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| Arabia |
| WHEN TERROR COMES HOME |
| 2004-04-28 |
| FOR more than a year now Saudi Arabia, the kingdom that sits atop a quarter of the world’s oil reserves, has been hit by a wave of terrorism that shows no signs of abating. Until a month ago, it was nothing but "operations against deviants." Now Saudi officials use terms like "conflict" and "war." And after a suicide-bomb attack destroyed the security forces buildings in Riyadh earlier this month, Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz said, "We are waging war against evil-doers." "War" is no exaggeration. According to Saudi sources, kingdom forces have clashed with terrorists at least 80 times since last November. Some seem to have been fairly large-scale battles. Casualties on both sides run into the hundreds. The security forces have captured more than 1,000 alleged terrorists and uncovered terrorist arms caches that could supply fairly large military units. Government losses are not reported. But a recent meeting between Prince Nayef and families of the "heroes lost in the war against deviants" attracted a large turnout. Worse is the fear that the terrorists have instilled in the average Saudi. Last Wednesday, a rumor, spread by Arab satellite TV channels, notably Al Jazeera, warned the people of Riyadh not to venture out of their homes because of "imminent explosions." The streets emptied in a flash, turning the usually bustling city into a ghost town. Prince Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, the governor of Riyadh, had to appear on television to reassure citizens they would be safe. These may be early days in a long struggle. It is foolish to compare the threat, as did one Saudi editorialist, to a "patch of cloud in a serene sky." Over the past half a century, the kingdom has faced a variety of challenges - from advocates of pan-Arabism, from proto-Communists, from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini. In every case, the Saudis were able to contain the threat by a mixture of firmness and compromise. They bought off some enemies with fat checks. In other cases, they made political pirouettes to get out of a tight corner. Some Saudi policymakers believe the latest threat could also be handled via traditional means. They are wrong. Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, the deputy interior minister and the man in overall command of the campaign against terror, insists that the new threat, from al Qaeda-style groups, is in an altogether different category. He is right. It is enough to watch one of the blood-curdling diatribes of these terror masters, often broadcast by Al Jazeera, to know that this is one monster that cannot be restrained, let alone tamed, by traditional methods. These groups have said they seek nothing but total victory for their diseased ideology. And there is every reason to believe that they mean it. The first thing to do is to understand that these al Qaeda-style terror groups do not exist in isolation. They are products of an entire society and must be studied in a broader context. Think of a nesting set of Russian "matrushka" dolls. The biggest doll represents Saudi society, which has become obsessed with religion in the past few decades. Before oil, the Saudis lived in tents and certainly had no money to build houses with two entrances, one for men, the other for women. The oil bonanza has allowed most of them to build their homes on the basis of architectural apartheid. In the pre-oil days, Saudi women had to work to help ward off collective starvation. Now they are given an expensive education but kept locked up at home. In 1960, there were no more than eight mosques in Riyadh; today, almost 3,000. (Some put it closer to 20,000!) In 1960, the kingdom didn’t have the money for a single state-sponsored school of theology. Today, there are hundreds, producing tens of thousands of Islam "experts" each year. The second doll, nested within the bigger one, represents the numerous institutions, always well-funded by oil money, that the kingdom has set up to make sure that citizens behave in as Islamic a way (whatever that means) as possible. The third doll represents the many hundreds of charities, big and small, that have collected billions of dollars for Islamic causes that no one quite understands and/or controls. The fourth doll represents the army of preachers, teachers, muezzins, muftis, mutawaa (enforcers) and "discerners of good and evil" who outnumber those who work in the vital oil industry. The fifth doll represents the many thousands of Saudis - recruited, trained and financed by the state - dispatched to Afghanistan to wage jihad. Finally, we have the smallest and deadliest doll: the terrorists and suicide-bombers who regard virtually all other Saudis as impious, if not downright heathen, and, thus, facing the choice between "reversion to Islam" and death. They are the ultimate products of a society in which religion, rather than being regarded as part of life, has become an obsession that engulfs the entire nation’s existence. From the moment they wake up until the moment they sleep, Saudis are bombarded with religion, with not a single day of respite. Every evening they watch television that sings the praises of martyrdom, which means killing some Israelis, Americans or, more recently, Iraqis in suicide attacks. Saudi state TV now devotes long programs to the effects of terror attacks on the kingdom itself. It gives officials unrestricted air time to lament the attacks and to condemn "the evil doers." But all such programs are immediately followed by others in which fire-eating preachers talk about "our Palestine," "the beauty of martyrdom" and the ugly soul of the Western powers. The 9/11 attacks and the suicide-murder of Israelis sitting in cafes or riding buses to work are presented with a mixture of admiration and awe. The criminals who are killing Iraqis in the name of Islam are presented as "fighters against occupation." The Saudis must begin to realize that there is no good terrorism. The cliché about one man’s terrorist being another man’s freedom-fighter is an intellectual swindle. Terrorism is terrorism, regardless of where it strikes and why. Today, the Saudis are paying the price of not wanting to understand that simple truth. The same "evil-doers" who cut off the testicles of Soviet soldiers, many of them Muslims, in Afghanistan in the 1980s are now killing Saudi workers and Iraqi schoolchildren. Until they understand this, the Saudis will be unable to play their part in the war against terrorism, let alone protect themselves against the self-appointed enforcers of Allah’s will on earth. |
| Posted by:tipper |