SAUDI ARABIA: WHY TERRORISTS ARE TARGETING ISLAM'S HOLIEST LAND
Artículo en “The Economist” del 3-6-04
Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)
A reactionary regime reacts too slowly to a growing threat
IT WAS not the bloodiest of terrorist outrages, nor the boldest, nor the most competently executed. But the attack on oil companies and a smart housing compound in the seaside city of Khobar was in some ways the most disturbing of the string of attacks that has shaken Saudi Arabia since May last year. More than previous incidents, it has focused minds on the stability of a country that is the wellspring of both the Muslim faith and a quarter of the world's oil.
The attack began on the morning of May 29th, when a group of gunmen shot down security guards and entered two office complexes, searching for and murdering anyone who looked vaguely western. Finding few suitable victims, they took off, at one point dragging a bound man behind their car, and at another shooting at a vehicle filled with children on their way to school. Its fuel tank exploded, incinerating a ten-year-old Egyptian boy.
The assailants then tried to ram a car bomb into the gate of Khobar's most luxurious residential compound. When it failed to explode, they scaled the perimeter wall and passed from house to house before occupying the six-storey hotel at the centre of the complex. Most of the guests had already left for work, so the attackers took some two dozen hotel staff hostage, killing the non-Muslims among them.
Helicopter-borne commandos recaptured the building in the early hours of the following morning, but by this time the attackers had already fled. Saudi police soon wounded and captured one, said to be the ringleader, but at least three others escaped in a pick-up truck and later hijacked another vehicle in the nearby city of Dammam. A drag-net across the oil-rich Eastern Province has so far failed to find them.
Even as the drama unfolded, a group calling itself the “Qaeda Organisation in the Arabian Peninsula” claimed responsibility. More incidents soon followed, including a botched shooting attack on American military trainers in Riyadh, the capital, and a police manhunt that left two suspects dead near the western city of Taif.
The official toll at Khobar was 22 killed and 25 injured. Most of the victims were Asian blue-collar workers. Three Saudi security men died, as well as an American, a Briton, a Swede and an Italian. Besides the numbers killed or injured, what really shocked observers was the attackers' calm, methodical throat-slitting of non-Muslims, their deliberate choice of oil-related targets and the evident inadequacy of Saudi security measures—before, during and after the attack.
Neither the kingdom nor the town of Khobar are strangers to jihadi violence. In 1996 a massive truck bomb killed 19 American servicemen in the city. Between 2000 and 2002, it was also the scene of several attacks on western expatriates, incidents that Saudi authorities blamed at the time, rather implausibly, on gang wars over the illegal alcohol trade. Most analysts now believe those sporadic hits were a foretaste of the far more ambitious strikes seen in the past year, which have included five deadly car bombings in Riyadh, shooting rampages, assassinations and gunfights with police (see table). Over the past 13 months, the death toll stands at 85 civilians, most of them expatriates, 12 Saudi policemen and at least 39 terrorists. Hundreds more people have been injured.
Aside from the mounting frequency, widening geographical spread and increasing goriness of Saudi terrorism, what distinguishes the violence is that it is explicitly aimed not merely at the “enemies of Islam”—ie, westerners—but also at overthrowing the ruling al-Saud family, who are seen to be aligned with them. This goal brings the jihadis a fair amount of local support. Since the Saudi autocracy bans votes and opinion polls, it is difficult to judge how large this is. An online poll of visitors to the al-Jazeera TV channel's website this week offered some clues. Out of 85,000 respondents, a predictable majority answered “Yes” when asked if they thought attacks on foreigners in Saudi Arabia were “bad for the image of Islam”. But it was not a large majority: 42% reckoned the carnage was fine for the faith.
Amid the elaborate justifications and gushing praise for the “Khobar Operation” on the many websites devoted to jihadi views, one enthusiast even claimed that the al-Jazeera poll had been skewed against the “noble mujahideen”, thanks to the nefarious electronic meddling of the Saudi secret police. Such paranoia, laced with twisted interpretations of holy scripture, is typical of the online discourse that provides the clearest view of jihadi thinking. A further example: one chat-site contributor ascribed the condemnation of the Khobar attack by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic resistance group that targets Israeli civilians, to its treasonous infiltration by “Muslim Brotherhood stooges”.
What the talk reveals is not a broad-based movement but a violent youth subculture obsessed with a sense of Muslim victimhood and a desire for revenge. It is, in some ways, not unlike the militia movement in America which gave birth to the bloody bombing in Oklahoma City in 1995, except that Saudi jihadis can point to real geopolitics, not just fantasies, as justification for their anger. “Would you rather sit in hotel lobbies or join us in the trenches,” taunts another website zealot, posing a question that must appear all too stark to the kingdom's large pool of bored, religiously brainwashed, sexually frustrated and, increasingly, jobless youths.
Most analysts believe that, with a hard core of anything from 500 to 2,000 activists in a country of 25m inhabitants (and an estimated 600 languishing in jail), the Saudi jihadis do not pose an immediate threat to the Saudi state. While disruptive, and frightening to the 8.8m expatriates (among them 100,000 westerners) who form the backbone of the kingdom's workforce, the attacks have so far failed to shake either its economy or its political structure.
True, oil prices rose to a 21-year high after the Khobar attack (see article), but the Saudi stock exchange, a better measure of confidence in the kingdom's future, actually posted gains, continuing a trend that has pushed share values up 125% in the past two years. Although jihadis toasted the oil shock as a sign of their success, the high price actually strengthens the Saudi regime, which pockets a windfall.
The longer-term effects of Saudi unrest are more worrying, both for the kingdom and for the rest of the world. Direct attacks on oil installations, which are heavily defended, are considered unlikely. Moreover, by damaging the country's livelihood, the jihadis would lose such public support as remains. Hitting soft targets, such as expatriates, cannot halt oil production. Already 85% of the staff of Saudi Aramco, the giant state oil monopoly, are indigenous. Yet over time, as the violence makes foreign experts costlier and harder to recruit, the kingdom could suffer.
Most analysts reckon it will take time and more bloodshed to deal with terror. “This is just the sunrise,” says a human-rights activist in Dammam. “We're in for a rough five years,” says an American executive in Riyadh. “I foresee an Algeria-type situation”, he said, alluding to a civil war in the 1990s which left 100,000-odd dead.
Since September 11th 2001, the Saudi authorities have made some headway against terrorism by making their long borders less porous, by controlling suspicious financial transactions, by protecting obvious targets, by purging school curricula of lessons inciting sectarian hatred, and by using the media to inflame opinion against the jihadis. But their struggle ahead is long.
“The government can't fight terrorism by itself,” says a Saudi businessman in Khobar. “It needs the people with it, and to get them it must give them a say in the political process. Right now, many people say this [terrorism] is bad, this is awful, but it isn't my business. It's between the government and the terrorists.”
The need for reform is accepted inside the ruling establishment. Some changes have been made, and others promised, including—for the first time—direct elections in October for half the seats on municipal councils. Next week, the third round of a “national dialogue”, a series of conferences gathering a representative range of professionals, is to discuss women's rights.
But so far most of this is talk, not action. “I don't care if they hold 30 conferences,” says the human-rights advocate. “They haven't implemented a single recommendation from the last ones.” Like other Saudi observers, he thinks that reform has not only stalled but gone into reverse. Soon after the kingdom authorised a semi-official human-rights monitoring body in March, the police arrested 13 democracy advocates. Three are still in prison, without charge; the new human-rights body has done nothing to secure their release.
What liberal Saudis fear most from
jihadi violence is not physical injury or even the prospect that the
kingdom's already stifling religious conservatism might increase. It is that the
ageing princes who run the place will take fright, and bolt the doors against
change of any kind.