wealth has leapt into the twentieth century unprepared. The practices resulting from the oil wealth and exposure to Western ways are in direct conflict with the pseudo-legal and cultural Muslim foundations of the place. No prince, not even those whose ugly behaviour has been mentioned earlier, professes anything except a strict adherence to Islam and its ways. Moreover, the Government expects everyone to do the same. The irony of the most Muslim state of them all in some ways becoming the most Western-looking country is there for all to see. To bridge the gap between the two, to create a centre where none exists, hypocrisy, official and personal, has been elevated to a science. Not only are we confused by Saudi Arabia's contradictory stance on the subject of a resurgent Islam, but nothing is called by its right name. Thus to accommodate Islamic tenets condemning usury even bank interest payments are called service charges but greedy bank managers who make a lot of exorbitant service charges have to close shop and observe the call to prayer.

The social contradictions of everyday life are real, substantial and dislocating and their results are the wounds and scars of change, a massive sociological free fall which, among other things, has created a generation gap of several centuries. And to repeat, this dichotomy in social behaviour is matched by a political one or by actions which have a bearing on the political future of the country. For example, to please the Arabs, Saudi Arabia condemns the foreign policy of the USA and calls for a Muslim Jerusalem in a week which sees it ordering more American missiles to protect itself against the same Arabs it is trying to please. At the same time the Government continues in its absolute ways, which are totally intolerant of dissent, while sending young Saudis to foreign schools which teach them about democracy, freedom and equality. In Saudi Arabia, being anti-West and pro-West and pro-Arab and anti-Arab at the same time and the confrontation between a Western-educated young man weaned on Rousseau, Hobbes and the federalist papers and a prince arbitrarily demanding a share of his company's profits is part of the country's make-up. Moreover, the result of the confrontation between the commoner and the prince who demands a share of his wealth is as contradictory as the situation: the Saudi lets his prince have his way while secretly cursing him.

These contradictory elements in the social and governmental sphere go forward with their own momentum. Moreover, because of lack of understanding of their consequences by the people who run the country, no policies have been adopted to deal with them and, the damage they produce is getting worse. The divisions between being pro-Arab and anti-West and the opposite, between the old and the new and between the Government's ways and the desire of the people for greater freedom, are getting wider by the day. The country's Arab and external policies will be analyzed later, but in the internal sphere the Government believes its own propaganda and accepts the acquisition of wealth by some of its citizens and their rising levels of education as enough to keep the people happy. It does not feel threatened by what surrounds it and, as a result, even the behaviour of members of the royal family is getting worse - and more unacceptably colourful.

In fact, the dichotomies run so deep within the country that even the misbehaviour of the royals is exclusive. Though cocktail parties and hashish parties are everyday occurrences among them and among some members of the new class, nobody who belongs to the latter group dares emulate the licentiousness of the royals without risking offending them and suffering the application of the letter of the law. I know of an important merchant who was scolded by the King for giving his daughter a lavish wedding. King Khalid was angry because the man had 'gone too far'. The man explained the episode thus: 'They don't want anybody to compete with them.' Outside the country, the royals act as a model for other Saudis who, while careful not to offend them, ape them in building houses in Marbella, gambling in London casinos, chasing starlets in Hollywood and the South of France. But, regardless of the degree of real and imitative social change shown by the activities of the new class and indeed despite its corrupt ways, the House of Saud has not been able to neutralize its demands for political adjustment. In other words, regardless of wealth and the indulgences afforded them by the oil boom, members of the new class still resent the royal family's monopoly on power and their own reduction to political vegetables. This situation is particularly evident when the House of Saud's suffocating separateness is revealed through new methods which infringe on the new class's comforts: rich merchants have to run ads wishing the King happy holidays, telephone tapping is universal and members of CAVES continue to treat them the way they treated people 50 years ago.

But, as under Ibn Saud, the only safety-valve the family has to offer is the antiquated and ill-used majlis. But the majlis has not worked and this is why the country has continued to experience many rebellions and assassination attempts. From the 1950s to the 1980s the increase in the level of education, wealth and awareness changed the source of the opposition, from the tribes and religious fanatics to nationalist movements made up of the new class, including the Army, and more recently non-traditional Islamic fundamentalism.

Since the inception of the Eisenhower Doctrine of the late 1950s, the Americans have openly guaranteed the security of the country in an inclusive way; the guarantees are aimed against both external threats and internal upheavals. These guarantees, the sheer numbers of the House of Saud and their relations and the geography of the country have led to the failure of all the attempts to change the government of the House of Saud.

The boldest expression of the American commitment and involvement to defend Saudi Arabia was the Gulf War, which will be addressed separately later, but this was preceded by several unpublicized alerts, particularly in 1969, 1972 and 1979. On these occasions the Americans were ready to respond to 'trouble' within Saudi Arabia, army conspiracies, but the Saudis managed to control things and eliminate the conspirators without outside interference- and without trial. (The elimination can take hideous forms, and there is evidence that King Faisal ordered 29 suspect Air Force officers to be ejected from planes without parachutes.) What the Eisenhower Doctrine's guarantee of the safety of the country against destabilization started has been reaffirmed by every American president who followed him and this US commitment acts as a check on the advocates of change, who have to take it into consideration.

In addition, the numbers of the House of Saud are another major barrier to internal attempts to change the Government. Not only are there too many of them, but they are scattered all over the country, holding key positions and controlling the local government apparatus. Their numbers allow them to control all the key posts in the Air Force and the Ministries of the Interior and Defence have never been out of their hands. Also, the Wahhabi and Bedouin National Guard, a paramilitary organization which was created for the sole purpose of protecting the family and which now has tanks, helicopters and other sophisticated weaponry, is under the Crown Prince. Naturally, the dreaded internal security apparatus is headed by a prince, Fahd bin Faisal, a nephew of King Fahd.

The best way to judge the importance of the number of royals is to realize that in Saudi Arabia killing the King and 50 or 100 relatives would only lead to other members of the family assuming power and it is physically impossible to gather all the thousands of princes who form the House of Saud in one place and do the job. America would anyway always find someone to make king.

But it is not solely a question of the policies of the USA and family numbers; geography is a third protective factor. The country is not only huge; it is multi-centered, with Jeddah, Mecca and Medina in the west, Riyadh in the center and Dhahran in the east. Organizing a simultaneous move against all of these centers at the same time would undo any conspiracy because too many people would have to know about it.

With all these protective elements in place, one would think the Saudi people who want change would not even try. But this is not the case and, despite the odds stacked against them, attempts to change the regime continue to take place. It is a simple case of the injustices of the House of Saud producing a totally human response. Saudi Arabia has never been a sea of tranquillity and the Saudi people have never been the punching-bag the House of Saud and its supporters and advocates make them out to be.

Because of the great number of uprisings against the House of Saud since the death of its founding father, it is beyond the scope of this book to deal with them individually. I will settle for identifying their source and presenting examples of how they were dealt with.

Understandably, because they were exposed to outside influ-ences, among the first political movements in Saudi Arabia were the labour unions formed in the oil city of Dhahran. On several occasions in the 1950s and 1960s workers there struck and demonstrated. They demanded reasonable working hours, higher wages, the elimination of discriminatory policies (ARAMCO provided them with housing inferior to what their American counterparts got), and political rights. Initially, under King Saud, this movement achieved some success, until he acted against it and it was crushed by the authorities. In 1962, when Faisal ran the country, 12 leaders of the movement disappeared, most of them never to be seen again.

From 1958 to 1964 several members of the family, with Prince Tallal (the father of the Citicorp agent) in the lead, left the country, formed the Free Princes and advocated change through joining forces with Nasser's Arab nationalist movement. The movement of the Free Princes, although a serious one which undermined the foundations of family unity, failed but met with a gentler end. Prince Tallal has never been completely rehabilitated, but he and three brothers have been allowed back into Saudi Arabia and were reintegrated into the system on condition of silence. This, and the fact that rebel princes succumbed to the lure of money and became wealthy, put an end to the hopes that the family might correct its ways. The only inter-family differences which now remain concern branches of the family vying for power, or competing for defence and other contracts.

In 1955 there was a pro-Nasser local army rebellion in the city of Taif and in 1969 a serious Air Force mutiny occurred at the Dhahran airbase. Again in 1969, several leading citizens and Air Force officers made a valiant attempt to topple the Government. In 1975 the Chief of Staff, General Muhammad Shamimairi, was arrested and later executed for conspiring against the monarchy. The earliest reported Army uprising took place at the Dhahran air base, and it is the one incident where a royal, Prince Faisal bin Saud bin Muhammad Abdel Aziz, was killed.

The Army officers involved in the Taif rebellion were executed summarily. The 1969 Air Force rebellion produced a number of executions which included Colonels Daoud Roumi and Said Al Oman. In addition, serious change in the process of selecting Air Force officers took place and now they may only be members of the House of Saud or from a few 'reliable' families. Little is known about the fate of those involved in the Dhahran rebellion.

Another serious Army-civilian rebellion in 1969 was led by Yusuf Al Tawil, the son of Muhammad Al Tawil, a man who conspired against Ibn Saud in the 1930s. Tawil, who was a classmate of mine at Beirut's International College, was spared and so were many of his co-conspirators. Their numbers and background meant that their execution would have backfired, but Colonel Saud Ibrahim Al Muammer, another IC classmate and a close friend of mine, died under torture and 23 lesser conspirators disappeared.

One of the most serious uprisings against the Government took place in 1979 when a group of religious fanatics occupied the Grand Mosque in Mecca for two weeks. In November of that year, a religious fanatic by the name of Juhayman Muhammad Otteibi led 300 armed men to occupy the Grand Mosque until most of them were killed by French paratroops who flooded the place with water and applied electricity to it, having been given special dispensation to enter the Islamic city. The Grand Mosque rebellion was costly: 227 people were killed and over 400 wounded. Juhayman was killed but 63 of his followers were distributed to cities all over the country and beheaded publicly, without trial. Saudi television broadcast the executions live to teach the people a lesson. On the two days following the Mecca rebellion an open Shia insurrection took place in the country's oil-rich east-ern region which was put down violently. No figures are available but estimates place the number of Shias killed at over 200.

Nowadays, in the wake of the Gulf War, dozens of students, teachers, journalists and religious leaders have been imprisoned for posing 'a threat to the regime'. The nature of this threat has never been disclosed, but many are still in detention and are tortured methodically. Among the best known of those imprisoned recently are Gulf War opponent and Sophist leader Muhammad Al Fassi and human rights activist Muhammad Al Misaari. Despite the repeated efforts of international human rights organizations, their families have not been allowed to visit them and their whereabouts are unknown.

Clearly, the numbers of the House of Saud and their geographi-cal spread, while instrumental in foiling anti-Government moves, have not acted as a deterrent and people have continued to try. The fact that the past decade has seen no major attempts to topple the House of Saud is undoubtedly the result of an increasing awareness of the blatant American protection given to the royal family. Yet this should not be overstated to imply that the people or the Army have submitted, and there is a perceptible increase in street-level opposition to the Government. The periodic dismissals of Army officers - and there have been two since the Gulf War, in April 1990 and May 1991 - indicate continued unhappiness in its ranks and the regular increases in the salaries paid to officers and soldiers are no more than a crude unsuccessful attempt by the House of Saud to buy their loyalty. But in the main, the major resistance to the House of Saud has undergone another shift. The failure of previous revolutionary attempts and the increase of Western support have led to the adoption of new ways. Now there is an attempt to subvert one of the major sources of support of the House of Saud: Islam. The opposition accepts that the country must continue within an Islamic framework and makes noises about cooperating with the West but does not accept the royal family's interpretation of Islam and accuses them of perverting it. It wants an Islamic representative government.

Whether this new way, with its broader appeal to the masses, will succeed where narrow-based nationalist movements failed is difficult to assess but what is clear is that it has become a danger to a fundamentally shaky facade. In the words of the writer David Howarth: 'The kingdom is clearly one of the richest and ripest prizes in the world for a revolution.' Understandably, the exiled Saudi writer Muhammad Sadeeq offers a more emotional assessment. 'The lights are out in my country, FOR NOW.'

One way to judge how dissatisfaction within the country works is to listen to Saudis and hear how preoccupied they are with the lack of political reform. To them, the constant violation of human rights forms an unhappy part of everyday conversation and, immediately after the Gulf War, this unhappiness expressed itself in a petition to the King asking for greater freedom. It was signed by 50 of the country's leading notables, scholars, business leaders and former Government officials, including former Min-ister of Information Muhammad Abdou Yamani (no kin to his famous namesake, the former Oil Minister). The petition went unanswered, and in the West these serious developments appear as nothing more than small news stories - they are denied the space they deserve. Nor do other serious developments reflecting on conditions within the country get the coverage they merit. On 16 October 1988 the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reported that the Saudi Council of Ulemas, a House of Saud-appointed Wahhabi religious body, issued a fatwa (encyclical) sanctioning the execution of members of opposition political parties. That same month, despite pleas by many international human rights organizations and the Kuwaiti Government, the Saudis executed 16 Kuwaitis accused of causing trouble during the Hajj.

More recently, according to the human rights organization Article 19 and the Minnesota Lawyers' International Human Rights Committee, the Saudis killed and wounded a number of Iraqis who had taken refuge in their country from Saddam Hussein. Over 20,000 of them are held in the Rafha desert camp under inhuman conditions, suffering from summer heat of 1200 F in the shade. When they rioted, demanding better accommodation and more food, the Saudi security forces opened fire at random. The Saudis have refused all requests by human rights organizations to visit the camp. Western governments responded to the atrocity by granting some of the refugees emigration visas (3000 to the USA and 700 to Sweden, among others), but no government condemned the behaviour of the House of Saud. All these acts are talked about and resented by most Saudis, many of whom are bitter about the attitude of Western governments and about the apparent indifference of the Western media (see The Last Line of Defence).

Since the Islamic fundamentalist revolution in Shia Iran, the massive discrimination against the Saudi Shias has gone beyond the periodic issue of religious fatwas denouncing them as heretics and the denial of jobs and economic opportunity. In September 1991 Saudi newspapers carried a statement by a senior Wahhabi cleric, one Abdallah bin Jibreen, an appointee of the House of Saud and one who does not move without their approval, in which he described the Shias as 'idolators who deserve to be killed'. The following year this inflammatory opinion was confirmed by an official fatwa. As if to bolster these unbelievable incitements to murder, the Government detained 26 Shia religious leaders, many of the Shia citizens of the village of Umm Al Kura disappeared and an outspoken citizen, Muhammad Al Farrash, was publicly executed. The security forces have razed four Shia mosques and, unlike in other places, the number of Shia mosques is small. The Government refuses to license the construction of new ones, and measures stricter than ever were introduced to stop the Shias celebrating most of their religious holidays. In 1988, 340 Shia employees of the Jubeil refinery, in the eastern part of the country, were dismissed, 'because Shias are unreliable', and the Shias seldom hold Government jobs and cannot join the armed forces. People continue to be arrested without being charged, tortured without being allowed to see their lawyers and in September 1992, in an act which defies the imagination and which reflects panic in the House of Saud, two Shia divinity students, Turki Al Turki and Abdel Khaliq Jannaabi, were awaiting execution because they read the Bible as part of their syllabus. They have since been released in response to an international outcry by human rights organizations.

Naturally there are laws, directed at the population as a whole, which stifle dissent indiscriminately. A person can be arrested for acting suspiciously with no clarification of what that entails, Government employees are forbidden to write letters to the press and everyone is discouraged from talking to foreign reporters. But it goes beyond that: suspect doctors cannot practise and suspect professors cannot teach, and 52 non-Shia clerics who objected to these measures were imprisoned in 1992. Torture of Saudi political prisoners is universal and has been documented by Amnesty International, Middle East Watch and the Committee for Human Rights in the Arabian Peninsula, the Minnesota Lawyers' International Human Rights Committee and others. The methods used are among the most brutal in the world. Many prisoners are kept in dark, humid cells measuring three feet by four feet for months at a time; the fingernails and toenails of some are extracted to get confessions; difficult male prisoners have their penises tied up and are filled with water until they burst; and occasionally prisoners have been thrown into swimming pools while guards with sticks stood around to stop them climbing out. Inevitably, they drowned and the security forces were able to claim that they died of natural causes.

Even women are imprisoned, and one of them, Alia Makki, wrote a haunting book about her experiences in solitary con-finement and how she lived with a huge population of ants, cockroaches and bugs and eventually lost track of day and night. When she was finally released to her father after six months of unexplained detention and torture, the security officer in charge demanded that her father confirm that she was in good physical condition despite the wounds, bruises and other visible signs of torture. Her father obeyed, then wept uncontrollably.

Years ago, before I was banned from visiting Saudi Arabia, I was amazed at the number of educated and religious people who had served time for political crimes. But not only was it impossible most of the time to determine what their crimes were; I also became aware that nobody was immune and that the only thing standing between me and revealing the names of higher-ups, including Army officers, who suffered imprisonment was fear of reprisal against them. However, a good example of this is found in Linda Blandford's The Oil Sheikhs. She recorded a disturbing interview with Abdel Aziz Muammer, former Saudi Ambassador to Switzerland, brother of the executed Colonel Saud Al Muammer and an acquaintance of mine. Blandford described how confinement to a dark cell led to loss of his eyesight and even now he is not totally in control of his faculties. When she asked him why he was kept in solitary confinement for 12 years, his simple answer was that he had no idea. I remember this Muammer as an extremely intelligent, civilized man and know that his family did not know whether he was dead or alive for seven years. His wife had to go through the indignity of kissing King Faisal's feet and begging for mercy to find out where they were holding the descendant of one of Saudi Arabia's leading families, a tribe who were the equals of the Al Sauds and who once ruled Nejed. This is not a strange or isolated example, but because of strict Saudi censorship and fear, there is no way of knowing the number of political prisoners in the country, or their fate.

Perhaps it is enough to say that even now the laws governing political arrest are considered a state secret and have never been published, while the number of CAVES offices has grown to 200 and there are 150 detention centres. Meanwhile, all published and spoken promises of reform are deflected or never applied, above all the ones that require legal representation and protect people against arbitrary arrest and torture. Predictably, no outside group has ever been allowed to investigate reports of torture on the spot and second-hand reports, including some thoroughly documented ones by officers of the US State Department, are dismissed by the Saudi authorities as propaganda.

Perhaps it is because in the end money does not make people happy, but there is certainly little to smile about in the place, as Muhammad Ali observed. Bearing in mind the recorded number of attempts to overthrow the Government by members of the new class and others, empirical judgement can only conclude that money is indeed not enough. Now, after 40 years of oil wealth, the new class have come to take their financial comforts for granted and fewer of them view their position as a gift from the House of Saud. This means that their loyalty to the royal family is weaker than ever before and suggests a consequent increase in the prospects for turmoil. This is particularly evident when we consider the growth in the numbers of this class, their ability to organize things better than in the past and the increased pressures on them in the wake of the Gulf War. For example, despite all G6vernment attempts to destroy them, political parties expressing the unhappiness of the new class are growing stronger. The Free Nejed, Labour Socialist Party, Arab Nationalist Party, Democratic Saudi Party and many smaller organizations are flourishing and their calls for an end to oppression are growing more strident by the day.

As pointed out above, the religious leaders representing most of the people are being assailed and are unhappy, and though with some exceptions they have so far been excluded from harsh retribution, this has come to include the Wahhabi-run and lavishly sponsored Council of Ulemas. Fanatics like Sheikh bin Jibreen aside, the recent rift between the Wahhabi religious leaders and the Government represents one of the major contradictions of the country, because the Government purports to depend on them for support, rules in the name of Islam and insists on using the Koran as a constitution. Essentially, this contradiction is created by another one: the way the royal family have used Islam as a cover without adhering to its tenets - a posture more convincing to ignorant people outside Saudi Arabia who mistakenly blame Islam for much of what takes place there.

No religious leader, however removed from worldly affairs, is isolated enough not to know that the House of Saud indulges in the forbidden activities of drinking, gambling and womanizing. These activities are condemned by all Muslim sects, who further-more reject the concept of monarchy and the principle of royal succession. The Prophet was quite outspoken against both and so were the caliphs who followed him. According to Islam, the governor is elected by the people through a bay~a (the nearest English word to describe this democratic concept is fealty) and he is elected to administer justice, to institute laws in accordance with religion, to dispense knowledge and to rule to the best of his ability. Above all, Islam is very clear about the unacceptability of the use of force against people and torture is forbidden by very specific laws.

Until recently the Wahhabi-run Council of Ulemas overlooked the misdeeds of the members of the House of Saud because they were their co-religionists and sponsors and criticizing them could have led to the Wahhabis' overthrow and the end of their dominance. But in recent times, this barrier to criticism by the highest official religious authorities of the land has disappeared. Now young Wahhabi clerics are so adamant in their opposition to the personal ways of the House of Saud and the lavish display of wealth by the very rich and powerful that they have forced their conservative elders into a turnaround. This new position, which on one recent occasion expressed itself in a refusal by the Council of Ulemas to condemn a petition critical of King Fahd, has led to the royal dismissal of seven members of the Council, an unprecedented and extremely dangerous step. In addition, the young ulemas, like the Ikhwan of the 192 Os, question the Government's close relationship with the heretic West and have forced a degree of change over this matter. The elders' response cum acceptance of the attitudes of the young religious rebels was made possible because the Wahhabi old guard fear a split in their ranks and the growing strength of the new class. They also fear the adoption of Western ways which would go with their assumption of a posture which made them a counterweight to the royal family.

The Wahhabi ulemas are also very worried that the ways of the House of Saud are forcing practising Muslims to cluster around other religious groups, and in December 1991 this fear took the form of an attack on new, popular Islamic fundamentalist groups. Furthermore, in an overall response to the pressures on them to either act or lose credibility in 1991 Sheikh Abdel Aziz bin Baz, the Wahhabi head of the highest religious council of the land, issued an appeal for reform addressed to the King. This, carrying the signature of 500 religious sheikhs, deplored the state of corruption in the country and lack of freedom, and demanded political reforms which included an independent, elected Consultative Council empowered to help legislate against and remedy the present excesses. Coming as it did from a body which has so far supported the House of Saud, the appeal was a stunning blow to King Fahd, particularly the part which explicitly compared his ways with those of his deposed brother, King Saud.

But if the moderate Wahhabi-controlled Council of Ulemas goes this far, and its appeal's words are harsh but do not go beyond advocating reform from within, then non-Wahhabi religious leaders and their followers go much further. The Shias' opposition to the regime is total - and, judged by the treatment they receive, unsurprising. There are also the banned but growing and effective religious parties of Hezbollah, the new Ikhwan, the Islamic Revolutionary Party, the Muslim Brotherhood and others, who all demand a reversion to Islam which precludes the continuance of the House of Saud. Though these groups operate mostly in secret, they are growing more vocal by the day and their protests are coming close to becoming a popular outcry.

The people's unhappiness is expressing itself in many small daily acts. One of the anti-Saud audio cassettes distributed by members of one of these groups is so popular that the Government offered a reward of $500,000 for any information about its author and another equally popular cassette is called SUPERGUN, a reference to the gigantic weapon Saddam Hussein threatened to use against the country. On this effective resurgence of religious opposition, the Syrian journalist and one-time adviser to King Faisal, Nihad Al Ghadiri, provides an astute comment: 'Islamic fundamentalism differs from Christian or Jewish fundamentalism; it is not the case of a sect taking a different approach, it is a case of all the Muslim sects wanting to revert to the word of the Koran.' This is why the House of Saud is finding it impossible to completely suppress these parties.

The distribution of audio cassettes, pamphlets, books, copies of anti-royal petitions and other articles promoting a cleansing Islamic revolution has become an everyday occurrence; they compete for top position on the bestseller list and the audiences for these revolutionary tools are growing in numbers. Also, courageous open dissent has occurred in some mosques where calls for a change of government have been made during Friday prayers despite the certain arrest of the speakers, and on 30 January 1992 the Government acted to stop a planned Muslim fundamentalist demonstration. These serious acts signalling the emergence of an overt challenge to the regime have led King Fahd and some of his nephews to use their press conferences to attack the fundamentalists.

A convergence of dissidence, though it was unthinkable until a few months ago, now appears likely. A July 1992 petition to King Fahd by 108 clerics, professors, merchants and others - an angry petition long enough and detailed enough to ask him to stop building palaces - has just surfaced and others are likely to follow. The severe social tensions are exacerbated by questions as to how the country's 1982 $140-billion surplus has disappeared and why the House of Saud persists in befriending a West which is against the Muslims in Bosnia and Palestine. Above all, the Government's unwillingness or inability to deal with the problems of what the Lebanese writer Georges Corm describes as 'a society sick with oil' is driving more and more people into opposition.