Saudi Arabia: how should the West act in the face of human rights contraventions?

Saudi Arabia is the world’s last absolute monarchy with an extremely arbitrary, reactionary and obscurantist justice system based on the most fundamental codification of Sharia law.

The kingdom’s medieval system of punishment includes chopping off the hands of thieves, flogging homosexuals, and beheading women for alleged adultery. The death penalty can also be carried out by stoning or firing squad followed by crucifixion.

In 2012, some 79 executions took place. One woman was beheaded for witchcraft and sorcery.

The country’s official murder and rape rates are one of the lowest in the world. The actual number, however, is far higher, and is corrupted by women and other minorities’ fear to report assaults committed against them.

The law is more often on the side of the aggressor than on the side of the victim, especially if the victim is not Saudi and male.

Foreign workers, in particular, have absolutely no protection or rights in the kingdom. At the moment, over 1.5 million female foreign maids live and work in Saudi Arabia, of which the majority is from Indonesia. Physical and mental abuse against them is not a rarity; it is a common practice. Many have had their passports taken away by their bosses. They are second class human beings – modern slaves – and are subject to random and unscrupulous attacks from their masters.

In 2010, an Indonesia maid was hospitalised after her boss burned her with an iron, cut off her lips with a pair of scissors and left her to die. Another maid was seriously injured by nails and other metal objects which were hammered into her body, after she complained about over-work.

Months later, Saudi Arabia beheaded a foreign worker and hanged her mutilated body from a helicopter as a warning to her colleagues.

According to Freedom House’sWorld Index, Saudi Arabia belongs to the ‘worst of the worst’ countries in the world.

Despite such an appalling human rights record, the kingdom is the West’s oldest and one of our closest allies in the Arab world.

This is our history. It is nothing to be proud of.

But what are the options on the table? Can we distance ourselves from the House of Saud? Should we encourage their overthrow if and when the Arab Spring hits the country? The brutal truth is that if the House of Saud were to fall, it would have serious repercussions for the West and several Middle Eastern countries, and would likely make the situation worse – even if that seems hard to imagine now.

The fall of the monarchy would touch upon central security and economic interests.

1. Iran: Saudi Arabia is the major counterbalance to Iran in the Arab world, especially since the end of the Saddam Hussein tyranny, and has contained its influence for decades. The demise of the House of Saud would considerably strengthen the regime in Teheran. While it is not an intelligent policy to control one dictatorship with another, as it is likely to result in a disaster in the long-term, it is of critical importance to take the consequences of that scenario into account.

2.  Regional stability: At the same time, the fall of the monarchy would considerably weaken the sheikdoms of the Gulf and the Hashemite Empire of Jordan. The collapse of King Abdullah’s reign, in return, would put the peace with Israel at high risk and undermine the stability of the region even further, with Syria drowning in blood and Egypt ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

3. Oil: The oil for security pact between the US and Saudi Arabia was forged by President Roosevelt and Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud on board of the U.S.S. Quincy in 1945. Nowadays, the US retrieves only 8.1% of its oil from the kingdom, as it is one of the world’s largest oil producers itself. Close to 40% of its oil needs are met at home. Europe, however, is far more dependent on the oil supply from the kingdom and would be subject to another economic crisis, if that flow were to stop.

So, how likely is it that Saudi Arabia will be hit by the tidal wave of change that is sweeping across the region? At the moment, it seems unlikely, but possible, that the Arab Spring will have a major impact on the country. It cannot be ruled out, as the kingdom shares some of the key criteria with other countries affected by the revolutions. For example, it suffers from high unemployment among the youth, no freedom of expression, oppression of minorities (in the case of Saudi Arabia, the Shia minority), and gender apartheid.

The House of Saud is indeed concerned and troubled by that scenario. It has significantly increased its security budget, forged closer ties with allies through the Gulf Cooperation Council (Jordan and Morocco were invited to join), supported revolutions that weakened arch-enemy Iran, such as in Libya and Syria, and on the other hand, supported the embattled monarchy of Bahrain, and pumped millions of dollars into Jordan.

But what should be of uppermost concern for the West is the make-up of the opposition to the House of Saud. Although there are some secularist democrats and moderates, the strongest and best organised opposition faction by far, is that of the Wahhabis. They have been part of the establishment ever since the existence of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, due to the alliance between the House of Saud and the clerics. That puts them into a privileged position and makes them the most likely successors to the monarchy.

Wahhabism is the most extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism prevalent in the Middle East and the origin of the radical ideology to which al-Qaeda is subscribed. Given Saudi Arabia’s immense wealth and largest oil reserves in the world, they could spread terror not only across the entire region but the entire planet.

Where does is leave us? Saudi Arabia remains the most complicated case in the Arab World for Western policy-makers. There is no easy way out of our moral dilemma. Tony Blair once said that if one cannot solve a problem, one has to manage it. As we cannot solve the Saudi problem, the best chance we have is to manage it by continuing to put pressure on the monarchy to engage in genuine reform.

Some steps into the right direction have already been taken; women were allowed to represent the country in the Olympics, and last week the king announced that from now on women can join the national assembly. We should be under no illusion, however, that progress in Saudi Arabia will be anything but painfully slow, and there will be many setbacks still to come.

The Saudi dilemma will stay with us for the foreseeable future, but while the West cannot fix the problem, it can at least apply pressure to make a bad situation better.

Syrian dilemma – Death toll tops 60,000

The United Nations announced today that the total death toll in Syria has passed 60,000. In summer of 2011, roughly 1,000 people lost their lives per month. The figure has now risen to 5,000.  It is said to be a conservative estimate with the actual numbers likely to be far higher.

Compared to other conflicts, the number of Syrian casualties now equals the total killed in the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948 or, put differently, Assad butchered half the number of people over 22 months that Milosevic killed between 1992-1995 in the Balkans.

Yet there are no signs of any potential intervention by the international community, as long as Assad is not resorting to chemical and biological weapons — also known as the ‘red line’ policy of the Obama administration.

But I am asking myself: shouldn’t tens of thousands of men, women and children not be a ‘red line’ in themselves? What is the acceptable human threshold of pain, given that we have said so many times: ‘never again!’

Some commentators suggest that we cannot do anything or that it is already too late to intervene effectively.

It is too late in the sense that the worst case scenario has already unfolded. What we see is that everything the Obama administration said would happen in the case of intervention, is actually taking place in the absence of leadership.

Islamists have hijacked the revolution and the opposition increasingly resorts to the tactics of terrorists.

Yet just because the situation on the ground is immensely bleak, and the post-Assad era likely to be chaotic, does not mean there is nothing we can do at all.

Damage control is still an option.

The Patriots along the Turkish/Syrian border could be utilised to establish a partial no-fly-zone without entering Syrian airspace. This is significant, as the Assad regime‘s preferred modus operandi is to kill from the air.

It would also allow us to establish humanitarian corridors to provide shelter. Right now, refugees are pouring into Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, at a rate of up to several thousand a day, and they have reached a breaking point of capacity.

The violence in Syria has also spilled into neighbouring countries. For instance, it manifests itself in the noteworthy increase of terrorist attacks in Iraq over the last few months. The crisis in Syria allowed Al Qaida to slip back into the country and with US troops gone, Iraq once more is at risk of descending into chaos.

It would also make sense to consider arming parts of the opposition. Such undertaking would not be without risk but what is happening right now is that while we refuse to engage with the secularists, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming the Islamist rebels with our weapons. The extremists grow stronger by the day. The people we should support, however, are side-lined.

The Syrian problem is not going away and the longer we wait, the uglier it will become. That is a lesson history has taught us many times.

We still have a choice. We always have one, even if it is a choice between the lesser of two evils.

Right now, Washington appears to be the major obstacle to intervention. No Western country has taken the full initiative but France, for instance, suggested the establishment of a no-fly-zone months ago.

With his inaction, Obama is betraying the core principles of American benevolence and is belittling his country’s power and influence in the world. Syria is one of his greatest failures and will haunt him throughout his second term.

As one Syrian woman put it:  ‘We will not forget that you forgot about us.’