CHAPTER 3

The Trivialization of Everything

With the death of Ibn Saud, even the unrepentant Philby, who spoke of 'the passing of a brilliant chapter in the history of the Arabs', had doubts about the future. His fears were aroused because of the rapid changes in the internal development of the country and its growing importance as a regional and world power which were brought about by oil money. By 1955 Saudi Arabia's income had reached $2 million a day, compared with $500,000 a year in 1935, an increase of 140,000 per cent. There was enough money for some of itto filter through to the people and improve their education and start a construction boom. Equally importantly, the predictions of Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and many American oilmen were coming true: the dependence of America and the West as a whole on Saudi Arabia as the world's leading oil reservoir was becoming a palpable reality.

But, although its income exceeded the needs of the royal family, and money was finding its way into development projects and a consumer economy was emerging, Saudi Arabia had not really become a country. Ibn Saud's ways and his highly personal rule had eliminated the potential for social development and the evolution of a sensible system of government. In the 1950s the immense oil surplus became the motor behind the changes in the lifestyle of the people and the physical appearance of the country, which was beginning to resemble a vast construction site. But the House of Saud, though prepared to allow people to eat better, was unwilling to permit them to think better, and there were no parallel moves towards greater social cohesion and a working governmental system.

Most writers who have chronicled the effects of the oil wealth and have suggested that there was a government which merited analysis are guilty of serious exaggeration. Though superficially different from the days of Ibn Saud and considerably wealthier, Saudi Arabia remains substantially the same to this day. It is still the world's leading expression of feudal absolutism.

It is easy to trace the way this feudal system has worked so far through the various kings who followed Ibn Saud. He was succeeded by his eldest living son, Saud, who was pronounced king by an ad hoc family council (whoever felt strongly enough about the problem of succession joined the committee). To give this unorganized family affair the semblance of legitimacy, the perfunctory support of the religious leaders (who all belonged to the minority Wahhabis) was sought and obtained. But in reality the opinions of the religious people counted for little. Until their recent politicization, the Wahhabi religious ulemas were used for added support but ignored when their opinions contradicted the will of the family.

Saud ruled from 1953 until he was replaced by his younger brother Faisal in 1964. Nobody has anything nice to say about Saud, not even his own family, despite their legendary tolerance of familial misdeeds. Outsiders' judgments aside, according to the official history of Saudi Arabia, Saud is a non-person and his 11 years as king are treated as if they never were. In government offices the pictures of the various kings of the realm are hung for everybody to see but Saud's is conspicuously absent and until recently no street, building or institution was named after him.

What prompted Saud's dethronement and his relegation to oblivion reveals a lot about the family's inherent fears. Ostensibly it was the result of his personal, financial and moral corruption, nepotism and ignorance of statecraft. He squandered tens of millions of dollars on foolishnesses such as the use of 25,000 light bulbs in the garden of his palace, which he called 'Little Paradise'. He married more times than his father, appointed his ignorant children to ministerial posts, including the important portfolios of defence and the interior, and could not even run a diwan properly because he was always at a loss for words. He failed to impose himself on the country the way his father had, and his people, the Arabs, Muslims and the West never took him seriously.

All this was true, but Ibn Saud too had been guilty on all these counts, with the exception of running the diwan. Ibn Saud's crimi-nal nepotism included naming the incompetent Saud his crown prince. What actually happened was that Saud's deplorable lack of finesse and his simplicity were revealed at a time when Nasser of Egypt was popular with the Saudi people and something more imaginative to counter the Nasser challenge was required. Saud never learned the present official Saudi method of pretending to do something while standing still. These shortcomings, all of which occurred when most Saudi people were enamoured of Nasser's Arab unity schemes, exposed the vulnerability of the family and its absolute rule and generated among its ranks a fear of being toppled.

Saud was much more lenient in dealing with the Saudi people than his father had been; he certainly showed no inclination towards eliminating local political enemies. This led to the emer-gence of political groups such as Young Nejed, the Peninsula Liberation Front and even a small communist party. He could not find it in himself to pressure merchants and others into subsidizing his profligate ways, even when he needed to do it to avoid exposure to debts. In the Arab arena, he was inconsistent: he switched sides between conservatives and progressives too many times and botched a Saudi-sponsored attempt to assassinate Nasser. In the wider Muslim world, he was not inclined to foment trouble, divide the Muslim world and impose the will of his country on others, even if they would have listened to him.

Towards the West, Saud cultivated an ambivalent policy which contained the seeds of independent thought and along with his occasional support for Nasser this threatened the traditional friendships with Britain and America, the backbone of the regime. Even when matters of policy and finance were under control, his personal behaviour was utterly deplorable (for example, the palace used 4000 eggs, 200 chickens and 30 lambs daily) and the family saw the CIA's willingness to procure boys for him as a sign of weak-ness because it left him open to blackmail. (I find it utterly appalling that Miles Copeland and other CIA agents knew about this and wrote about it with the minimum amount of moral misgiving.)

That Saud was rotten is beyond question, but he was an inher-ently simple, if not stupid, man and what mattered to his family, who deposed him, was not the principle of his rottenness, most of which they shared, but how unintelligently merciful, corrupt and ineffective he was. Eventually, the family became genuinely alarmed when ordinary people expressed admiration for Nasser and began thinking about politics. They acted because such permissiveness and Saud's refusal to wield the sword undermined the foundations of the Saudi state.

Essentially what the elimination of Saud meant was that a family will to protect and preserve the continuance of the House of Saud could emerge to replace the individual will of an ineffective king.

But even to this day, much like everything else in the country, this family will does not manifest itself in an organized fashion. There are no specific family groups to take care of these things, but there are coalitions which come into existence to deal with specific crises. The group which forced Saud to step down had no name; it was merely a collection of princes, 72 out of 1500 at that time, whose success or failure depended on the force of personality of the participants. In this case, they were led by Muhammad 'Twin-Evil', one of the elder brothers about whom we will hear more later; an alcoholic whose violent way earned him his uncomplimentary nickname and a real Bedouin with an instinctive attachment to absolutism. The whole episode of Saud's role could be reduced to one brief proposition: determined to continue its absolute rule, the House of Saud acted to guarantee that future kings would behave in the best way to retain such power.

Saud was replaced by Faisal, the second eldest brother and until 1964 the country's perennial Foreign Minister. Faisal was seen as more capable of continuing the ways of Ibn Saud and the family while giving them an aura of respectability. In the words of the Saudi historian Anwar Abdallah: 'He eliminated obvious corruption and continued the subtle variety.' His most memorable pronouncement on the essence of his rule was: 'What does man aspire to? He wants good. It is there in the Islamic Sharia. He wants justice. It is there in the Sharia. He wants security. It is also there. Man wants freedom. It is there. He wants propagation of science. It is there. Everything is there, inscribed in the Islamic Sharia.

Goodness, justice, security, freedom and the propagation of science were nowhere in Saudi Arabia, but superimposing the family's view on the ways of Islam and perverting a most just religion was a better way of expressing state policy than Ibn Saud's pronouncement regarding the use of the sword. (Faisal's statement recalls Hitler's exploitation of the concept of the Volk.) This type of disguise was what Faisal was good at. He was a subtle manipulator who was extremely adept at concealing his misdeeds, regardless of their enormity and immorality, behind a veil of phoney correctness. His ability to create this cover was enhanced by a relative worldliness gained during his years as Foreign Minister. Unlike his brothers of similar age, he had travelled extensively and mastered the art of compromise, a skill which allowed him to appear capable in the eyes of the world.

Faisal ruled for 11 years, until he was assassinated by an irate nephew for non-political reasons in 1975. Despite the strictly familial reasons behind the murder, the simple facts that the murderer had acted to avenge a brother whom Faisal had ordered killed for objecting to 'non-Muslim ways' and that he himself was later beheaded publicly are a confirmation, if one was needed, that the ways of the House of Saud were anchored in an ancient past.

During his lifetime, Faisal made much of four deliberate acts. The first of these was his marriage for most of his life to one woman, Iffat, his fourth and last wife and a distant cousin who had been educated in Turkey. In fact, when it came to indulging his fancy, Faisal was hardly the puritan he pretended to be. Robert Lacey, among other historians of the House of Saud, speaks of Faisal leading 'a wild youth' and his abstinence from the family sport of marrying dozens of women was the result of Iffat's strength of character rather than his disapproval of the tradition. Though apologists for the House of Saud would have us accept that marrying a mere four times is a considerable virtue, little is said about why Faisal did nothing to contain or discourage the overindulgence of his brothers and relatives, for which the state paid. (A Saudi writer estimates that Ibn Saud's 42 sons married 1400 women - as good an estimate as any.)

The second source of Faisal's self-proclaimed reputation as a principled reformer was his freeing of the slaves in 1962, when he held power prior to his eventual accession to the throne. Once again there is less to this than meets the eye. In 1932, as his country's Foreign Minister, Faisal conducted a major diplomatic altercation with Britain and demanded the recall of the British Ambassador, Sir Andrew Ryan, because the latter helped free one of his father's slaves in accordance with the terms of the 1927 treaty between the two countries. It was Faisal who renegotiated the treaty in 1936 and produced one in which the only change was the elimination of a clause obligating Saudi Arabia to abolish slavery. For years after that, most of the world, a number of UN committees and unforgettably Nasser, were making noises against the institution of slavery in the country to the extent of threatening concrete anti-Saudi action. The UN condemned it, President Kennedy pointedly brought it up when he met Faisal and Egyptian radio beamed special broadcasts to Saudi Arabia to attack the practice. These messages were well received by most of the Saudis, whose thinking was already ahead of that of their rulers. As a result, after a long period of denying the existence of slavery in his country, Faisal acted under pressure, particularly from Kennedy. Even when the slaves were finally freed, most of the 4000 people who qualified remained where they were, totally unable to lead normal independent lives.

The slave-freeing act ordered by Faisal prohibited the open trade in slaves. But it did nothing about the new enslavement of foreign workers and the purchase of wives, something which his family practised and which still flourishes - members of the House of Saud have special scouts who do nothing else. Faisal cleverly turned this overdue act into a triumph and paid millions of dollars to Lebanese journalists and others to sing his praises. Yet they were under orders to say not a word about his own record or about how his father's kingdom had failed to sign any international conventions outlawing slavery and had declined to sign the United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights because it was seen as too liberal.

The third celebrated act attributed to Faisal concerned his supposed introduction of controls on the royal purse. If his other acts were exaggerations, then this one was no more than a blatant propaganda lie. What Faisal did was to find other ways of compensating his family and friends in callously corrupt but more subtle ways. The biggest new method did not completely replace the old one of outright treasury payments, but it perpetuated and expanded the ways of the family while acting to ease direct pressure on the treasury - and it was more difficult to trace.

Until Faisal dealt with it, the question of the ownership of public land, estimated at between 92 and 95 per cent of the country, had never been decided. True, it was assumed that like the land where the oil is, it belonged to the Government and hence to the House of Saud, but nothing had been done with it except the occasional building of a palace or establishment of a farm. Faisal cleverly decided to use public land to compensate his family and friends without 'abusing' the treasury. Ever committed to appearing magnanimous, he stopped short of expropriating all of it and settled for making 80 per cent of Saudi Arabia 'Aradi Emeria', land which belongs to the emirs or the rulers. Blatantly, like all things in the country, the confiscated land was arrogantly named after members of the family, Faisaliah, after Faisal, Khalidia, after Khalid, and Sultania, after Sultan. He used what remained to placate the people.

With oil income increasing at a rate faster than Saudi Arabia could absorb and the family well taken care of, business was booming and the country suffered from a huge dose of inflation which affected the price of land more than most things. Faisal began giving away huge parcels of land to those around him. The chief beneficiary was his wife Iffat, who was given vast tracts of land around the city ofjeddah worth an estimated $2 billion (almost $5 billion today). The only Saudi non-royal to achieve the status of a household name, the legendary Oil Minister Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani, admitted to his biographer, Jeffrey Robinson, that he owns over $300 million worth of Faisal-given land. Bedouins were settling and people were building large houses and when a prince had his eye on a specific piece of development land, all he had to do was to liaise with the appropriate authority, the municipality or the province governor, and arrangements would be made for him to obtain ownership. Often this happened even when the land had an owner. It was taken away as a Royal Claim for Public Purposes, then handed to His Highness. While it is impossible to determine it with any accuracy, my attempts to assess the value of land given away by Faisal produce a figure between $35 billion and $50 billion. Naturally, the kings who have followed him have perpetuated this system and most of the give-away land has gone to members of the family.

Of course, some members of the family, including former King Saud, still needed treasury cash. Saud alone spent $10 million in one month while in exile in Athens. Faisal accommodated Saud. Not only that, but Faisal, more than anybody else, encouraged members of his family to go into business to capitalize on the huge opportunities the oil wealth was creating. This tradition led directly to what exists now. According to Who's Who in Saudi Arabia and other sources, members of the House of Saud and their relatives and in-laws are chairmen of 520 Saudi corporations. In many cases these titles mean simply that they have lent their names to corporations financed and run by the Government or by others who use the royal names and the influence which goes with them to win Government contracts. Beyond the massive number of chairmen, many princes of the House of Saud are 'silent partners' in corporations. They promote the business of companies and individuals without attribution an& receive huge sums of money in return. Doing serious business in Saudi Arabia without a royal partner is a rare thing indeed.

The fourth of Faisal's celebrated acts was to appear as a champion of women's education and it is true that he ordered the opening of the first girls' school in the country. However, in view of the fact that it was never followed by any concrete efforts to improve the lot of women, there is good reason to suspect that it was instigated by his wife, Iffat, to educate members of their family. It was Faisal himself who exposed the limits of his so-called liberation of women. Many years after the girls' school was opened he responded to a question about when he was going to grant women rights by saying: 'When we grant them to men. This meant never, and he never made any moves towards either. In fact, despite the many promises of political reform (see The Brutal Friendship) he had made while trying to oust Saud, his first political move on assuming total power was to dismiss the reforming cabinet of promising young men, average age 39, his brother had appointed to attract popular support.

By the time Faisal died, members of the royal family occupied half of the cabinet posts, all of the province governorships and 11 deputy ministerships. Several of them were generals in the Army and Air Force while still in their twenties and thirties and 32 others held key posts such as Director of Intelligence, or were ambassadors or chiefs of protocol. Faisal used members of the family to control all public and private aspects of the country, including his personal creation, the dreaded internal security apparatus, which he entrusted to his brother-in-law, Kamal Adham. Says Saudi opposition member Abdel Ameer Mousa: 'The things we most remember him for are the number of people he imprisoned and the initiation of torture. In this regard, he was the worst one of them all.'

In the 1960s Faisal used his questionable achievements to try to give Saudi Arabia a new image and this affected its relations with the Arabs, the Muslims and the West. The country's wealth allowed him to stand up to the external threats of Nasser and the progressive Arab forces and eventually to try to wrest the leadership of the Arab world from their hands. He supported an antiquated monarchy in the Yemen with funds and arms and ensnared Nasser in its civil war, which sapped the energies and financial strength of the Egyptian President's government and undermined his popular attempt to unify the Arabs. He continued the tradition of supporting backward Arab regimes without overtly demanding obedience - a simple case of bribing them into adhering to Saudi ways. He also systematized Saudi Arabian attempts to pervert the Arab press by buying the loyalty of newspapers and journalists throughout the Arab world - and many journalistic establishments had been free and effective until then. (See The Last Line of Defence.)

Above all, because the Muslims were less of a threat to the House of Saud than the awakening Arabs and Saudis, and also because control of Islam's holy shrines gave it a Muslim edge, Faisal pushed his country towards an Islamic identity at the expense of its Arabness. He encouraged conservative Muslim movements everywhere because they balanced the Arab threat against him and conservative Islam held governments back. Examples of this policy included supporting the Pakistani army and its Chief of Staff General Zia Al Huq against their country's legitimately elected Prime Minister, Ah Bhutto, which led to the latter's overthrow and execution. Bhutto was his own man, very much concerned with modernizing Pakistan, and what Faisal needed was a tributary country. In addition, as far back as 1959, when Faisal was Prime Minister, the Egyptian magazine Al Musawar had published a detailed report of how a CIA group under the guidance of one James Russell Barracks cooperated with Saudi Arabia to create Muslim political groups within the country as a counterweight to Nasser and pan-Arabism.

As would be expected, Faisal's change of direction extended to his country's relations with the West. He used his stand against Nasser and progressive Arab movements to get more Western support and to create a Saudi-led, Islam-based conservative camp. He blunted early Arab pressure on him to use his oil wealth against the West's support of Israel by espousing an incredibly unsound policy aimed at pleasing both sides. He claimed that communism and Zionism were evil and were one and the same, and this led to Arab acceptance of his condemnation of Zionism and Western support for his attack on communism.

In 1973, fearing Arab pressure and a nationalist uprising in support of Egypt after it attacked Israel and started the October War, Faisal briefly shut off oil supplies - seemingly an Arab move at the expense of the West. This very complicated move, which will be examined later, enhanced Faisal's Arab standing, but he rescinded the decision as soon as possible and hurried to mend fences with the West. In fact, despite this tactical shut-off of oil, he saw his fate and that of his country irrevocably linked to America. In 1975 he confirmed this to Time correspondent Wilton Wynn, saying, 'US relations are a pillar of Saudi policy.'

Faisal carried this approach forward and initiated the destructive and far-reaching policy of supporting American foreign policy with Saudi funds. The first demonstration of this common purpose was in the Horn of Africa, where conservative forces were supported at the expense of progressive ones. Later his brothers extended this policy to Afghanistan, where backward warlords were pres-ented to the world as freedom fighters, and other countries and situations followed. (See Brotherhood is Selective and The Brutal Friendship.)

That Faisal was clever is beyond doubt, and clever men in the service of bad causes are more dangerous than stupid ones in the same role. According to dozens of Saudis interviewed for this book, Faisal's unmerciful ways eliminated all internal opposition. The liberal political movements in the Arab world and the Arab nationalist movement were broken and have never recovered. The West accepted Saudi Arabia as its deputy in the Arab world. Still Faisal never wavered from the unsound beliefs that his family could do anything so long as it was done cleverly, that Wahhabism and its strict ways were the path to salvation and, above all, that the average Saudi was not entitled to enjoy the fruits of the oil wealth. (In 1962 the uneven distribution of wealth left the average Saudi undernourished: the calorific intake was 83 per cent of what was needed to survive, compared with 100 per cent in Lebanon and 92 per cent in Jordan.) Faisal was a champion of absolutism who ensured that Saudi Arabia belonged to the House of Saud lock, stock and barrel. This is why his successful efforts to improve the country's image were not matched by benefits for the average Saudi and why many Saudis still cringe at the mention of his name.

Khalid, the man who became king after Faisal, did not even want the job.. He had to accept it because his refusal would have led to a widening of the emerging divisions within the royal family and a consequent reversion to the tradition of blood feuds. Although he was much more interested in falconry than kingship, Khalid's years on the throne (1975-82) were marked by some of the most far-reaching developments in the history of the country.

The most serious development was the emergence of a strong family of full and devoted brothers within the larger Saud family. The Sudeiri seven, or Al Fahd as they are also called, are the seven sons of Hassa Al Sudeiri, the woman Ibn Saud married, divorced, allowed to marry his brother and then married again. Three of them, Fahd, Sultan and Nayef, occupied ministerial positions for some time and the rest were governors and deputy ministers. Through sheer wile and their connection to the powerful Sudeiri tribe, Fahd became Khalid's crown prince, while Sultan continued as Minister of Defence and Nayef as Minister of the Interior, and Salman assumed the important governership of Riyadh.

The Sudeiri seven, with Fahd in the lead, became the power behind the throne and proceeded to take steps to eliminate or restrict the power of other groups within the family. In the process they undermined the seniority system (by prevailing on older brothers to forgo their slots) and the family council, the two authorities in the succession process. The sons of their brother, the late King Saud, were denied jobs in the Government and obstacles were placed in their way to prevent them attaining any positions of importance. The sons of King Faisal were allowed to occupy official positions, even that of Foreign Minister, but the Sudeiris saw to it that they were denied any real power. They were so successful that even the Foreign Minister, Prince Saud bin Faisal, was reported to have complained to King Hussein of Jordan that he was no more than an office boy. Of course, the sons of Fahd, Sultan and the rest of the Sudeiris became merchants, ambassadors, governors and generals. In total, the Sudeiris and their sons held 63 key government positions.

Eventually, the Sudeiri coup within the family, for that is what it was, ran into unexpected obstacles which thwarted a complete take-over. The line of succession which appointed Fahd Crown Prince to Khalid stipulated who should follow him, and Prince Abdallah and Muhammad Twin-Evil stood in their way and would not let them push the rest of the family too far and Abdallah was made next in line to the throne. Muhammad wanted Abdallah, and his bloodthirsty ways appealed to many of the tribes, with the~result that the Sudeiris were always fearful that he might raise the rest of the family and the tribes against them.

The second major development affecting Khalid's years was a regional event, the accession to power of a Muslim fundamentalist movement in neighbouring Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini was an immediate problem. Because of Faisal's Muslim policies, the basis of Khomeini's appeal could not be denied and it reached beyond his Shia co-religionists, who represented 15 per cent of the Saudi population. Other Muslim groups were encouraged by his movement and were ready to emulate him. In response, Khalid, with total family backing, imprisoned hundreds of Shias and Muslim fundamentalists and the House of Saud was in a state of panic.

Unable to confront Iran directly, but determined to undermine the huge threat to its security, Saudi Arabia opted for an indirect assault on the Muslim revolution in that country. Saudi Arabia encouraged Iraq to start the Iran-Iraq War. The Saudi support, for this move, which is discussed later, was recorded in the Arabic magazines Al Tadamun and Al Dastour and many Western newspapers and the country's controlled press admitted this without going into details. In fact, Saudi Arabia bankrolled Saddam Hussein of Iraq to the tune of a staggering $30 billion. The determination of the House of Saud to follow a divide-and-rule policy, in this case of Arab against Muslim, reached unprecedented levels.

The third development during Khalid's years was summed up by a former charge' at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia, Marshall Wylie: 'We need their oil and they need our protection.' America's growing dependence on Saudi oil made it set aside all other considerations, including Jimmy Carter's commitment to human rights. Simultaneously, internal, Arab and Islamic funda-mentalist pressures started gathering strength and the country's inherent inability to fend for itself forced the House of Saud to seek the military protection of America more than ever.

Despite the consistency of the House of Saud and its unchanging ways, an important shift in the way its members reveal themselves has taken place under King Fahd and it is full of portents for the future.

The undoubted success of the House of Saud against all internal attempts to eliminate it or force it to change; the defeat of Arab and Muslim challenges and the neutralization of their sources; and the ever-increasing dependence of the West on Saudi oil and the so far consequent extension of uncritical support have merged to create an arrogant House of Saud whose members feel secure in their ways. This false security, based as it is on obliviousness to their surroundings, has led to a bad situation becoming totally absurd. Under Fahd, the House of Saud, unafraid and without pretence, has come into the open. This move has trivialized everything, even corruption.

Now King Fahd can play Saud without provoking the family's displeasure. He feels no need to go through Faisal's elaborate cover-ups. His coercion of Arab and Muslim countries through the use of money is crude and his dependence on the West is seldom offset or balanced by real or cosmetic internal or regional moves. As it is, the man stands for nothing or everything. Perhaps a new word has to be coined especially for him; nothing which exists describes him, though people have tried. To former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 'He has nothing to say for himself.' But Nihad Al Ghadiri, a Syrian journalist who watched him very closely for years, endows Thatcher's observation with appropriate angry Arab rhetoric: 'He's an empty hulk, a mountain of nothingness. Even his evil deeds don't reflect him; he's achieved the impossible, people don't take what he and his family do seriously. Nobody talks about corruption in Saudi Arabia any more; they take it for granted.'

The judgements of Thatcher and Ghadiri say a lot, but they are not enough. The man is still King of Saudi Arabia, the sole maker of the policies of an extremely important country. Even if Fahd is undoing Saudi Arabia, even if he turns out to be its last king, he deserves greater analysis than is contained in Thatcher's and Ghadiri's appealing generalities. But to me and many others the man is a mystery, almost beyond analysis. Says the editor of a major Saudi-sponsored Arabic newspaper in London: 'Before he came to the throne I was one of his leading supporters. Now I don't know what to say about him - he is the biggest single disappointment in the history of the country.' This is very close to my opinion, but the complexity or utter simplicity of the man makes a single opinion dangerous and, instead, I will take the reader from Fahd's beginnings to where he is now.

Fahd was not one of his father's favourites nor was there anything in his early years to single him out. He pursued his elementary education at the Princes' School in Riyadh, but did nothing else to broaden his horizons. Even his bedroom English remains elementary after years of wandering around Europe in pursuit of blondes. We do not know of a single personal interest he has which is not questionable - nothing like Saud's fascination with photography, Faisal's commitment to his children's education or Khalid's love of falconry.

The one thing common Saudis, princes of the household, oilmen, foreign diplomats and Western statesmen agree on is Fahd's laziness. By all accounts, every single book about the modern history of the kingdom alludes to his appalling laziness. He is supposed to have been a lazy student, an uninterested lover - even in his twenties - a lazy and careless minister of health, education and the interior. He used to leave his country for months at a time to play after he became crown prince and now, as king, cannot bring himself to read even the most important of documents. 'The documents, and some of them are very important, pile up on his desk for weeks, then he gets tired of looking at them, summons one of his aides and asks him to take them away without reading a single one. I have never seen anything like it, a total absence of interest in anything.' The speaker is a builder who worked on Fahd's $3-billion Jeddah palace, Al Salem, and had a chance to observe him at close range.

Beyond being lazy, there are four other unsavoury aspects to Fahd's character which are universally acknowledged. He is a womanizer, but interestingly - perhaps because he has no need to endow his womanizing with respectability - he does not have to marry to do it. I have seen pictures of him with European women who look beneath the dignity even of a Bedouin royal and he fre-quented Regine's discotheque in Paris, where he often picked up a socialite for the night. In addition to dozens of second-hand stories attesting to his playboy status, I have first-hand knowledge of one. Fahd was enamoured of the wife of a Lebanese acquaintance of mine, and conducted a five-year affair with her while favouring her husband with concessions and pieces of business. The couple are extremely wealthy now, and there are many similar stories.

There is little which is new in Fahd's womanizing and his sexual proclivities do not match those of his father or his brother Saud. On the other hand his gambling is unique and it takes up much of his time. Years ago, he used to spend a lot of time in Lebanon's casinos, and regularly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it was in Monte Carlo in 1962 that his gambling reputation was established. According to the German magazine Stern and other publications, he lost DM 20 million in one evening. He was recalled to Saudi Arabia by his brother Faisal and scolded, but he was not cured. Now, even at home, he is always in search of poker parties and they definitely take precedence over the piles of documents he refuses to peruse. One way for an ambitious Jeddah businessman to get ahead is to join Fahd's gambling circuit, and, according to a Lebanese witness to one gambling party, Fahd has his servants pay his losses in cash which is carried in Samsonite suitcases. Often what is left in the suitcases is given to the servants.

Fahd has a drinking problem, like many of his brothers, a number of whom have died of it. Time, the New York Times and many other publications have alluded to this habit or mentioned it outright. His drinking is a twofold curse. He has been known to go on binges for days at a time, and even after he became king his drinking led him to neglect other affairs and forget state functions. But he suffers from severe diabetes and therefore drinking is a potential killer. When, as at the time of writing, he stops drinking for long periods of time, Fahd loses a considerable amount of weight and his pictures show a more alert man, but all this does is make him a better poker player. He still does no work.

Fahd's fourth characteristic is his love of money and his ability to spend it. This was always so, and he squandered millions of dollars as a young man, but now, except by the Sultan of Brunei, his wealth may be unmatched in history. He has seven huge palaces in Saudi Arabia and a conservative estimate of their value would be $11 billion. In addition to the palaces in his own country, he has a 100-room palace in Marbella, another fitted out for eighteenth-century French kings outside Paris, a third with 1500 telephone lines in Geneva and a huge house near London which cost £30 million to refurbish. Of course there is his flying palace, a Boeing 747 fitted with a sauna, a lift, chandeliers and gold bathroom fixtures, and his equally lavish $50-million yacht. He uses gold-plated toothbrushes and his beach buggy is a Rolls-Royce Camargue converted for the purpose by the British firm of Wood and Barret. Fahd's personal wealth, excluding the palaces, is estimated at $28 billion.

There is little new in the things Fahd does except their scale. As long as the family's ways remain intact, this will continue as a natural extension of their control of the oil income of the country. The fact that Fahd no longer cares to hide his money-wasting inclinations means that he will invent new ways to fritter it.

Before addressing the important points of how Fahd's behaviour affects his family, his people and the internal affairs of his country (relations with the West, Arabs and Muslims are addressed separately), it is important to ask why someone so meagrely endowed became king. According to the seniority system, which is based exclusively on age, he was not in line to succeed; his brothers Nasir and Sa'ad are older. Equally interesting is why he was groomed under Faisal, the shrewd specialist in disguises. More than anything else, it is Fahd's assumption of the throne which exposes both the pro forma way in which the House of Saud governs and its Western-approved failure to modernize the country and give it the necessary lasting institutions which would guarantee its survival.

The major reason for Fahd's accession to the throne is the simple fact that the basis for succession has not been settled. The kingship was passed on to Saud by his father and Faisal was designated crown prince in accordance with the seniority system. But, under stress, seniority gave way to perceived talent. The move from Fai sal to Khalid bypassed Muhammad Twin-Evil, in recognition of his shortcomings and in favour of his younger full brother. Then from Khalid it went to the supposedly talented Fahd, bypassing Nasir and Sa'ad. In this case, while the House of Saud stresses the talent factor, what matters most in the improvised succession process is neither seniority nor talent but who is going to protect the unity of the family. Unlike the retiring Nasir and Sa'ad, Fahd represented a clan within a clan, the seven full brothers of Hassa Al Sudeiri, the Sudeiri seven, and there was no way to deny them the throne and keep the family united. They would have dissented and their numbers and relationship to the powerful Sudeiris would have led to trouble. They acted like a cohesive group, more of a family than the larger Ibn Saud one, and, amazingly, Nasir and Sa'ad had less to offer than Fahd and there was no block within the family capable of helping them.

As stated before, the Sudeiri seven's assumption of power was tantamount to a coup. But they worked to achieve it for a long time, and in the process, in an attempt to justify it, they endowed Fahd with a non-existent talent. For the most part, everybody, including journalists and outside powers, believed them, or, in the case of the latter, wanted to believe them. This is why Fahd is a disappointment to many thinking Saudis and, conversely, what prompts people like Time's Wilton Wynn to describe him as 'amiable and talented' Newsweek to call him a 'workaholic' and other journalists to resort to the epithets 'modern and liberal-thinking'. This is why the assumption of power by someone with such small talents and a huge public relations apparatus was based on a lie and why the result, Fahd, has produced confusion among those who believed that lie.

Having said enough about Fahd's regressive personal inclina-tions to document his shortcomings, it is necessary to show how his inadequacy has affected Saudi absolutism at this critical point in the country's history.

The strangeness and lack of character revealed by Fahd's personal ways goes beyond his love of money, women, gambling and alcohol to affect the way he runs the Government. Despite an attempt to deflect regional and internal Islamic fundamentalist pressure by adopting the title Guardian of Islam's Holy Shrines and shedding the Islamicly unacceptable title of king, he is addressed in more ways that denote supremacy than any man alive. 'Majesty' is still used and so is 'King', as well as the official 'Guardian of Islam's Holy Shrines'. But he is also Al Muathem, the one endowed with greatness; Al Mufada, the one who deserves sacrifice; Moulana, the holder of ultimate authority: Saydna, our master; Walye Al Ami, the decider of all things. There is no end to the improvisations and variations; nor does he discourage any of it.

But if the average Saudi and Government officials who address Fahd have to go through the indignity of using the most syco-phantic words the Arabic language can afford them, the demands of Fahd's ego impinge on even foreign heads of state. He is always late for appointments. In 1987 he was 45 minutes late for a Buckingham Palace lunch with the Queen and he has appeared late for meetings with President Bush, King Hussein and Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda. In a striking incident, his insulting constant lateness prompted Argentine President Menem to cut short his four-day visit to Saudi Arabia and leave after two days. And in 1992, visiting Kuwait after the Gulf War, he kept the Emir of that country waiting to receive him in the airport lobby for a whole hour while taking a nap in his plane. Fahd shows no signs of changing his ways and this self-importance has led to the issue of several ministerial directives as to what pictures of him to use in newspapers (he is extremely worried about a lazy eye and complains to the Minister of Information about uncomplimentary photographs).

Within Fahd's own country, this arrogance shows particularly in the way he dismisses those in high positions. Ahmad Zaki Yamani, the famous former Oil Minister; heard the news of his own dismissal on television (see Servants of the Crown). Muhammad Abdo Yamani, Minister of Information; Ghazi Al Ghoseibi, Minister of Health; Abdallay Al Jazairi, another Min-ister of Health; Ahmad Ah Abdel Wahab, the Head of the Royal Court; Abdel Munir Al Otteibi, the Chief of Staff; and Abdel Hadi Taher, the head of the Petromin - all were fired the same way. They heard the news second-hand or somebody told them to stay at home. Fahd's nephews, Prince General Khalid bin Sultan, Chief of the Saudi Air Force and Commander of the Arab Forces during the Gulf War; and Prince Fahd bin Salman, Deputy Emir of the Eastern Province, left their positions unexpectedly and are presumed fired. In early December 1992, in a politically more significant move, Fahd fired seven members of the extremely important Council of Ulemas because they would not issue a decree against people who criticized some Government actions and pleaded for political and social reforms to be enacted. Here it is important to state that Fahd's insensitive treatment of ministers, princes and religious leaders is original and that former Saudi kings fired people in much gentler Bedouin ways, just in case they needed their services again.

The reasons behind these undignified dismissals differ and range from matters of policy to unhappiness over the smallest of personal details.

In the case of the talented Ghoseibi, it was because he had written a poem complaining that the King was not seeing him, while others were fired because of equally trivial matters. Two other examples, one concerning what Fahd expects from his ministers and showing how little it would take to dismiss them and another of his general lack of care, are worth reporting.

One of the best known and more important Lebanese newspaper editors was visiting the Saudi Minister of Information, Ali Al Shaer, in his office at ten at night when Shaer's private telephone rang. This was his side of the conversation:

'Yes, sir.'

'I am extremely sorry, sir, I had no idea.

'I will stop it right away, sir, immediately.'

Al Shaer hung up, looked at the puzzled Lebanese editor and dialed another number.

'Listen, if I told you once, I've told a you a million times: His Majesty doesn't like Indian films,' he said.

'I don't care if you're half-way through the film - stop it and put on an American film instead,' he insisted after hearing what the other person had to say.

As the Minister of Information gratuitously explained, Fahd had called him to complain that one of the television channels was showing an Indian film in the slot reserved for Film of the Day. He did not like it and ordered Al Shaer to stop the broadcast right away. That was the minister's order to the head of the station. How the rest of the viewers in the country reacted to this interruption is not known, but conceivably Al Shaer saved his job by acting with alacrity.

On another occasion Fahd telephoned the people building his Al Salem Palace in Jeddah to tell them of his wish to visit the site. In accordance with Islamic custom, sheep are butchered on these occasions, and 1000 sheep were slaughtered in anticipation of his arrival. Fahd did not show up, but telephoned to say that he would come the following day. The sheep-slaughtering exercise was repeated and again there was no Fahd. He made a pr9mise to appear a third time, with the same result. Three thousand sheep had been slaughtered for nothing.

As usual, family behaviour follows the personal behaviour of the King. In this regard, Fahd is closer to Saud's ways than he is to those of Faisal and Khalid. Most of his sons are uneducated and many of them are in the Government. Muhammad is the governor of the oil-rich Eastern Province and he is heavily involved in commerce, a partner in the huge Al Bilad Trading Company, and besides involvement in selling oil on the open market (see Oil, OPEC and the Overseers), rumours persist that one of his companies managed a $10-billion contract to install a joint Bell of Canada and Philips of Holland telephone system throughout the kingdom. Faisal, Fahd's eldest son, is head of the Youth Welfare Organization, a job which carries the rank of minister. Many writers have accused another son of being a drug addict and rumours have it that he shot his male lover when the latter left him. Yet another son, Saud, is the deputy head of intelligence, a post growing in importance by the day. But it is the favourite son, Abdel Aziz, who represents another gross departure by Fahd.

When Abdel Aziz was young, a fortune-teller, almost certainly noticing the affection his father had for the child, advised Fahd to take him with him everywhere or else he, Fahd, would die. That is why when he came to Britain on a state visit in 1987, Fahd brought Abdel Aziz with him but, without knowing the background to his presence, the press treated the infirm 14-year-old gently. Towards the end of his stay in London, Fahd had meetings with members of the Arab press. This is part of what he voluntarily told journalists Haj Ahmad Al Houni and Ghassan Zakkaria during their royal audience: 'Young Azoouzi [Abdel Aziz's pet name] overspends. But Allah gave us wealth and we are glad to share it with our son. I've just transferred $300 million into his personal account to meet his needs.' Houni and Zakkaria looked at each other and had nothing to say. To this day, Zakkaria cannot tell the story without his eyes bulging. The same disastrous official trip saw him take Abdel Aziz wherever he went, even when the child was not invited. Fahd on his own was enough of a show; the step of the royal carriage had to be reinforced so as not to break under his weight, and he left on his personal Boeing 747, followed by another for his entourage and three 707s to carry the royal party's luggage, and four custom-made, armoured-plated cars.

Naturally enough Fahd's 'liberal' attitude towards his children extends to the rest of the family. Eleven years ago, heanng that some of the late King Saud's sons were in need, Fahd gave each $15 million to build 'a house'. But it does not stop at gifts and Fahd is quite explicit about his approval of the family's 'commercial' ways. The family's involvement in commerce is so total that they have begun to compete with each other. Because of their numbers and the depth of their involvement, a company sponsored by Prince X competes with another sponsored by Prince Y and perhaps Princes Z and W. Often, with little regard to competence or which companies are involved, the princes meet and decide how to split the pie, but occasionally commercial competition turns into a family feud. Either way, the money they get or share is so colossal that Ghassan Zakkaria insists that no fewer than 50 members of the family are billionaires. (See Big Deals and Dangerous Games).

Fahd's sanction of the use of commerce to make money goes beyond his family and extends to his in-laws and friends. He himself is a partner in several firms, though their Saudi registrations place libel constraints on naming them because the names of their owners could be easily changed and backdated. His favourite in-laws, the Ibrahims, are heavily involved in influence peddling and some of them manage the interests of young Prince Abdel Aziz, their nephew, who has been forced on some major Saudi trading houses as a partner. Even oil, the country's main resource, is not immune from royal dabbling and Fahd has used a Greek shipping friend to sell it on the open market. (See Oil, OPEC and the Overseers.)

The total laxity with which Fahd views his family's, friends' and officials' misdeeds and the freedom to misbehave afforded them by his attitudes came together in 1986 to produce one of the most bizarre episodes in the annals of corruption, a profound example of how a small story grew into a larger one which mirrored the condition of the whole country.

Beginning in August 1986, the Washington Post, Washington Star, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle, ABC News and many other media organs carried the story of one Sam Bamieh, a resident of San Mateo County, California, who was suing for conspiracy, slander, libel and invasion of privacy the then Chief of the Saudi Royal Court and his predecessor, Muhammad Suleiman and Muhammad Imran. Bamieh demanded $50 million in compensation.

Bamieh produced a tale of horror to support his claim. In documents filed with the District Court of Northern California, he alleged that the two associates of King Fahd had held him captive in Jeddah for a period of 133 days between March and August 1986. Bamieh, the head of a small Californian trading company, Industrial Development Corporation, claimed that he had gone to Saudi Arabia to collect money owed him from the commissions on contracts he transacted with the accused. There they had taken away his passport and held him hostage until he wired his solicitors in California, dropping all claims against them in return for a payment of $400,000. He further claimed that the King, whom he had met before, knew about his claim and detention.

The original allegations made so much press noise that the Saudi Embassy to the United States, Congressional Committees and the Secretary of State were soon involved. There was a question as to whether the Saudi Embassy would accept the service of writs on behalf of the accused and whether they had acted in an official capacity, on the instructions of Fahd. Congressional Committees wrote letters of protest and held hearings to discuss the denial of an American citizen's rights and this opened the door to the press, who proceeded to produce examples of other US citizens who had been denied their rights without recourse. There were cases of American mothers who had lost their children to Saudi fathers who had kidnapped them to Saudi Arabia and who were afforded protection by the Saudi Government, which ignored the American mothers' rights. There were also cases of executives who had been cheated out of money by important Saudis and others who had been imprisoned without trial.

At first the Saudi Government denied the original claim of detention and attributed the whole story to Bamieh's desire for publicity and his greed. Later, when he persisted, he began receiving threatening telephone calls. When he refused to be frightened into dropping the suit, the Saudis denied all official involvement and described it as a totally personal matter which should be resolved as such. It should be settled in Saudi Arabia in accordance with Saudi law, they insisted.

At this point, Bamieh broadened his attack. He claimed that some of the money owed him was paid to the defendants by Fahd's son Muhammad for business done with Bechtel Corporation, that Adnan Khashoggi, whom he described as a friend of the King, was another person who paid money to the defendants, and then he involved John Latsis, the King's Greek friend and renowned oil merchant. The rest of Bamieh's long list of the people involved read like a who's who in Saudi Arabia and included the former head of intelligence, Kamal Adham of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) fame, Fahd's brother-in-law Abdel Aziz Ibrahim and 44 others.

Though the case was moving through the courts, the slowness of the proceedings gave an angry Bamieh ample time to wage a thorough anti-Saudi campaign. In a change of direction aimed at exposing the rottenness of the whole country, Bamieh produced documents and details to support allegations that Saudi Arabia was funding the Nicaraguan Contras and the anti-communist forces in Angola. Soon this list was expanded and Bamieh provided information on how the Saudis were behind anti-communist movements in Afghanistan, Somalia and the Sudan.

Bamieh's relentless anti-Saudi attacks and his ability to afford a complicated legal suit, the interest the press and Congress took in the case and the obvious though muted US Government displeasure over the whole thing, eventually led to an out-of-court settlement which satisfied Bamieh. But nothing could be done to repair the publicity damage to Saudi Arabia generated by the case.

The Bamieh case showed that, in Saudi Arabia, the people who 'belong', the royal family and their friends, operate along sinister lines. The various branches of the system cooperate with each other to make money in complicated ways which outsiders cannot decipher and those involved band together for protection. The fact that two of the King's cronies imprisoned a senior American businessman for such a long time shows how far they have gone in disregarding the ways of others. Even after the case started, the Saudi Government was willing to try to protect two of its own because they were well-placed members of the team. The involve-ment of the King's son in commission-bearing business deals was confirmed. Saudi-American cooperation over Saudi financing of anti-communist activity all over the world was documented. And Bamieh produced evidence of how arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi dealt with the high and mighty of the Republican party and administration - for example, White House Chief of Staff Robert McFarland of Iran-Contra fame - and suggested American con-nivance in suppressing unpleasant news about Saudi Arabia. When the dust settled, one newspaper spoke of a Saudi finger in every pie and a member of Congress lamented the fact that America has never given Saudi Arabia any incentive to respect human rights.

Even though it was settled out of court and Bamieh has been 'rehabilitated', the case may be the ultimate expression of Saudi disregard for the opinions of others. An equally important indicator of this disregard is the growth of Saudi involvement in international scandals and their commitment to protecting the participants. Under King Fahd and when he was crown prince and strong man, the Saudis have been involved in many of the major scandals of our time. (See Big Deals and Dangerous Games and Servants of the Crown.) 'If the scandal is big enough, then look for the Saudi connection,' is the way the Lebanese journalist Suleiman Al Firzli describes the situation.

This phase began with the Lockheed scandal, when huge payments were made to Fahd's friend Adnan Khashoggi, and when the ensuing investigations suggested royal involvement. This was followed by the AWACS deal, the payment in oil for surveillance aircraft, a transaction which flooded the international market with oil and undermined the OPEC pricing system. It produced huge commissions for those who handled the oil sale and manipulated the price. Saudi Arabia was also a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal. By financing covert activities in Nicaragua it helped the executive branch of the US Government to circumvent congressional controls on aid to outside forces, a hugely dangerous precedent. The 1991 BCCI scandal revealed a substantial Saudi involvement in the persons of Kamal Adham, Ghaith Pharoan and Hamad bin Mahfouz, who have been accused of realizing hundreds of millions of dollars from illegal transactions. (Bin Mahfouz denied all charges strenuously then settled out of court in late 1994.) The Saudi participants are all friends of Fahd and while Adham has tried to exonerate himself by paying back $115 million, Ghaith Pharoan has been given official Saudi protection even though he is wanted for questioning in the UK and America. There were also impor-tant non-Saudi participants in the BCCI scandal, such as former Undersecretary of State Clark Clifford, who had been seduced by Saudi money. And the almost-forgotten silver scandal, the attempt by the Hunt brothers to corner the silver market, had a substantial Saudi aspect to it and the Fustuck in-laws of the House of Saud were involved. Now we have serious revelations of the Westland Helicopter scandal, the possible use of the US firm United Technologies' British associate to make payments to important Saudis to overcome the hurdles placed in its way by SEC and anti-corruption laws. (See Big Deals and Dangerous Games.)

These deeds demonstrate that Saudi corruption is international and infectious. America's laws and Congress are being under-mined, the commodities market is revealed as vulnerable, an oil market controlled by Saudi Arabia is unreliable and American and British corporations and highly placed citizens are corruptible.

Under Fahd, when the Saudi throne is not directly involved, it is indirectly implicated through friends.

While it cannot be said that Saudi corruption and its conse-quences exist in an organized form, they continue to be the by-product of an atmosphere created, knowingly or through stupidity, by those in power. This is why, very often, some acts are discovered to be no more than the actions of lowly officials who wish to please their unknowing masters. One of the new ways this wish to please expresses itself is in the relatively recent kidnappings and violence perpetrated by operatives of branches of the Saudi Government.

In 1979, before Fahd became king but when he ran the day-to-day affairs of the country, the Saudis kidnapped the well-known Saudi writer Nasser Al Said from Beirut and took him to their country. They paid an associate of the PLO's Yasser Arafat $2 million to facilitate the kidnapping. As reported earlier, Al Said's fate is unknown, but the kidnapping was a clear violation of Lebanese sovereignty, provoked by Al Said's constant documentation of House of Saud crimes against its people. In 1984 the Observer, Sunday Times, Washington Post and the London-based Arabic weekly Sourakia reported the arrest at London's Gatwick Airport of one David Martindale. According to these reports, Martindale was carrying an Uzi automatic pistol and had come to London to assassinate the leader of the Muslim Sophist sect and Saudi opposition personality Shams Eddine Al Fassi. Martindale admitted receiving money to do the job (the figure changed several times) and was deported to the USA, where he was sentenced to 21 years in prison. Nothing was done about those he accused of paying him.

In another incident in late 1991, Muhammad Al Fassi, son of the already mentioned Shams Eddine, a Saudi citizen who openly opposed the Gulf War, was handed over to Saudi Arabia by the Jordanian authorities. Human rights organizations have protested about the illegal hand-overs, but to no avail. The appeals for his release produced a stark example of Saudi attempts to infiltrate the press and corrupt it (see The Last Line of Defence).

The use of these methods began under Fahd and has had an impact on the behaviour of Saudi and other journalists, writers and politicians opposed to the Saudi regime. Many of them have left the Arab countries where they had taken refuge because the Saudis are capable of kidnapping them or exerting pressure on the host countries to surrender them. Even in London, Saudi opposition people are afraid to give their telephone numbers and addresses and some of them used elaborate methods to determine that I was not a Saudi plant trying to assassinate them. The situation is brutally summed up in the words of Saudi writer Abdel Rahman Munif, the author of the monumental Cities of Salt trilogy: 'Exile doesn't guarantee safety.'

It is only fair to state that voices have been raised in objection to this massive, unprecedented and growing exercise in corruption. In addition to increased activity by Saudi opposition groups, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia James Akins has spoken and written about all this. And even the conservative former British Ambassador Sir James Craig wrote a two-hundred-page official critique which was leaked to the British press and provoked Saudi ire. Within the family, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal has warned of the dire consequences of lack of reform. Of course, there are smaller voices, but the results of making a stand against corruption can be considerable. Protesting has not done Akins and Craig any good and it is one of the reasons behind the relegation of Prince Saud Al Faisal to a powerless functionary.

The concern of the objectors to life under Fahd is the overall deteriorating situation of the country. Recently, Fahd's imperi-ous and unstoppable permissiveness has led him to divide and destabilize the House of Saud as never before. Because he flagrantly favours his children over other members of the family, he has crystallized the existence of several clans within the family as a whole and lost the support of his full brothers, the six who with him made up the Sudeiri seven. There are serious indications that Fahd wants his son Muhammad to succeed him and this is revealed in the most important and novel article in his proposed Consultative Council (Majlis Shura) charter which gives the King the right to appoint - and dismiss - his crown prince.

This blatant attempt to create a House of Fahd has not escaped his brothers Abdallah and Sultan (a Sudeiri), respectively the two people next in line to the throne. Abdallah is strengthening his National Guard power base and forming his own family group. Sultan is doing the same through his position as Minister of Defence. The late Faisal's sons are unhappy about the relegation of their brother Saud to a nonentity. King Saud's sons are also around and they have never forgiven Fahd for voting against their father.

These divisions in the ranks of the family weaken it and perhaps work against any family moves against Fahd. But they still strengthen the hand of the growing class of educated Saudis who are opposed to absolutism, the various Muslim fundamentalist movements and the Army in spearheading a change in government, through forming alliances among themselves or by using willing, disaffected members of the family as a front. In addition to the long list of abuses of the country by the House of Saud, there are new indisputable facts which suggest that this situation cannot continue for much longer:

· Despite its huge oil income, Saudi Arabia has run a budget deficit for 12 years and has begun to default on some internal and external contracts (bin Laden and Blount of the USA). The need to satisfy the countries which supported Saudi Arabia in the Gulf War will make this situation worse.

· Expenditure on defence uses 36 per cent of the country's income. Existing contracts to buy more military hardware will maintain it at this level, or higher, for the foreseeable future.

· All province governors are still members of the House of Saud or their Sudeiri in-laws.

· The demands of the family on the national budget are increas-ing because of the huge increase in their numbers and their insatiable appetites. Their growing involvement in commerce, and the Government support behind it, gives them an advan-tage which is adversely affecting the merchant class and alienating its members.

· Thirty per cent of the people still do not attend school. The budgets of the Ministries of Education and Health have been affected by a budgetary squeeze which has not affected expenditures on defence and the family.

· Little is being done to solve the problem of the water shortage which will develop early next century. The situation is so bad that it prompted Prince Tallal bin Abdel Aziz, the King's brother, to write to him warning of 'a disaster in the making'.

· The religious ulemas, aware of the people's unhappiness, have begun to object to the ways of the monarch and the monopoly on power and commerce held by his family and, in strong, uncompromising language, have petitioned him to change them.

· Afraid of Army-based conspiracies against him, Fahd has ordered the disarmament of all Saudi Air Force planes and the doubling of the number of security agents in all the armed forces.

As can be seen from this brief historical review, the basis of Saudi rule has changed little over time. To this day, the King rules supreme; the only change from the time of Ibn Saud is the potential for family interference to strengthen his will and the extent (but not the nature) of the assistance he gets from his relations. It is an unremarkable change forced by the existence of the potential for change, the greater numbers of family members and the remarkable increase in the country's wealth. (Having made my point, I see no substitute for using the word 'country'.)

The King of Saudi Arabia, in order of the importance he assigns to each of his functions, is head of the Al Saud family, the Prime Minister and chief executive of the Central Government, the Supreme Religious Imam, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the Chief Justice. With this type of unchecked control, the country's huge oil income is totally in Fahd's hands. Apart from the perfunctory need to appease the religious leaders, there are no executive, legislative or judicial authorities to questions his decisions. And because he controls the country's income and his position as head of the family comes first, describing Saudi Arabia as the world's largest family business becomes axiomatic. In 1984 each prince received a monthly salary of $20,000 and if he held a job or several then his official salary was an addition to his princely one, and both were additional to his commercial one if he was the head of a corporation. Naturally, the figure quoted was for lowly princes; important ones received considerably more. Also, the designation prince or princess applied to all members of the family, so an ordinary prince with ten children and two wives received $260,000 a month, and the top ones who were in the public eye and supposed to perform real or imaginary functions got as much as $100 million a year.

Although promises of major and minor reform have been made repeatedly since the death of Ibn Saud in 1953, very little has been done about it Except for the influence of members of their family, all the powers inherent in the titles attached to the kings have a literal meaning and they do dismiss judges, generals and religious imams without having to justify their actions. It is well to remember that when confronted by an attempt to curtail his powers, King Saud, the one who succeeded his father only to be deposed by his family later, snapped back, 'I am not Queen Elizabeth - I am the King of Saudi Arabia.

A brief examination of the qualifications of the Saudi kings to exercise the powers they assigned themselves is in order. When it comes to being the head religious figure, though members of the House of Saud observe most Islamic practices, none of the men who became king was trained to be an imam, a function requiring a high level of education and considerable intelligence. In addition, two of them drank heavily, something forbidden the average Muslim let alone a clerk. None of them would ever undergo the rigours of officer training or study military matters to become Commander-in-Chief. Three of the four kings were terribly overweight and all were quite sickly. And indeed their knowledge of the Sharia and Islamic justice was very shallow, rendering highly questionable their ability to preside over the judiciary or to appoint judges. (And Sharia laws are extremely elaborate.)

What Kings Saud, Faisal, Khalid and Fahd brought to the job were patterns of family behaviour bequeathed to them by their father and amended by their considerations of the family's increasing numbers and needs and the established tribal attitudes of the fanatic Wahhabis. Saud's wavering notwithstanding, whether what resulted from exercising power in accordance with these antiquated ways amounts to an extended individual rule, a family rule or a tribal rule, did not and does not alter the absolutism it produced. In fact family and tribal rule eventually became one and the same; the numbers of the House of Saud became big enough to make it a tribe.

Yet these absolute and obsolete family/tribal ways in which the House of Saud continues to govern are vulnerable and subject to change because they are not adequate to control the results of oil wealth and an evolving country. Tens of thousands of Saudis have received or are receiving higher education; there are three and a half million foreigners with infectious ideas working in the country and a citizen can buy a satellite dish and pick up television signals full of eye-opening information from all over the world. This is not to speak of ideological developments in neighbouring countries, the fact that the Middle East is full of Muslim fundamentalist and socialist ideas whose danger is made worse by the natural receptiveness of the Saudi people and the fact that some countries deliberately export such ideas to Saudi Arabia.

So far, despite the many pressures for change, what has prompted variation in the way the most valuable piece of personal real estate in the world is run has not been the desire of the kings or the family for it, but because no way has been found to protect against it. Many internal and outside stimuli for change have reached the point where they became impossible to resist. Totally opposed as they still are to any reduction in their control, the members of the House of Saud have resorted to accepting changes which are essentially cosmetic in nature. The aim is to ease the pressures by pretending change has taken place while obtaining the same old results through new or amended means.

On the external front, occasional pressures and fear of regional destabilization appear to have forced the House of Saud to extend aid to other Arab countries without regard to their political inclinations. But the budgets of Saudi Arabia have invariably revealed that much of the aid money allocated for 'pure', unselfish reasons with no strings attached has never been spent. The House of Saud has always managed to attach unacceptable conditions to them which amount to interference in the internal affairs of the recipient countries. It has often reneged on its supposedly humanitarian aid programme; in the case of aid to Lebanon and the Palestinian refugees, it has kept allocated funds because it could not find recipient organizations which would provide it with publicity and obey orders. On both the internal and external fronts, respectively creating a quasi-parliamentary consultative council and providing aid, what the House of Saud has managed to achieve is the semblance of doing something.

This type of superficial propaganda has gone beyond pretence. The House of Saud's present claim that it flies thousands of Muslims to do the Hajj at the King's personal expense is true only if his personal expense is different from the country's treasury. And it has given a lot of money to building mosques in the Arab and Muslim countries and in London, Brussels, Washington and Rome. Sponsoring the Hajj and building mosques have propaganda value and are not threatening - unlike building schools, something which the House of Saud has done considerably less of than other Arab oil producers. Even the aid money which has reached its targets has had a questionable, selfish reason behind it. The Saudis gave money to the Palestinians to stop them from veering left and to the Lebanese Christians to help them fight their radical Muslim fundamentalists, who frown on Saudi Arabia's Islamic veneer.

This conflict between pretence and fact makes it impossible to segment the 'governmental system' in terms of how it functions. What is 'analyzable' is what the country has purported to do, but what has actually happened is subject to constant change and has been motivated by a narrow self-interest which has expressed itself in the exclusive wish to preserve the household. All pretence aside, we are back to Ibn Saud.

It is because the House of Saud has constantly fabricated ephem-eral responses to internal, Arab, Muslim and world pressures, that I find it difficult to assess its unwieldy 'policies'. The diversity and prospects of the pressures it has faced have been too wide and so have the improvised responses it has produced. The potential of encompassing what might happen and what the responses to them would be is impossible to reduce to a comprehensible analysis. To use realistic examples, a simple change in the government of a neighbouring Arab country could lead to a total change in the Saudi approach to Arab and regional affairs. For example, the emergence of an Islamic, radical and threatening Egypt could lead Saudi Arabia to re-befriend the presently detested Saddam Hussein of Iraq and the assassination or death of the present crown prince could open wide a contest for succession which could lead to civil war. With this in mind, the safest and soundest way to appreciate how the country has functioned and its prospects is to assume that the House of Saud has been in the business of self-protection and has held back progress and development and to look at the people who have run the country and how it has worked under them. In other words, to exanline how the kings who followed Ibn Saud have tried to achieve the same goal of maintaining the place as a personal/family fiefdom through different means. Dangerous as it is, I leave it to the reader to think of all the things that could happen within and outside Saudi Arabia and the possible responses to them. A few examples are coups d'etat in Arab countries producing threatening new regimes, a member of the family joining forces with the armed forces to eliminate corruption, a popular Islamic uprising against the unlslamic behaviour of members of the family. (Some of this speculation is detailed in Brotherhood is Selective.)

It is worth repeating that except for the presence of oil and Islam's two holiest shrines, in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia still qualifies for the Roman name 'Arabia Deserta', a huge stretch of arid land that on a map of the world is a ghastly blank covered by shades of brown which denote barrenness. Historically, it was a land steeped in mystery, but the way its sources of importance have been used has generated enough interest to demystify it; oil and Islam are commodities whose importance has increased. The time for seeing the country as a remote little place with, in the words of Princess Alice of Athlone, 'attractive little chaps with tea towels on their heads', is no more. Even for those who still think of the Arab as simple and naive, there is enough at stake to warrant a close and critical look at Saudi Arabia.

What most of the world knows now is the country's unattractive face, the House of Saud as it is seen through cocktail-party stories, the wealthy, vulgar, corrupt people who run or own the place or both. The power of the image created by the everyday behaviour of members of the family, and the few others who have benefited enough from oil wealth to emulate them, is so total that the non-expert knows very little about the rest of the people of the country, not even their number. When the people of that huge expanse are thought about, they are reduced to abstractions with no face, and we are back to Princess Alice and her bunkered description.

There exists something of a conspiracy of silence regarding the people of Saudi Arabia; one in which their own government deliberately participates. Until a recent, highly questionable one whose results were undoubtedly exaggerated was conducted, the only population census in the history of the country was carried out in 1976. The complicated job cost about $100 million because of the vastness of the country and the use of aerial photography to track unsettled Bedouins who were on the move with the seasons. But the money paid to conduct the census was wasted. The House of Saud has never published the results of this huge and sophisticated effort. The reason is simple: the census produced a smaller figure than had been anticipated or estimated. To the House of Saud, a small population - and there is reason, based on word-of-mouth reports by Saudi officials, to believe the census produced a figure of seven million people - meant a vulnerable country which could not defend itself, supposedly an inherent weakness which might have encouraged anti-House of Saud forces within and outside its borders.

Fear also stood in the way of publishing any figures of the number of people who belonged to the ruling minority Wahhabi sect and of the downtrodden but considerably larger Shia commu-nity who continue to suffer the fate of 'heretics' - 20 and 15 per cent, respectively. And in fact it is Western fear of upsetting and eventually undermining the House of Saud, the people who control and supply the oil, which still stands in the way of the rest of the world giving a thought to the people in Saudi Arabia as a whole, or in terms of some particularly suffering parts.

It was a similar fear of what the native Saudis and others might say which prompted the House of Saud not to publish the 1991 budget, the one which would have exposed the records of the vast sums of money, at least $60 billion, they paid out to get other countries to join them in the Gulf War (to eliminate the fear of Saddam Hussein). And it was this same fear which prompted the family to cover up the many coups and assassination attempts against them except when such attempts became too widely known to ignore. Then they had to respond to the stories by successfully presenting their highly doctored versions of events which create the image of a country full of happiness. But while fear has been behind everything the House of Saud has done, including hiding the figures of the family budget, it has not had to be real and it has often resembled the reaction of someone who suspects the worst because object to a policeman issuing him a traffic ticket without being accused of belonging to a subversive political party, reading French books is definitely frowned on and simple worship by Christian workers produces incredibly stiff prison sentences. (All political parties are subversive and banned, the French are regarded as degenerate and those in power are determined to outdo the Muslim fundamentalists, who object to all Christian presence in the country.) It is a paranoid family rule, insecure in its ways.

The House of Saud has committed itself and the enormous wealth of the country to continue what it has maintained for most of this century. In this regard, a cursory review of the recent reports of the human rights organizations Amnesty International, Article 19 and Middle East Watch confirms the continued use of the most brutal methods to maintain barriers against change.

Internally, there is no freedom of the press and criticism of the royal family, the Government and religious figures is against the law. As will be discussed later, the Government's control of the press is so tight that it took two days before it allowed newspapers to report the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Not for the first time, the people of Saudi Arabia were confused by international media reports which spoke of something which the Government concealed. (See The Last Line of Defence for a detailed analysis of how the authorities handle the Saudi and Arab press.)

Saudi women do not have the same rights as men, and they are not allowed to drive cars, travel alone or be secretaries. A woman is essentially a non-person and, engagingly, her husband is responsible for her behaviour, including her debts, even if the couple are separated. A number of female college professors, many of them with PhDs, who in 1991 conducted a group drive to protest against the laws which forbid them to be licensed to do it legally, lost their jobs and some were arrested, tried and imprisoned. In some cases, their husbands were threatened with physical violence. The husband's responsibility goes further and the estranged wife of one of my relatives ran up bills of hundreds of thousands of dollars which my brother was unable to stop but had to pay.

Political parties are illegal and so is the right of peaceable assembly. Members of CAVES (Committee for the Advancement of Virtue and Elimination of Sin) have been known to walk in on dinner parties to determine whether the guests, even when their numbers are no more than four or five, are indulging in political discussion. The people look over their shoulders and mention the King and members of his family in whispers and referring to them without affixing respectful titles can lead to stiff jail sentences.

All non-Muslim religious manifestations, including wearing a crucifix, are against the law and foreign workers, who represent one in four of the population, have very few rights: American and British citizens have been arrested for celebrating Christmas and Yemeni and Pakistani workers accused of minor crimes have disappeared in Saudi prisons without trace. There is no academic freedom and question-and-answer sessions between teachers and students are deemed dangerous and have been known to lead to the arrest of both. Although the Koran is the constitution of the land, even this wide, inexact and basically generous method of determining things is restricted further by the fact that the Wahhabi interpretation of the Koran is the only one acceptable. Among many others, a 40-year-old woman, Zahra Al Nasser, died in detention for carrying a Shia prayer book. Ah Salman Al-Ammar, 16, was detained for two years for the same reason, and a Shia religious student, Sadiq Al Illah, was executed for heresy. Even a book called Development of Arab Family Struc-tures is banned and during the Gulf War Time, Newsweek, the Independent, Le Point, Le Monde and dozens of Arabic newspapers and magazines and ones from Muslim countries, including titles sponsored by and beholden to the House of Saud, were banned.

The House of Saud's attitude towards fellow Arabs is not a subject to be documented by human rights organizations except insofar as it affects Arabs living in Saudi Arabia when, like all foreigners, they are not afforded whatever meagre rights are accorded Saudi citizens. As will be seen in the following chapter, some have been deported for not being respectful enough in the presence of a lowly but full-of-himself bureaucrat, women have been beaten with sticks for not dressing modestly and others found themselves without residence visas because their Saudi employers objected to their asking for salary increases.

In addition, Saudi Arabia materially opposes the existence of political parties, parliaments, a free press, the granting of rights to women and the ownership of pets (most are profane and owning them is against Islam). Official pressure was exerted on Kuwait and Bahrain to stop them holding parliamentary elections; the Saudis threatened to cut off aid until the Lebanese Government imprisoned some critical journalists; Arabs working in Saudi Arabia are discouraged from having their wives loin them there for fear they might teach Saudi women a thing or two and pressure has been applied to ban alcoholic drinks on all Arab airlines. The darkness which envelops Saudi Arabia is being geographically extended through the use of money to influence other Arab countries.

Violations of any of these unwritten rules governing Saudi Arabia's relationships with other Arab countries are considered dangerous because what others do is deemed infectious. Such offences to the Saudi Stone Age sensibilities have been met with unjustified and mostly unannounced retaliatory actions which have included the cancellation of aid programmes and the refusal to grant citizens of the 'guilty' country entry visas and work permits. The Yemen's refusal to accommodate Saudi pressure to support their Gulf War stance led to the deportation of 800,000 Yemeni workers and the near destruction of the Yemeni economy.

When the Saudi Government tries to justify its actions, it consist-ently resorts to substitute reasons acceptable to the international community and the rest of the time it gives no reason whatsoever. But a good way to judge how angry Saudi Arabia behaves with a fellow Arab country is to examine how it limits the number of visas issued to its citizens to work in Saudi Arabia and the amount of 'allocated' aid which is never remitted.

The Saudi treatment of the Muslim countries resembles that given to the Arab countries. Recently the House of Saud has taken to pressuring the Muslim countries into banning drink -curious when you remember that most members of the House of Saud, including Fahd, drink heavily. The Saudis also try to induce fellow Muslims to curtail the educational curriculum for women. Certainly anything which includes sports is disapproved of, but naturally the House of Saud has swimming pools where its female members indulge regularly and hold parties. Again, this is no more than a demonstration of Saudi Arabia trying to hold back Muslim countries because changes in them might be emulated by its own increasingly unhappy people.

In the larger international arena, particularly in terms of its special relationship with America and Britain, the House of Saud's policy is again to hold the line against change. This means attempting to maintain the blind support which it has traditionally received from its 'allies'. Neutralizing the sources of Arab and Muslim pressure automatically increases the importance of maintaining Western support. Here again the Saudis use their wealth to perpetuate the inclination of America and other Western countries to ignore their misdeeds, though in this case mostly in an indirect way. The House of Saud is willing to provide the world with cheap oil and political support in their problems with the Arabs and Muslims in return for the elimination of all criticism. It goes further and uses the awarding of huge defence contracts for the same purpose. (See Big Deals and Dangerous Games.) In reality, the twin policy of using oil and awarding defence contracts is no more than blackmail; they protect the Western economies from high oil prices and buy their arms in return for silence. (I cannot unearth a single public statement by a Western leader about the country's abominable human rights record and only Kennedy objected to it, and that secretly.)

In its internal behaviour and relations with all outside powers, the House of Saud's policies are negative, an attempt at protecting their piece of property, an improvised response to fear. Realisti-cally, even the low price of oil and the huge defence contracts are only possible at the expense of the greater and obviously pressing needs of the people. (Among other problems, the Saudis suffer from the second-highest rate of blindness in the world.) Here, a simple formula is necessary to explain why the very ordinary Saudi, who is often illiterate, is for increasing the price of oil. If the present price of oil is $20 a barrel and the personal expenses of the House of Saud (estimated at over $7 billion a year) and defence costs use half of that, then a $5 increase in the price of oil increases what is left for the people by 50 per cent and not by the purely mathematical 25 per cent. But the House of Saud would rather keep the West as friends and protectors than satisfy its own people.

In return for keeping the price of oil down and resisting all OPEC pressure to do the opposite (see Oil, OPEC and the Overseers), America has supplied Saudi Arabia with F-IS fighters, C-130 transports, AWACS, Harpoon, Stinger and Patriot missiles, M-60 and Abrams tanks, as well as less sophisticated pieces of military hardware and military training. To protect against internal unrest, the House of Saud was supplied with an elaborate electronic monitoring system which records every single telephone call in the country (the problem is to decide which ones to recall and decipher). Major CIA agents were seconded to the country to occupy sensitive positions which would allow them to monitor developments at close range. And all these acts were encapsulated in unconditional statements of support by Nixon, Carter, Ford, Reagan and Bush, as well as Kissinger and Baker, guaranteeing the national integrity of the country.

What had existed before, a relationship of interdependence, was elevated to an unratified but open and unconditional alliance underwritten by presidential guarantees. Any internal or external attempts to change the Saudi Government without its approval would be met with the military might of the United States. Except for situations which cannot be defeated by America's armed might, the House of Saud became totally secure and set in its ways.