Insecure Gulf

The subtitle is The End of Certainty and the Transition to the Post-Oil Era. The author is Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, deputy director of the Kuwait Research Program on Development, Governance, and Globalization in the Gulf States, based at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Ulrichson takes the present day oil-rich conditions, and imagines what they may mean sometime in the future when the oil resources are depleted and the world is making a transition to a non-oil based economy.

See what you think. You can get a Google preview of the book here.

Arab News op-ed: We are still prisoners of a culture of conspiracy & inferiority

In an op-ed entitled, Let's Stop Blaming America, Dr. Khalid Alnowaiser writes in the Saudi-based Arab News:

I am not pro-American nor am I anti-Arab, but I am worried that unless we wake up, the Arab world will never break out of this vicious and unproductive cycle of blaming America. We must face the truth: Sadly, we are still the prisoners of a culture of conspiracy and cultural inferiority. We have laid the blame on America for all our mistakes, for every failure, for every harm or damage we cause to ourselves. The US has become our scapegoat upon whom our aggression and failures can be placed. We accuse America of interfering in all our affairs and deciding our fate, although we know very well that this is not the case as no superpower can impose its will upon us and control every aspect of our lives. We must acknowledge that every nation, no matter how powerful, has its limitations.

...

The Holy Qur’an states Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. He has the power to change them, but He prefers that they change with their own will power which He respects.

What we are seeing now in the Arab streets is a new hope and a step forward to change what is in ourselves. I remain very optimistic because we have now begun to realize that simply blaming the United States for our problems will not help us progress toward great personal freedoms. Our enemy is not America but an inferiority complex from which I am sure the Arab world with its rich culture and history will eventually recover.

The U.S. is flawed and it has made mistakes. It does not always respect the will of people in other countries. And it is powerful. Sometimes it does good, sometimes bad. But it does not control fate.

US to help Saudi's build new military force

AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite their deepening political divide, the United States and Saudi Arabia are quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale, led by a little-known project to develop an elite force to protect the kingdom's oil riches and future nuclear sites.
...
The force's main mission is to protect vital oil infrastructure, but its scope is wider. A formerly secret State Department cable released by the WikiLeaks website described the mission as protecting "Saudi energy production facilities, desalination plants and future civil nuclear reactors."
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The special security force is expected to grow to at least 35,000 members, trained and equipped by U.S. personnel as part of a multiagency effort that includes staff from the Justice Department, Energy Department and Pentagon. It is overseen by the U.S. Central Command.
...
The newly established specialized force is separate from the regular Saudi military and is also distinct from Saudi Arabian National Guard, an internal security force whose mission is to protect the royal family and the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina. The U.S. has had a training and advising role with the regular Saudi military since 1953 and began advising the National Guard in 1973.

5 countries where they literally have "fashion police"

Foreign Policy on the fashion police in France, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Bhutan, and Sudan. Penalties range from fine to flogging. Ouch.

A Saudi Arabia version of the TLC network's What Not to Wear would make interesting viewing.

The Saudi Women Revolution Statement

Link.

Paragraph of the day

Regarding the division between the US and Saudi Arabia over Bahrain:

The crackup was predicted by a top UAE sheik in a February meeting with two visiting former U.S. officials. According to notes made during the conversation, the UAE official said: “We and the Saudis will not accept a Shiite government in Bahrain. And if your president says to the Khalifas what he said to Mubarak [to leave office], it will cause a break in our relationship with the U.S.” The UAE official warned that Gulf nations were “looking East” — to China, India and Turkey — for alternative security assistance.

Read, in the Washington Post.

Gulf states send force to Bahrain following protests

I said recently the Saudi-Bahrain causeway was built with this in mind, but I didn't expect to be right so soon. This, to me, is very surprising. Would it happen if it wasn't royalty putting up a common front?

The BBC:

Troops from a number of Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, have arrived in Bahrain in response to a request from the small Gulf kingdom, officials say.
...
A Saudi official said about 1,000 Saudi Arabian troops arrived in Bahrain early on Monday.

The troops are part of a Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) deployment, a six-nation regional grouping which includes Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates.

It is believed they are intended to guard key facilities such as oil and gas installations and financial institutions.

I wonder if the "guarding" is both literal and metaphorical. Market watchers are concerned about the possibility of protests in Saudi Arabia.

Business Intelligence - Middle East / Stratfor:

Troops from the United Arab Emirates are reportedly expected to arrive March 14. Al Arabiya reported that Saudi forces have already entered Bahrain, but these claims have yet to be officially confirmed by the Bahraini regime.
...
The ongoing tensions are exacerbated by the split between Bahrain’s Shiite movement, which became clearer during protests on March 11. The more hard-line faction of the Shiite movement, led by the Wafa and Haq blocs, has been increasing the unrest on the streets in the hopes of stalling the talks between the Shiite Al Wefaq-led coalition’s negotiations with the regime.
...
...If Bahrain indeed has requested Saudi intervention this time, the implication is that the Bahraini military is not confident in its ability to contain the unrest now.

Riyadh’s decision to send forces to Manama could be taken for this reason, since wider spread of Shiite unrest from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia would aggravate the already existing protests among Saudi Arabia’s own Shiite population. Saudi military intervention in Bahrain is also not unprecedented; Saudi Arabia sent troops to Bahrain in 1994 when Riyadh determined that Shiite unrest threatened the al-Khalifa regime.

The regional implications of the unrest in Bahrain were underscored when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Manama on March 12 and urged the Bahraini regime to implement bold reforms....

Dubai's Gulf News has a brief Reuters report on the troop deployment. Abu Dhabi's The National has picked up a more complete report from Agence France-Presse although the story is headlined Saudi troops 'enter Bahrain'.
The message seems to be, "don't try this at home".

Does this mean the GCC won't be able to help with a no-fly-zone over Libya?

Did Bahrain call in the GCC because it needed more firepower, or because needed foreign troops willing to fire because they aren't their own people? It's a scary thought, but I can't believe the GCC troops would use force unless their own lives are threatened.

Another thought -- I'm pretty that the bulk of the UAE armed forces are not Emiratis. That's partly because the work is not the kind Emiratis would accept, and partly because the rulers like it that way for a variety of reasons.

Arab News (Saudi Arabia): What if women could drive?

What would it matter if women were allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia? They'd still men need to do anything.

It's impossible to capture this piece in one quote. Read it all.

By the way, today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.

Video of protests in Saudi Arabia

Here and here.

I'm picking these up from a twitter search on Ahsa.

About the Ahsa Governate: "Al-Ahsa (Arabic: الأحساء‎ al-Aḥsāʾ, locally pronounced al-Ḥasāʾ) is the largest governorate in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, named after Al-Ahsa oasis."

This Irish Times report is good even though it's from six days ago:

Sadek al-Ramadan, a human rights activist in al-Asha, Eastern Province, said: “People here are watching closely the protest movements across the region, which are tapping into long-held demands for reforms in Saudi Arabia.” Al-Ramadan said that there are “deep frustrations” in Saudi society over high levels of poverty, unemployment, poor housing and perceived widespread corruption among the rulers of the world’s top oil exporter whose gross domestic product last year is estimated at $622 billion.
...
“Unemployment is as high as 50 per cent among Saudi youth, whether Shia or Sunni, and there is a serious shortfall in housing and education facilities,” said al-Ramadan. “People want more transparent governance, an end to corruption, and better distribution of wealth and welfare.”

He said there was widespread recognition reform in Saudi Arabia is badly needed. “The question is: how far will the call for reforms go?” The Saudi authorities are undoubtedly mindful of the rapid escalation of anti-government protests in the neighbouring Persian Gulf island state of Bahrain, only an hour’s drive away from the Eastern Province across a 25km causeway.

Welfare princes

In America we have welfare queens. In Saudi Arabia they have welfare princes. Reuters has taken a look at U.S. State Department cables obtained by Wikileaks.

Reuters:

The November 1996 cable -- entitled "Saudi Royal Wealth: Where do they get all that money?" -- provides an extraordinarily detailed picture of how the royal patronage system works. It's the sort of overview that would have been useful required reading for years in the U.S. State department.

It begins with a line that could come from a fairytale: "Saudi princes and princesses, of whom there are thousands, are known for the stories of their fabulous wealth -- and tendency to squander it."

The most common mechanism for distributing Saudi Arabia's wealth to the royal family is the formal, budgeted system of monthly stipends that members of the Al Saud family receive, according to the cable. Managed by the Ministry of Finance's "Office of Decisions and Rules," which acts like a kind of welfare office for Saudi royalty, the royal stipends in the mid-1990s ran from about $800 a month for "the lowliest member of the most remote branch of the family" to $200,000-$270,000 a month for one of the surviving sons of Abdul-Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia.

The above the table welfare is just the beginning. Read it all.

One of those scheme is what we call "turning them loose on the local economy":

Royals kept the money flowing by sponsoring the residence permits of foreign workers and then requiring them to pay a monthly "fee" of between $30 and $150. "It is common for a prince to sponsor a hundred or more foreigners," the 1996 cable says.

These foreign workers compete with citizens for jobs. For every member of the House of Saud, and there are many given the royal welfare incentives to procreate, there many more Saudis who are poor by western standards.

Turning foreign workers loose on the economy to find a job and pay you an annual fee is common in other GCC countries.

Prince Talal says reform in KSA is urgent

Prince Talal bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud told BBC Arabic that "anything could happen" if King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz did not proceed with a program of political transformation. "King Abdullah ... is the only person who can carry out these reforms," the prince told the broadcaster. "On his departure, may that be in many years to come, latent trouble will surface and I have warned of this on many occasions. We need to resolve the problems in his lifetime," the prince added.

Talal added that if Saudi authorities "don't give more concern to the demands of the people, anything could happen in this country".

Talal has long called for reform in Saudi Arabia and formed the liberal political group "Free Princes Movement" in 1958 in reaction to the hostility between former kings Saud and Faisal.

Read it here.

What young Saudis want

Rulers who can deliver.

The many risks to the al Saud family's rule can be summed up in one sentence: The gap between aged rulers and youthful subjects grows dramatically as the information gap between rulers and ruled shrinks. The average age of the kingdom's trio of ruling princes is 83, yet 60% of Saudis are under 18 years of age. Thanks to satellite television, the Internet and social media, the young now are well aware of government corruption—and that 40% of Saudis live in poverty and nearly 70% can't afford a home. These Saudis are living Third World lives, suffering from poor education and unable to find jobs in a private sector where 90% of all employees are imported non-Saudis. Through new media the young compare their circumstances unfavorably with those in nearby Gulf sheikhdoms and the West.
...
Over the years, the royal family—now numbering nearly 7,000 princes—has come to pervade every corner of Saudi life, but it has lost public respect in the process. Almost every Saudi business, key ministry and mayoralty is headed, or figure-headed, by a prince. A royal family that once was relatively unified when decisions were made by a handful of senior brothers now is so large and fractured that different branches pursue conflicting agendas.
...
Still, most ordinary Saudis do not crave democracy. They fear that traditional tribal divisions, coupled with a lack of social and political organizations, would lead to mayhem—or to even greater domination by the conservative religious establishment that is well-organized through the kingdom's 70,000 mosques. If in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood is considered a potential threat, its Saudi equivalent already dominates Saudi society.

What Saudis hunger for are standard services provided by far less wealthy governments: good education, jobs, decent health care. They also want to be able to speak honestly about the political and economic issues that affect their lives. Yet when a professor of religion at Imam University dared in November to suggest on the Internet that Saudis be permitted to take public their private discussions on succession, he was jailed.

Read it all in the Wall Street Journal.

Wikileaks: Saudi youth admire American values

Influenced by American values like living with Jennifer Aniston in great New York City apartments with no apparent need to work, a US diplomatic cable says Saudi youth are less likely to participate in jihad.

The Guardian:

Satellite broadcasts of the US TV shows Desperate Housewives and Late Show With David Letterman are doing more to persuade Saudi youth to reject violent jihad than hundreds of millions of dollars of US government propaganda, informants have told the American embassy in Jeddah.

Broadcast uncensored and with Arabic subtitles alongside sitcoms such as Friends on Saudi Arabia's MBC 4 channel, the shows are being allowed as part of the kingdom's "war of ideas" against extremist elements. According to a secret cable titled "David Letterman: Agent of Influence", they have been proving more effective than Washington's main propaganda tool, the US-funded al-Hurra TV news channel.

Read it all.

Adhl: a form of slavery

AP:

Year after year, the 42-year-old Saudi surgeon remains single, against her will. Her father keeps turning down marriage proposals, and her hefty salary keeps going directly to his bank account.

The surgeon in the holy city of Medina knows her father, also her male guardian, is violating Islamic law by forcibly keeping her single, a practice known as "adhl." So she has sued him in court, with questionable success.

Adhl cases reflect the many challenges facing single women in Saudi Arabia. But what has changed is that more women are now coming forward with their cases to the media and the law. Dozens of women have challenged their guardians in court over adhl, and one has even set up a Facebook group for victims of the practice.

The backlash comes as Saudi Arabia has just secured a seat on the governing board of the new United Nations Women's Rights Council — a move many activists have decried because of the desert kingdom's poor record on treatment of women. Saudi feminist Wajeha al-Hawaidar describes male guardianship as "a form of slavery."

I've recently been looking over US census reports from the 1800s. The census included slaves (why count them: because they counted as 3/5 of a white man for the purposes of apportioning representation in the US House of Representatives). In those records slaves are counted as part of the household of whites. Often you see a notation that the slave is hired to someone else. The slave holder gets paid, not the slave. Slaves have no personal freedom. Their guardian (the slave holder) provides for them.

Just as the US laws courts perpetuated the institution of slavery, Saudi Sharia are letting down Saudi women. Adhl is not legal under Sharia law, but conservative judges fail to enforce the law.

American Bedu has more.

Give breast milk to your driver says fatwa

Gulf News

Riyadh: Saudi women plan to turn a controversial fatwa (religious ruling) to their advantage and launch a campaign to achieve their long-standing demand to drive in this conservative kingdom.

If the demand is not met, the women threatened to follow through the fatwa which allows them to breastfeed their drivers and turn them into their sons.
...
Breast milk kinship is considered to be as good as a blood relationship in Islam. "A woman can breastfeed a mature man so that he becomes her son. In this way, he can mix with her and her daughters without violating the teachings of Islam," the scholar [Shaikh Abdul Mohsin Bin Nasser Al Obaikan, member of Saudi Council of Senior Scholars and adviser to the king] said.
...
Another Saudi woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, questioned: "Does Islam allow me to breastfeed a foreign man and prevent me from driving my own car?

"I have not breastfed my own children. How do you expect me to do this with a foreign man? What is this nonsense?" she said.

Another woman said the fatwa should also apply to the husbands who should be breastfed by housemaids. By doing so, all will be brothers and sisters," she said.

grapeshisha on a roll

He's been doing some mean blogging of late:

• 75 year old Saudi woman to be flogged - Is there another side to the story? Could be, but grapeshisha and I doubt it.
• Ethanol fueled cars are haram - I was thinking maybe it was because ethanol is bad for the environment and raises the price of food. But I would be wrong.
• David Hasselhoff in Dubai chasing some Saudi girls - Need I say more? Something about the slit veils.

Don't cry for Abu Dhabi

Brad Setser has a piece on year on year changes in oil revenue for Saudi Arabia which - refering to the recent dip in prices - he titles Don't Cry for Saudi Arabia. He goes on to discuss Abu Dhabi's revenues and what they're doing with them.

Saudi Arabia creating cities from scratch

The Financial Times takes a look at the ambitions, the challenges, and the criticisms.

Maybe uppers will help.

Saudis to creat sovereign wealth fund

The Financial Times has two items today about the creation of a sovereign wealth fund in Saudi Arabia.

Cautious Saudis step into SWF arena

The decision to create an investment fund occurred only after months of internal debate among the kingdom’s cautious decision-makers. Some queried whether the nation really needed a fund. If so, who would manage it: would it fall under the responsibility of the finance ministry, or the central bank, which has managed the kingdom’s foreign assets? And, critically, how big would it be?

There was even speculation that more than one entity would be launched, enabling the funds to be sector specific.

There is also the issue of “blame and claim”, according to one analyst, who argues that few wanted to be blamed in the event of making the wrong investment decisions, while many would wait in the wings to claim recognition for taking the right investment decisions.

Another crucial factor that sets Saudi Arabia apart from its neighbours – and partly helps explain why the country has not previously set up a sovereign fund – is the size of the country. With some 17m Saudi citizens, and about 7m expatriate workers, the nation has a population far higher than the rest of the other five Gulf Co-operation Council states combined, with oil revenue per capita that only betters that of Oman in the GCC.

This has meant Saudi Arabia has spent more of its revenue internally and has a greater absorptive capacity than its smaller neighbours.

Saudis to launch $5.3bn sovereign fund

The kingdom has invested conservatively, with an eye on liquidity to help it through downturns in oil price cycles.

About 85 per cent of foreign exchange reserves are invested in dollar-dominated fixed-income securities.

“The proposed investment company’s strategy...would, on a general and basic level, be similar to that of a number of existing portfolio investors – for example Norway’s GPF [Government Pension Fund] or Singapore’s GIC [Government of Singapore Investment Corporation] – while taking into account the specific requirements of Saudi Arabia,” Mr Maiman said.

Analysts said the relatively small size of the sovereign fund’s initial capital reflected Riyadh’s conservatism but was also a result of the backlash sovereign wealth funds had generated as other Arab and Asian states used state investment vehicles to acquire assets in the west.

Bans on heads on mannequins and salesmen of ladies undergarments

Sharjah is cracking the whip on ladies garment shops.

Mannequins in Sharjah shops should be headless and only model “decent” clothing, a Sharjah Municipality circular has stated.

Gulf News interviewed Khalid Al Jaberi, head of market control at Sharjah Municipality:

“We reinforced the ban because it was a religious issue that raised many complaints from residents, who were against shops displaying men and women’s undergarments on realistic mannequins,” said Al Jaberi.

He said no fines had been imposed on shops because everyone had adhered to the circular.

Sharjah Municipality originally implemented the ban five years ago following a fatwa issued by the Islamic Affairs Department.

However, the ban has been reinforced because several outlets had stopped abiding by the rule. [seems to contradict earlier paragraph]

The municipality has always been keen on conserving the traditional Islamic values of Sharjah and has already implemented several rules, including the ban on men selling women’s undergarments in shops.

When I first arrived in Sharjah in the Spring of 2002 I visited the Sharjah Art Museum -- I highly recommend it. It had an exhibit of modern art. I was struck most by the mannequin in an abaya with red finger nails and red handcuffs on her wrists. Without thinking about rules I pulled out my camera and out of nowhere stepped a guard who sterning indicated no photos allowed.

Here's my post on the ban of men showing ladies undergarments from March 2007.