becomes easier to point the royal finger toward Manama and Kuwait, to suggest that it is in the temperament of Arabs to be ruled by their royals, or their tribal chiefs. Saudi Arabia was prepared to go to any length to vanquish the protests in Bahrain, which it did with armed force after doing a monumental deal to which we shall return eventually. In Yemen, matters were simplified. There was no need to do a deal to send in troops. The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is clever. He played the crowds carefully, holding his own support base together with tribal blandishments and with threats about the fear of the notorious South, once home to Marxism and now, by his lights, home to al-Qaeda. Saleh had two other cards in his pocket: (1) that the Saudis did not want instability on the Peninsula, and besides, after attempting to overthrow him in 1994 they have now come to terms with his rule; (2) that the United States and Saudis are petrified of al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP). Yemen remained on the front pages of the newspapers of the region, and on the inside pages of the Atlantic papers only because of the courage of the Yemeni people. But there was no real pressure for regime change from either Riyadh or Washington. In fact, Saleh was allowed to get away with murder, as the Saudis have in Manama, because there are limits to what Power is willing to concede in the region. Bahrain and Yemen illuminate the manuscript of Imperialism, a concept that many have increasingly come to deny or misrepresent.
Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave of struggle that broke out on the Peninsula in the late 1950s and peaked in the 1970s was crushed by the early 1980s. Encouraged by the overthrow of the monarch in Egypt by the coup led by Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts. Iraq and Lebanon followed. On the peninsula, the people wanted what Fred Halliday called “Arabia without Sultans.” The People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf emerged out of the Dhofar (Oman) struggle. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. With Nasserism in decline by the 1970s, the new momentum came to this Arabian republicanism from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. They had the inspiration, but not the organization. This Arab archipelago could not go the way of Yemen, where a revolution allowed a Marxist organization to seize power in 1967. Yemen’s Marxists faced ceaseless pressure from the Saudis, their Yemeni allies and the forces of the Atlantic world. In 1990, with the Soviet Union on the wane, the North (led by Saleh) absorbed the South. It was the peninsula’s Die Wende, the turning point, at about the same time as the two Germanys were united. The pendulum swung in favor of the status quo.
Rumbles have been heard in Saudi Arabia itself over the years. Liberals and Islamists held the center of the opposition to the regime. The former were constrained by threats and material advances, while if the latter were not susceptible to bribes they were sent off to do jihad elsewhere or to contemplate their errors in prison and re-education camps. One has to only look at the kleptocracy that goes by the name Al Saud Inc. to understand the frustrations of the people. Each of the major royals gets a monthly bursary of $270,000 while minor royals get $800 per month (with a bonus of $3 million at marriage and at the construction of a palace). Of the total Saudi budget of $40 billion, $2 billion goes to the core of the al-Saud family itself, who are, the US Embassy in Riyadh complained, “more adept at squandering than accumulating wealth.” Popular revulsion against this kind of expenditure is quite general. As Egypt rumbled, the regime put into place its typical maneuvers. Pre-emptive arrests removed some of the typical culprits. Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz met with Saudi newspaper editors and told them that the events in Egypt were the work of outsiders, a theme familiar to tyrants. His half-brother, the King, hastily opened the family’s treasury and disbursed $36 billion to quell the economic worries. The official opposition formed a platform of unity: it included the Islamic Umma Party (led by ten well-regarded clerics), the National Declaration of Reform (led by Mohammed Sayed Tayib), al-Dusturieen (a lawyers movement led by Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz) and a host of reform websites (such as dawlaty.info and saudireform.com). The Islamic Umma Party’s Abdul Aziz Mohammed al-Wohaibi told the Christian Science Monitor, “We think the royal family is not the only one who has the right to be leader of the country. We should treat the royal family like any other group. No special treatment.” This was heresy.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
