Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, Washington DC

April 10, 2013

Commentaries and Analysis of Current Saudi Affairs

Cruelty-Relishing Saudi Judges

CDHR’s Commentary: As this article reveals, barbarity under the Saudi judicial system is common practice. Presiding religious judges in Saudi courts can sentence anyone to any form of punishment they wish and justify their rulings not by logic, facts and precedence, but by Quranic versus and Islamic law or Shariah. As this repulsive case demonstrates when two 14-year-old friends got into a fight ten years ago and one of them paralyzed the other from the waist down. The judge sentenced the 14-year-old stabber to a ten year imprisonment and $270,000 blood money or surgical paralysis if the money could not be raised. 10 years later, the money could still not be raised and the judge is looking for a butcher to paralyze the now 24 year old.

Chopping heads and limbs, mutilating genitals, gouging eyes, divorcing happily married couples by force and castrating people are some of the punishment Saudi judges practice on regular bases. As a tool of the merciless system not an instrument of justice, the religiously–based Saudi judicial is designed to terrorize people and remind them that none of them can be spared the wrath of the system. One must remember that the Saudi judges, clerics and Muftis are only tools through which the system justifies its ruthlessness.

The Saudi Mufti: Champion of Suppression

CDHR’s Commentary: The well-funded Saudi religious establishment’s denigrating obsession with women continues despite its destructive impact on the country’s security, stability, unity, social justice and economic progress. As a front man for the system, the Saudi Mufti (the highest religious authority in the land) recently warned against the luring and manipulating of women by “wicked people” to create chaos in the country. The Mufti’s warning against “luring women,” whom he considers weak, irrational and easily seduced, is in response to ongoing demonstrations by female relatives of citizens incarcerated without charges or trial.

The Mufti’s fixation on women and his adamant opposition to their rights and independence is comprehensive as exemplified by his total hostility to their employment. He is against women’s rights to drive, work and worst of all mingle with men. He considers hiring women even in exclusively women’s shops a crime because that could lead to “debauched” relationships.   

As the country’s highest religious authority, the Mufti has used his position to promote, defend and justify the absolute ruling family’s total control over the country, its people and wealth. One of the Mufti’s roles is his stand against advocates of religious freedom, civil society, freedom of expression and power-sharing. He portrays peaceful public protest as un-Islamic which is designed to destroy Islam, the rulers and the country’s stability.

The Mufti’s and his extremist religious establishment’s major assignment since the beginning of the Arab Spring is their relentless attacks on and condemnation of pro-political reform and on advocates of human rights and social justice. The Mufti and his henchmen printed and distributed millions of religious edict leaflets on March 11, 2011 against planned peaceful protests which he and his senior clerics said "violates what God ordered." The Mufti condescendingly labeled Saudi social media users lately as a ‘council of clowns’ when in fact most of them are highly educated, politically savvy and patriotic promoters of peaceful transition from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy.

The Saudi Mufti and his senior clerics’ oppositions to women’s rights, intolerance of religious minorities, demonization of other beliefs and relentless attacks on reformers have very little to do with religion and more with their persistent fears of losing their unwarranted privileges which they can only maintain if religion, as they interpret it, continues to dominate every aspects of people’s lives and institutions. The clerics share this daunting nightmare with the real power wielders, their royal employers.

The repressed population is becoming increasingly aware that the religious establishment is only a tool used by the royals to deflect public attention from the monarchs’ social, political, religious and economic failures domestically. The royals are also becoming aware of the public’s awareness of the underpinnings of the system which was created and maintained by the Saudi/ Wahhabi ruling elites more than two and half centuries ago. These facts are stripping naked both the autocratic and theocratic ruling oligarchies from the excuses they have used to justify their policies internally and externally.

When discussing relevant domestic and global policies and obligations with foreign regimes, the absolute Saudi monarchs have used the heavy influence of their religious establishment to exonerate themselves from meeting their obligations to their subjects and to the international community.

The Pen Is Mightier Than the Sword

CDHR’s Comment: The autocratic Saudi ruling royals and their draconian religious judicial system continue to prove that they are incapable of governing peacefully. Their severe and lengthy sentencing of two prominent democracy promoters and human rights activists Mohammed Fahd al-Qahtani and Abdullah Hamad on March 9, 2013 is indicative of the system’s nature to oppose peaceful political reforms and social justice. Instead of responding to their repressed citizens’ demands for emancipation from political and religious totalitarianism, the Saudi ruling elites continue to silence the voices of reason.

At a time when most Arabs are revolting against draconian ruling methods and practices of repressive and corrupt regimes, the Saudi monarchy is strengthening its grip on power. As exemplified by the system’s unnecessary, unjustified and punishing sentencing of Drs. Al-Qahtani and Al-Hamid, two enlightened patriotic founding members of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, the system is determined to continue a policy that will force the population to resort to violence to obtain their political rights.

In recent years, the Saudi people have become increasingly bold in challenging the Saudi royals’ heavy-handedness, corruption and legitimacy. Examples of people’s demands and defiance are taking place all over the country. Religious minorities in oil rich eastern Saudi Arabia are demonstrating against their government’s discriminatory policies toward them and in the process some of them were killed by the State’s brutal security apparatus.  Families and supporters of prisoners, including women and children, are demonstrating in Central Saudi Arabia, the bastion of the Saudi regime’s and its religious establishment’s powerbase. Instead of trying or releasing their loved ones, the ubiquitous system’s security personnel collected them and threw them in prison because all forms of peaceful expressions are banned in the Saudi Kingdom.

Female college students in Asir, the lush Southern Region, are demonstrating violently against the government’s  corruption, neglect and abuses by the educational system and its discriminatory policies against women.

The monarchy’s responses to people’s legitimate demands consist of violence, handouts and window dressing steps which most Saudi males and females don’t take seriously nor do they hold high hopes that things will improve peacefully. Instead of living in an incredible and indecipherable denial, the Saudi rulers, especially their educated men and women offspring, ought to look across their borders and see that it’s only a matter of time before their people resort to the only option that was available to other Arabs to obtain their rights: violence.

Saudi Royals Above the Law?

CDHR’s Commentary: Accustomed to doing whatever they want in their kingdom with total immunity, Saudi princes and princesses feel they can do the same in other countries and get away with it. They used to be able to either buy their way out, using their family’s influence, or to claim diplomatic immunity to escape culpability for their misdeeds.

They still do, especially in Arab and Muslim countries, but their options seem to be shrinking in democratically governed societies. As elucidated in this article, a senior Saudi Prince, Mishal, and his son, Abdul Aziz, were entangled in a business scheme and had to face their day in an open British court despite intense efforts to dismiss the case or keep it secret. The once untouchable royals were denied both options.

Other members of the Saudi ruling family, males and females, have been reminded that they may be absolute rulers and beyond reach in their kingdom, but they can no longer escape justice in countries where the people are the authors of their own destinies. Princess Maha, the wife of former Saudi Minister of Interior, Naif, attempted to flee Paris after accruing 6 million Euros debt in luxurious hotels, rare jewels and 24 hour limousine services in 2012. Some of the victims spotted Maha and 60 of her servants (modern slaves), bodyguards, and makeup personnel loading up the unpaid-for goods and services in the middle of the night in June 2012 and alerted the French police.

Being a former wife of the most powerful and ruthless prince, Minister of Interior Naif, Princess Maha thought she could pack up and leave France without paying her huge debt. This time, she overestimated her royal significance. Not only was she prevented from traveling, but a French court confiscated her booty to pay the trusting French business owners. In Saudi Arabia, any prince or princess can pick up the phone and call any department store and order whatever he/she wants without questions asked, let alone paying at the counter. Furthermore, it’s not unusual for Royals to borrow money from banks and never pay their loans.

Princess Buniah Al-Saud “was arrested on a felony charge of aggravated battery” after her maid, Ismiyati Memet Soryono, reported her to US authorities in Florida for enslaving and abusing her while refusing to pay her meager $200-a-month salary. Like other royals, she claimed diplomatic immunity even though she was a greenhorn English student. She was born into a totally segregated environment of ruling masters and subservient subjects where royals are not subjected to any law in their kingdom and where treating commoners with respect is considered a sign of weakness which would only encourage non-royals to think of royals as equals.

In late 2010 Prince Saud, said to be one of King Abdullah’s nephews, was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment by a British judge for murdering his male servant whom the prince had repeatedly abused both sexually and physically. Appalled by the vulgarity of the prince’s cruel treatment and the subsequent murder of his defenseless servant, the judge told the prince in an open British court (courts in Saudi Arabia are closed to media, and defendants are not allowed to have legal counsel) that,

“You killed Abdulaziz in the course of a sustained and ferocious assault… You were in a position of domination over him, as demonstrated both by the lift (elevator) incident and by the sexually explicit photographs you took of him, at some point prior to Feb. 15, which were found on your mobile phone. Abdulaziz was a vulnerable victim, entirely subjugated to your will. You were in a position of authority and trust over him which you exploited ruthlessly.”

These criminal verdicts against Saudi royals being levied in countries where no one is above the rule of law should send a clear message to the thousands of princes and princesses – their subjugated subjects are yearning for equal treatment under a codified rule of law applicable to everyone including the king and his family. Given the large number of well-informed and educated Saudi men and women advocating for non-sectarian rule of law, the day for accountability is inevitable and fast approaching. The trials and convictions of members of the Saudi ruling family in other countries give moral support to Saudis who demand a just system in their country.

However, the Saudi royals’ influence has reached dangerous pinnacles; they are in a position to blackmail democratic governments into overriding their democratic judicial systems and rule of law in surrender to Saudi ultimata. Accused of being involved in a large bribery scandal in a massive Saudi-British Arms deal (Al-Yamamah), the former Saudi Ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar, flew to London and told former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to stop his Attorney General’s office from pursuing an investigation of the scandal or risk terror attacks against Britain. Similarly, the US Justice Department sided with the Saudis in May 2009 when new evidence linking the Saudi royals to the 9/11 attack was discovered by lawyers for families of the victims.

Prince Bandar is reported to have told Blair that if he were to let the investigation go through, Britain could face bloody terrorist attacks. “Investigators working on the fraud probe into Saudi arms deals were told they faced ‘another 7/7’ and the ‘loss of British lives on British streets’ if they continued the inquiry… Saudi Arabia’s rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted.”

The continued Western self-defeating support for the absolute Saudi system is alienating some of the West’s most natural Saudi allies: women, religious minorities, and pro-democracy and social justice advocates. Besides being resentful of their oppressive regime’s heavy-handedness, many aspiring and freedom-seeking Saudi citizens are becoming increasingly resentful of the West’s support for their repressive system, support garnered by secure access to Saudi oil, money, and businesses.

“Obama out of sync with Arab Street”

CDHR’s Commentary: This article captured the essence of the current US Administration and its predecessors’ inability to understand and factor in the aspirations of the new generation of Arabs who decided, for the first time in Arab history, to focus on and rectify their homegrown misfortunes. President Obama's appointment of John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John Brennan to top military, foreign and intelligence positions is designed to continue failed Western policies in the Arab World, especially in the oil rich Arabian Peninsula.

Focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is not and has never been at the top of the Arab people’s list of demands for change of their existing failed systems is indicative of the US successive Administrations’ and most Western analysts’ inability to comprehend the Arab people’s yearning for freedom from religious and political totalitarianism, poverty, corruption, sexism and grinding social injustices. The US and other Western democratic regimes’ continued collaboration with absolute Arab regimes’ insistence that peace, stability and reforms in the Arab World hangs on solving the Arab-Israeli conflict is not only duplicitous, but designed to turn new generations of Arabs against America and shrink its influence in the region and beyond.

It’s worth noting that the Arab-Israeli conflict would have been resolved in 1948 if it were not for the Arab autocratic and theocratic rulers who have used the conflict for more than 60 years to deflect their repressed peoples’ attention from their domestic failures on all fronts.

It begs the question as to why the US government continues to focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict at a time when the Arab street could care-less about anything other than ridding themselves of absolute and corrupt regimes which are running out of external excuses to blame for the economic, political, social, religious and scientific stagnation of their societies.

Nowhere in the Arab World were staggering failures, corruption and repression can be found more than in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states whose absolute ruling monarchies are supported and protected by democratically elected Western governments. Western governments, foundations, think tanks, businesses and learning institutions can best serve their populations’ safety, national security and economic stability by supporting pro-democracy movements, groups and individuals in the Gulf Arab States’ instead of continuing to protect regimes’ whose time in power is ebbing regardless of what the West can do. 

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