ARAB AFFAIRS - Mar. 16 - Arrests In Saudi Arabia.

In a sweep of five regions - Jeddah, Riyadh, Dhahran, Al Qatif and Dammam - Saudi police arrest 13 leading liberals and academics. Later in the week Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef Ibn Abdel Aziz, who is strongly opposed to Crown Prince Abdullah's positive response to calls for reforms, refused to release the intellectuals and warned there could be more arrests if open calls for freedom did not stop. In an article published by the IHT, Mai Yamani, a daughter of former Saudi oil minister Shaikh Ahmad Yamani and a research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, says: "Nayef and some of his brothers have now asserted their hard-line control. The new message is clear: there are no seats available in the Saudi national dialogue for moderate Islamists and liberals...The Wahhabi religious establishment, with its plethora of online fatwas and unrelenting dogma against the West, will see the move (the arrest of freedom advocates) as an essential act of house cleaning, ridding the country of any infectious notions of democracy. That alone should give the West pause for thought". Although some of those detained were released later, they first had to pledge they will never again call for reforms. On March 19, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal defended the arrest at a press conference held with visiting US Secretary of State Powell. He told Powell Riyadh would manage without any external interference.

Ms Yamani began her article by saying: "Saudi Arabia's latest high-profile public relations operation to sell its vision of political reform to a skeptical West has collapsed after a fresh crackdown on leading intellectuals. Four members of Saudi Arabia's much hyped Consultative Council (Shura)...had been flown to London to wax lyrical about their country's reformist credentials. They were feted by politicians and given a sympathetic hearing by local journalists. But they had barely unpacked their suitcases back home when the authorities shot their own fox" (by arresting the 13 intellectuals). She said one of the academics was "humiliatingly detained during a university lecture and handcuffed in front of his students". She added: "All had petitioned the government for reforms but had scrupulously professed loyalty to the state. Several had even held face-to-face meetings with an apparently sympathetic Crown Prince Abdullah. More important, they represented the one moderate section of Saudi society that could have helped the royal family introduce the reforms they claimed to want - and thereby stemmed the rising levels of terrorist violence. Seven were later released after they pledged not to petition for reform or talk to reporters. The remaining leaders were refusing to cooperate without legal representation. By arresting such widely respected, moderate figures, the government has made a mockery of its claims about moving the political process forward, its promises of a more open society and its desire to play a full part in global bodies such as the World Trade Organization". (The arrests came a week after the Saudi government announced the formation of the National Committee for Human Rights, whose members were expected to travel to Geneva to explain their new role to the UN Commission on Human Rights). Among those detained was Matruk Al Faleh, a former lecturer at King Saud University in Riyadh, dismissed for writing an article pressing for urgent reforms after 9/11. Mohammed Saeed Tayeb, also arrested, is a lawyer and publisher, jailed in 2002 for having written a critical letter to the Shura. After a US State Department spokesman condemned the detentions as "inconsistent with the kind of forward progress that reform-minded people are looking for", the Saudi authorities insisted that the arrests were an internal matter.

It was said the detainees had enraged the royal family and the Wahhabi establishment by calling for a separate human rights committee, independent of the government, and publishing demands for a constitutional monarchy, putting them on a collision course with Prince Nayef. Ms Yamani says in her IHT article: The arrests "illustrate a serious split within the royal family, whose own reformists, led by Abdullah, were prepared to tolerate criticism and for a time were capable of protecting the critics. This is no longer the case. Those jailed...were emboldened by Western talk of democracy spreading throughout the Arab world. They wanted to move the process forward. They may even have believed that the US plan for democracy...would offer them some protection inside their own country".

The Arab axis regimes - Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria - were particularly upset by the way Bush's Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI) was first leaked out of Washington in February. It was through the website of Al-Hayat - a Saudi-financed pan-Arab daily published out of London - that most Arab governments learned details of the initiative. It was part of Washington's post-Iraq war strategy for the Middle East. Rumours of an ambitious project had been circulating for weeks as US and European officials met in Washington later to discuss the GMEI. A more benign - or, for the axis regimes, less threatening - version of the GMEI is to be unveiled at the G8 summit in Georgia, USA, next June. But when a leaked copy of preliminary proposals to promote social and political reforms appeared in Al-Hayat, their reaction was harsh.

After prodding from and subsequent consultations with Assad, Egyptian President Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdullah (the Wahhabi kingdom's de facto ruler) issued a joint statement in Saudi Arabia telling the US their region would "not accept" reform being "imposed on Arab and Islamic countries from the outside". Stability, they said, required US attention to crisis - namely the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and Iraq. But, at the same time, the botched handling of the GMEI and the Arab reaction underlined a growing polarisation between Washington and the Arabs a year after the US invasion of Iraq. Yet liberal Arabs said that, while the language in the GMEI - which a Bush team is redrafting - was somewhat patronising, even the first document was modest in its aims. Its proposals included aiding parliamentary exchanges, giving help in drafting legislation, promotion of literacy, micro-finance and the establishment of a regional development bank. The furore was driven primarily by the sense that the US had failed to consult its Arab allies in its quest to impose change.

According to the FT, many Arab rulers saw in the GMEI signs of the Israeli view that democratising the Arab world was a pre-requisite for solving the Arab-Israeli conflict. Indeed, for many years, right-wing Israeli leaders have been stressing that for peace with the Arabs to be viable (hence lasting) the negotiations must be between democracies, rather than between a democracy and dictatorships - regimes that can tear down any treaty at any time of their liking, as Saddam Hussein did (in late September 1980) with the Algiers agreement between himself and the Shah of Iran. It was because of this argument that in 1996 US neo-conservatives (neo-cons) included Benyamin Netanyahu among the drafters of an American policy paper called "Clean Break", a document adopted years later by the Republican Party when it decided to field George W. Bush as its candidate to the 2000 US presidential elections. This paper also became part of the neo-cons' global scheme called Project for the New American Century (PNAC)

So concerned were Arab rulers in February 2004, as the FT noted, that when their foreign ministers met to prepare for the March 29-30 Arab League summit in Tunis, "a flood of initiatives was put forth" to reform their own regimes as well as the League itself. By March 20, it had been planned for the summit's resolutions to emphasise that the most important contribution the US could make to regional stability was to rein in Israel. It had also been planned for the Tunis summit to issue a declaration of principles on gradual reforms, to placate Bush without threatening the survival of existing Arab regimes. Survival was the motivation behind the new Arab axis, an axis of regimes helping each other to remain in power. Essentially, this is a buffer between their people and a Bush administration determined to drain the swamp from which the likes of Osama Bin Laden have emerged to kill Americans anywhere. But it is a temporary axis as the three regimes involved are no longer certain that Bush will be re-elected to a second term in November. Yet a Democratic administration under Kerry may carry the same torch, and no axis in the Arab world has lived long enough to make a difference (except for the GCC and the UAE).

Ibrahim Nawar, head of the Arab Press Freedom Watch, has been quoted as saying: "Since the Iraq war, governments in the region have been trying to respond to pressure from abroad and from within and to ease some measures but at the same time they want to stay in full control of everything...We've seen some positive developments in the last years but not to the extent that it can be sustained". But the faltering of the GMEI also shows that, while the Arab public is eager for the very same reforms proposed by the US, Washington's policies in Iraq and the occupied Palestinian territories have eroded American credibility. Says Mohammed Al-Sayed Saeed, deputy head of Cairo's Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies: "We see a trend of (the Arab public's) increasing disorientation, confusion on the ideological and cultural scale. We see mounting distrust and hostility towards the US; it is becoming one of the major dogma in the region".

Anti-US Arabs and Iranians have viewed the GMEI as another sign of US imperialism; none of them could conceive that democracy was more important to them as people than democracy as a threat to their ruler's regime. The transformation of the Middle East - drummed up so frequently by the Americans since 9/11 - has been perceived in the Arab world as being the broader objective of the Iraq war, with the US justifying its attack by focusing on the brutality of Saddam's Baathist regime, on his links with terrorists, and on the "grave threat" his supposed WMD presented to the world. The FT also noted that, beyond the specific casus belli, lay "a grand vision of how America should wield its unrivalled military and economic power". That sense of American supremacy, combined with most Arabs' fear of an inferiority complex and the conspiracy theory so popular in the Middle East, plus the concept of a unipolar world, emerged after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. But it was 9/11 that shifted what Bush has readily described as an imperial mindset to remap the Middle East. Bush told the National Endowment for Democracy in November: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty". But, so far, US actions in Iraq have tended more to undermine Washington's ability to turn its vision into reality than to assure Arab advocates of freedom that the Americans will stand by them. As the FT noted, Arab warnings that the Iraq war could exacerbate the threat of terrorism from radical Islamists "have proved credible".

In Syria, the Baathist regime is facing the prospect of civil strife. In Saudi Arabia, there is a more open confrontation between security forces and cells of Al-Qaeda, as well as a war of low intensity between the ministry of interior and intellectuals demanding reform. In Iraq, the war provided an excuse for Al-Qaeda to win new recruits. An October tape from Osama Bin Laden broadcast on Al-Jazeera identified Iraq as the front for a new jihad and called on Muslims to join the battle against "the Jews and the Crusaders". The rising number of suicide attacks in Iraq suggest that local Sunni Islamists and Wahhabi militants infiltrating through Al Anbar may have heeded Bin Laden's call.

Bush has also insisted that, "because America and our allies acted (in Iraq), all the world is now seeing democracy rising in the heart of the Middle East". The Iraqi Governing Council's agreement on an interim constitution which guarantees human rights and freedom of religion, he said, was one of the historic changes that were "sending a message across the region from Damascus to Tehran". Grand Ayatollah Sistani, however, is said to have vowed privately that he and other Shiite leaders will reverse the US achievement after June, when sovereignty should revert to the Iraqis.

The US-inspired and UN-guided Iraqi experiment in democracy, if it succeeds, will have a defining impact on the Arab world and Iran. But, as the FT noted, "the past year has shown that Iraq's vision of democracy and the projection of American power do not necessarily coexist". The most glaring illustration is in Iraq itself, where the US has been resisting early elections out of fear that radicals, whether Shiite or Sunni, would make gains. While the US has succeeded in unsettling Syria and Iran, in both countries the reaction of the regimes has been to consolidate power rather than speed internal reforms.

Seen from the Arab world, US policy is riddled with contradictions. The FT quoted Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi analyst and adviser to one of the senior princes, as saying: "The US is serious - it wants to change the Middle East but it doesn't know how. They want democracy but not Islamists to emerge. They want democracy but they want the elected bodies to accept relations with Israel". The FT also reported analysts as arguing that the US was not doing enough to create secular alternatives to existing regimes. "True", it said, "some progressive laws have been put in place in a few countries over the past year". The Moroccan government has introduced a family code that brings far-reaching reforms to women's rights. In Jordan, a quota was set for women to be elected to parliament. "Still, though", the FT added, "the trend towards more Islamisation and radicalisation is continuing and is likely to have been exacerbated by the Iraq war". Elections in Jordan, Morocco and Kuwait show that Islamists remain the largest opposition to government. Other indicators of Islamisation are the newly launched satellite stations in the region devoted to Islamic causes and the increasing number of religious programmes, which can be seen on more general channels.

According to a survey just released by the Pew Research Centre, overwhelming majorities in Jordan and Morocco believe suicide attacks against Americans and other westerners in Iraq are justified. Most people in these countries also say the US and Britain lied about Iraq's WMD. The FT said the dilemma facing the US in its quest for a more democratic Middle East "is to reconcile its ambitions with its self-declared war on terror. Human-rights defenders say that new anti-terrorism laws are being used to suppress freedom of expression".

Nader Fergani, the lead author of the UN-backed Arab Human Development Report published in mid-2002, was quoted by the FT as saying: "I'm afraid what will come out of (the GMEI) will be superficial... reforms to respond to outside pressure, and that will delay deep and profound change. This has been one of the mechanisms of authoritarian regimes - if you speak of human rights, they go and set up their own human rights organisation...we end up with facades that don't represent genuine reform".

According to Gulf News, the Saudi leaders rebuffed a plea made by visiting UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to lead the Arab regimes towards the GMEI. Straw asked the Saudi leaders also to re-introduce their peace initiative, first announced by Crown Prince Abdullah at the Arab summit in Beirut in late March 2002. Aware of rising Arab suspicions towards US policies, Straw tried to make it clear to the Saudi leaders that the GMEI might become "an international" initiative after G8 summit. At a joint press conference with his Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud, Straw did not refer to the GMEI but said he had spoken with a number of Saudi intellectuals and members of the appointed Shura on "a wide range issues". In a speech at the Foreign Policy Centre in London on March 1, Straw said: "As many in the (Arab) region recognise, much more needs to be done - and with a sense of urgency". He called for "a more open, participative and representative government supported by a stronger civil society; for action to make the rule of law effective and transparent; for greater respect for human rights; for economic reform to create jobs and stimulate growth; for improved standards of education, in order to prepare young people for life and work in the 21st century; and for imaginative changes to enable women really to fulfill their potential in society". However, he stressed that ideas must come from the Arabs themselves, adding: "We in Europe or the West cannot and must not dictate to them; but we can, and will, work with them to support and nurture reform".