by Peter Maass
The theater of the brazen was nearer. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a longtime Saudi ambassador to the United States, said in a television interview that it wasn’t a problem if the elite “misused or got corrupted with $50 billion,” because a far greater amount of money was not stolen. The prince, whose vacation compound in Aspen was valued at $135 million when it was put up for sale, famously added, “What I’m trying to tell you is, So what? We did not invent corruption.” A former fighter pilot, Prince Bandar was himself accused of receiving one billion pounds from BAE Systems, the British arms manufacturer that sold $80 billion of weapons to the Saudi government. An initial probe by the British government’s Serious Fraud Office was shut down by then-prime minister Tony Blair because it imperiled British-Saudi ties, though the U.S. Department of Justice has begun looking into the case.
Royal corruption was not the only precursor to instability. The extraction of oil required the construction of an infrastructure that included drilling rigs, pipelines, roads, power plants, offices and airports. American firms flooded into an isolated nation that, until the 1930s, had almost no paved roads. The oil boom functioned as a sudden introduction to Western ways. Elvis Presley and Johnnie Walker were brought to the kingdom, as was education for women. The transition was uneasy because Saudi Arabia was one of the most conservative societies in the Arab world, with a brand of Islam, known as Wahhabism, that was famously strict and puritanical. Even the advent of TV was an occasion for a violent protest from conservatives opposed to reproductions of the human image. While it was a comfort to have air-conditioning in Riyadh and running water in Jeddah, some Saudis worried that Islam’s holy land, where Mecca and Medina are located, was selling its soul.
The revolt of the alienated began in 1979, when several hundred gunmen, led by a messianic fundamentalist named Juhayman al-Oteibi, seized Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Islam’s holiest shrine. Perhaps the seizure would have taken place without the oil wealth on which the royal family had compromised itself, but the qualities that made the House of Saud so odious to Islamists—its Westernized ways, its love of material comforts, its less-than-devout inclinations, its willingness to allow infidels and their impure customs into the holy land—were linked to petroleum. Oteibi, speaking over a loudspeaker system normally used to broadcast prayers, called for the ousting of the royal family and the imposition of theocratic rule.
The national guard failed to retake the mosque in a series of assaults. The ruling family, realizing that its own forces were inept or disloyal, called upon the military services of foreign countries, including Pakistan and, controversially, France. Infidels are not allowed in Mecca, so the use of French commandos has been officially denied. The foreigners, according to some news accounts, were required to make quick conversions to Islam before entering Mecca. In the final battle, which killed hundreds, a gas was used to disable the fundamentalists. More than fifty-five of them, including Oteibi, were captured and, a month later, beheaded in the largest mass execution in Saudi history.
The royal family felt too weak to oppose a rising tide that its misbehavior had helped incite. Instead, the House of Saud decided to placate the fundamentalists. New authority was granted to religious leaders, with the Ministry of Education placed under their control and enhanced powers given to the muttawa, an Islamic police force whose official name was the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. To augment its conservative credentials, the government gave several hundred million dollars a year to the mujahideen who fought the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Most crucially, in terms of the global spread of fundamentalism, billions of dollars were poured into projects to propagate Islamic values. An American think tank estimated that more than $70 billion was spent between 1975 and 2002 on projects that included the construction and operation of mosques and study centers. Thanks to this funding, in Karachi, Jakarta, Hamburg and elsewhere, young Muslims were taught that the Koran should be the law of the land, that living as the Prophet lived was a way forward, and that nothing was more glorious than dying in the service of Allah. With a population equal to only 1 percent of Muslims worldwide, Saudi Arabia funded more than 90 percent of the faith’s costs, and these expenditures constituted the most expensive information campaign ever mounted.
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Paradoxically, the dissatisfaction the monarchy sought to cure by supporting fundamentalist causes had the effect of deepening the problem. Exhibit A is the seventeenth child of a onetime bricklayer.
The oil boom enriched a number of nonroyal Saudis, including Mohammed bin Laden, who was a manual laborer for Aramco in the 1940s. Mohammed used his talent with numbers—he could instantly solve calculations—as well as his proclivity for hard work and harder bargains to create a construction firm that by the 1960s was building everything—roads, palaces, mosques. The wealthiest nonroyal in Saudi Arabia, he was rich enough to support twenty-two wives and fifty-four children. If the oil boom had not happened, he could not have dreamed of such an extended family, and Osama would not have been born.
After Mohammed bin Laden died, in a 1968 plane crash, his firm continued to prosper under the leadership of his eldest sons. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi Binladen Group, as it was called, employed about thirty-six thousand people. Osama was not an active manager, though he performed minor functions during quieter moments in his life. Although his wealth was estimated in some reports to be as high as $300 million, later and more reliable estimates cited in Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens suggest that Osama received about $24 million from the family firm between 1970 and 1993 or 1994.
This was sufficient to make him, when he went to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a noted figure of the anti-Communist jihad who leveraged his personal finances by raising donations from wealthy friends and acquaintances. By the time he returned home after the 1989 Soviet withdrawal, bin Laden was regarded as an Islamic hero. The 1990-91 Gulf War soon brought a new cause to his life when the royal family welcomed American troops to ward off the attack by Iraqi forces massed in Kuwait. Ironically, the Saudi government became a prime target of the fundamentalists the government had all but created. Like Dokubo Asari in Nigeria, bin Laden was outraged at the corruption of political and moral values that oil had wrought, and he stridently opposed the presence of an infidel army in Islam’s holy land. Dissatisfied and restless, he moved to Sudan and presided over a grab bag of small businesses started with his funds.
The Sudanese all but fleeced him, so he left for Afghanistan in 1996, nearly broke. Because he had spoken out against the Saudi alliance with America, family money was now out of reach. At times, bin Laden and his followers had nothing to eat in Afghanistan but stale bread. Al-Qaeda, mostly inert since its creation in 1988, was nursed to life with modest donations bin Laden raised on the basis of his previous exploits fighting the Soviets. His new enemy was the United States. Oil was now relevant not as a source of funding for bin Laden’s activities but as the reason the United States kept its troops in Saudi Arabia (to ward off another invasion of Kuwait by the still-troublesome Iraq). Bin Laden’s mission broadened beyond removing infidel soldiers from his homeland: he now wanted to cleanse the entire Muslim world of American and Jewish influences.
Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual, wrote a book about the terrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule entitled Republic of Fear. The Middle East has many such countries, each different from the other, and Saudi Arabia is one of them. A hallmark of these countries, whether they are rich or poor, is a brutal security apparatus that, rather than elections or dialogue, is the method through which the unloved regimes deal with their opponents. Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, when I talked with him, was trying to avoid becoming the next victim.
Mugaiteeb had one of the loneliest jobs in Saudi Arabia. He was the oft-interrogated and occasionally imprisoned leader of the Saudi branch of Human Rights First, which consisted of a handful of activists sending out information and appeals to a world that paid little heed. As Amnesty Internation
al noted, “The Saudi Arabian government spares no effort to keep its appalling human rights record a secret, and other governments have shown themselves more than willing to help maintain the secrecy.”
After arriving in Riyadh, I reached Mugaiteeb on his cell phone in Dhahran. He was parking his car at home and told me he had been summoned for a police interrogation the next day.
“I have been under scrutiny for the past two years,” he said, his voice a mixture of impatience and nervousness. “All they have done is harass me. I do not know what they want to accomplish.”
Mugaiteeb had arranged to meet a small group of diplomats the next day, so the summons appeared to be a form of punishment and a means of stopping the event from happening.
Might he be jailed when he went in for questioning?
“It would add another honorable individual to the long list of activists who are in jail,” Mugaiteeb replied. “We are not sheep. Believe me, I don’t care. They”—he was referring to the regime—“like to break people. They think they are getting on my nerves, but they can go to hell. Look at the price of oil, and still people do not have what they need. They think they can steal the resources of the country and the people will keep quiet.”
He spoke fast, like a man who knew the connection might be cut at any moment. He quickly climbed the stairs to his apartment, and I could hear him gasping for air. His heart was not good, he said. Mugaiteeb was in his fifties and had ulcers, sciatica and thyroid problems. His financial health was not robust, either. He was $150,000 in debt and paid for his cell phone and Internet connection with credit cards that were nearly maxed out.
Opening the door to his apartment, he was met by his eighteen-month-old daughter. Sweetheart, he said in Arabic, sweetheart. I could hear the daughter’s playful voice, and I could hear him start to cry. I asked whether we should talk later.
“She is going to miss me if she grows up without her dad,” he replied. He began to sob again. The next day he had to submit himself to a system whose tortures and deprivations he had devoted his life to uncovering. He wasn’t sure he would even have that long, because the police could come at any moment if they realized he was talking to a reporter. He spoke as though to a confidant, even though we had never met.
“We have to make our lives meaningful. People die by the thousands every day without doing anything. We must make meaning.”
He paused.
“I am sorry for talking so much. I am very tired. I was beaten up two months ago.”
He said his wife had just arrived home.
“She does not know the news yet,” he whispered.
The youth of Saudi Arabia are children of oil. In 1973, the population was six and a half million, but the infusion of postembargo affluence helped fuel a demographic explosion. Baby boom followed baby boom, and the population is now about four times larger than it was thirty-five years ago. These Saudis would seem to have it made.
The latest boom was well under way when I visited the country in 2005. Riyadh’s skyline was, at that moment, a panorama of cranes and extraordinary new buildings, including the Kingdom Center, a thousand feet high and shaped, at its top, like a postmodern bottle opener. Nearby, the Al Faisaliah Center had been designed in the form of an elongated pyramid, with a sphere housing a restaurant at its apex. The government was planning to build entirely new cities and further alter Riyadh’s skyline with the $480 million Al Rajhi Tower, in the shape of a sail. The architectural brashness, mirrored in other countries and emirates of the then-booming Persian Gulf, made the vistas of Chicago, San Francisco and even New York seem tired and dull. And what was inside these buildings was remarkable, too. I visited the lobby of Al Faisaliah one morning and chatted with a real estate agent who was selling million-dollar vacation villas on man-made islands off Dubai whose collective shape resembled a palm tree. Sales were brisk as well-to-do Saudis, dressed in impeccable white thawbs, inspected a scale model of the fantasy islands. Actually, the islands were real—they were under construction, and the first ones wold be completed a year later—but the most striking architectural statement, when oil prices fell as the global economic crisis took hold in 2008, was the forest of immobile cranes throughout the Persian Gulf. The construction of skyscrapers and cities and fantasies had stopped cold.
The illusion of everlasting wealth was carried along (yet undermined) by the fact that foreigners held two-thirds of all Saudi jobs (and an even higher percentage of private-sector jobs). Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans labored at construction sites, Egyptians and Sudanese populated service industries, Americans and Britons ran the oil industry and banks. It was possible to spend months in Riyadh without speaking to a Saudi. Drivers, waiters, shopkeepers, bankers, nurses and doctors were almost all foreigners. The man who was selling the villas in the lobby was not Saudi. This would seem a benefit of possessing the world’s largest oil reserves, because an army of foreigners can be paid to do your work. Saudi Arabia was one of the last nations on earth to outlaw slavery, in 1962, so it was accustomed to a subclass of workers.
But in fact Saudi Arabia, even in its boom days, had a severe economic problem. More than 30 percent of Saudi men were jobless, and they were not pleased, because few had a prince’s stipend. Of course, this seems odd. Why didn’t they just take the jobs that foreigners had? The answer was simple: most Saudis would rather be unemployed than accept low-paying, difficult work. And the good jobs—the ones in banking and other well-paying sectors—were out of reach for most Saudis because their education was insufficient. The elite sent their sons and daughters abroad for university and secondary school because the kingdom’s recently formed educational system—its oldest colleges date from the 1950s—produced third-rate graduates whose studies were controlled, until a few years ago, by religious leaders who continue to exert a significant amount of influence. Even in the region, Saudi graduates could not compete: Egypt produced better engineers; Lebanon churned out better bankers. The best Saudi geologists did not graduate from King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals but from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Texas. The government tried to force businesses to employ locally educated youths, but the program hasn’t gone well. An American who ran a midsized engineering firm in Dhahran told me of a Saudi he reluctantly hired for a white-collar job who had a habit of assigning his work to expatriate Asians in the office. Making the situation worse, the Saudi did not listen to advice or instructions from the better-skilled Asians. He was not just worthless but disruptive.
These sorts of problems help explain why the country didn’t have thriving industrial or technology sectors. The government had no shortage of funds to invest in new industries but lacked an ingredient that successful economies like China, Germany and Chile tend to possess: educated and motivated workers. And, unfortunately, the industry Saudi Arabia did possess—oil extraction and refining—was a miserly one when it came to job creation. Outside Dhahran I visited the corporate and residential compound of Aramco, the state-owned firm where the pay and benefits were wonderful but only for the lucky few with jobs there—and many of them were foreigners.
The compound was located at the spot where, in the 1930s, Max Steineke and his team of geologists had pitched their tents to explore for oil in the empty desert. Several million people now lived in the region, and the “camp,” as it was still called, had the feel of a gated community. Its Rolling Hills Country Club had a golf course and a clubhouse serving burgers and salads. There was a bowling alley, duck ponds, baseball diamonds, parks with gazebos and grills, a horse stable called Hobby Farm, a skateboard park, a movie theater, tennis courts, a miniature golf course and miles of jogging paths. The streets had bucolic names like Prairie View and Eastern Avenue, and they were plied by yellow school buses and carefully driven SUVs that made full and complete stops. The ranch-style homes whispered “America” into your ear, as did the lawns and the kids on bicycles.
The white-collar residents of this enclave, who were a mixture of
Saudis and expatriate Americans and Europeans, called themselves “Aramcons.” Their lives were apart from what lay beyond the gates. In the rest of Saudi Arabia, Islamic custom prevailed, overseen by the muttawa. Women in shorts did not jog on the streets in the rest of the country, where they wore body-and-head-covering abayas when not at home and were forbidden from socializing with men who were not their fathers, brothers or husbands. Movie theaters were banned outside Aramco’s gates, because reproducing the human image was still frowned upon (with the politically useful exception of the country’s monarchs, whose faces and names were everywhere). The camp had a high-tech hospital that was far better than all but a few medical centers in the entire country. (Even so, when first-rate treatment was required, a private suite at the Mayo Clinic would be reserved for Prince X or Princess Y.)
My host was a Saudi employee of Aramco who was proud of the comfortable and enlightened life the company had created for its workers. After lunch in a camp restaurant that had the feel of an Ivy League faculty club, and that was staffed by Filipinos and Sri Lankans, we got into his car and drove toward Dhahran, a few miles away. There were no more lawns or even sidewalks along the roads, no women chatting with men or driving cars (the camp is one of the few places where women can drive in Saudi Arabia), no more of the quiet contentment that was the shared condition of Aramcons enjoying their well-paid jobs, excellent health care and competitive schools that prepared their children for modernity rather than joblessness or jihad. As I have said earlier, it is one of the oil industry’s structural tragedies that it requires few workers, so there was little room for Saudis at their own oil company. In a country of more than 20 million people, Aramco employed 50,000, and each year it hired just 500 new employees.
“We are rich, but rich in what?” my host asked, downcast, as he dropped me off. “It is oil. It is not factories.”