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PAS : KE ARAH PEMERINTAHAN ISLAM YANG ADIL
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Saudi Kingdom fights growing anger
CAIRO - Saudi Arabia, home to a quarter of the world's oil reserves and
the birthplace of
Islam, faces growing popular opposition to the American campaign in
Afghanistan - anxiety
that could force the Saudi government to temper its crucial cooperation
in the US pursuit of
Osama bin Laden's network, analysts and diplomats say.
In the past week, the powerful Saudi interior minister has warned his
countrymen not to
sympathize with bin Laden and his followers - an acknowledgment of the
popularity the
Saudi exile enjoys in his homeland. The religious affairs minister,
meanwhile, has reminded
the populace that no one other than the king could declare holy war, a
move meant to head
off such calls from popular and more radical preachers in the kingdom.
Across the country, home to Islam's two holiest shrines, at Mecca and
Medina, prayer
leaders - with a rare forum for public expression in the restrictive
kingdom - have
dismissed the minister's warning and urged a holy war against ''the
enemies of Islam.''
Others praised bin Laden as a ''true Muslim hero.'' Both calls were
issued amid reports in
an Arabic-language newspaper that Saudis were volunteering to fight in
Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia's government has weathered such opposition before, most
notably during the
1991 Gulf War when US troops were stationed on Saudi land. But the
anxiety on the part
of Saudi leaders over popular opposition to the US-led campaign in
Afghanistan points to
the delicate balancing act the Saudi government has faced for much of
its history - a deep
alliance with the United States that, in public, cannot appear so deep.
''The more they're seen as closely associated with the US, the more
difficult for them to
justify their own pronouncements that they have independence of decision
making,'' said
Aziz Abu Hamad, a Saudi analyst in Riyadh. The United States ''doesn't
realize that if the
government cooperates more they will jeopardize their own security.''
Saudi leaders, so far noticeably reluctant to endorse the US campaign,
began this week to
air their displeasure with the course of the attacks on a fellow Muslim
country.
Their messages, albeit subtle, suggested that Saudi Arabia is
increasingly uneasy with the
duration and scope of the US campaign, both in its military attacks on
Afghanistan as well
as the less visible moves against financial sources of Osama bin Laden's
network, many
of which traditionally sprung from Saudi Arabia's elite.
US officials have publicly said that they are satisfied with the support
the Saudis are
providing. ''The cooperation has been much better than the general
public perception,'' said
Robert H. Pelletreau, former assistant secretary of state for Near
Eastern affairs.
But requests for more cooperation may be dangerous, Hamad said.
So far, the Saudis have allowed the United States to use a sophisticated
command and
control system at Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh during the strikes.
More help will be
needed to crack down on funding believed headed for bin Laden's network
- something the
Saudi government has sought to do since 1993 - and in the investigation
into those behind
the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, analysts say.
With Egypt and Israel, Saudi Arabia remains one of the pillars of US
foreign policy in the
Middle East, a strategic region in a world dependent on fossil fuels.
The US-Saudi alliance dates to 1945, when President Roosevelt met King
Abdul Aziz
aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. It has weathered four
Arab-Israeli wars, and it
grew far deeper and more public after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990,
which led to the
arrival of US troops on Saudi soil.
But the relationship, bound by oil, remains sensitive.
While the Cold War united them as opponents of the Soviet Union - the
United States
because of communism, Saudi Arabia because of atheism - the Saudi
government has
shied away from appearing too close in public to a country unpopular for
its support of
Israel and increasingly perceived as hostile in foreign policy and
lifestyle to Islam.
''They have a lot of ambivalence toward us and we have a lot of
ambivalence toward them,
but our mutual interests are so strong, they've overridden the
ambivalence,'' said David
Long, a former US diplomat in Saudi Arabia. ''Our mutual interests are
so close that the
policies have stayed remarkably close for the last 60 years.''
The crisis today, analysts and diplomats say, has introduced a new and
perhaps more
dangerous element into that relationship. The test, they say, could
prove as severe as the
1991 Gulf War, which gave rise to a dissident movement - both militant
and peaceful -
upset about the arrival of US soldiers on land considered by Muslims to
be sacred.
The challenge revolves around bin Laden himself, a Saudi exile who was
long a hero in his
country for fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
That campaign, backed by the United States in one of its biggest covert
operations ever,
joined bin Laden with many of the 6,000-strong Saudi royal family. Among
his supporters
were Prince Salman, the powerful governor of Riyadh, and Crown Prince
Abdullah, all but
certain to be the next Saudi king, who donated dozens of trucks in the
war's early years.
On his return to Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was in demand as a speaker in
mosques and
homes across the desert kingdom. More than 250,000 cassettes of his
speeches are said
to have been distributed, and they usually sold out as soon as they
appeared.
Bin Laden was forced into exile in Sudan in 1991 and his passport was
revoked three
years later when he refused to quiet his forceful opposition to the
royal family. But he
remains a symbol to the politically disenchanted in the country,
particularly among religious
youth, who face a future in which population growth isn't keeping up
with the creation of
jobs, in an economy that is still overwhelmingly dependent on oil.
''They always have to be careful because he's a very charismatic guy,
and they have a
partially marginalized younger generation,'' Long said.
That popularity is not only among the young. A Saudi journalist said
that some of his
newsroom colleagues began crying as they listened to bin Laden's
videotaped message
and his denunciation of US policies on the night the US campaign
started.
Bin Laden's place in conservative Saudi society has merged with the
unpopularity of those
strikes. As in much of the Arab world, the campaign is seen as directed
less at bin Laden's
network and more at a fellow Muslim country.
Images broadcast on Al-Jazeera last week inflamed viewers in Saudi
Arabia and
elsewhere with footage that graphically detailed an American strike on
Kabul: crying and
wounded civilians, houses pulverized in the attack.
''If you talk to anyone, even a secular Saudi while he is finishing his
glass of whiskey, and
you ask him about how does he feel about bombing Afghanistan, he will
say this is
harram[forbidden], this is wrong, this is ridiculous,'' said Jamal
Khashoggi, deputy editor of
the English-language Arab News. ''So, yes, there is a general unease.
People are not
comfortable with the bombing, especially the way it's turning out to
be.''
Source: Daily Globe, Boston
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