Arab unrest: perspectives - XI

Oil prices that soared towards $120 per barrel on February 24 on account of turmoil in Libya eased only on Saudi Arabia's assurance to European refiners that the kingdom could step in to fill any supply shortfalls. Is there any country that could compensate for the lost oil output if Saudi Arabia descends into turmoil? The answer will be surely in the negative because the kingdom is the largest producer and exporter of petroleum liquids in the world.
But the Saudi ability to live up to its reputation in the realms of production and export of this vital commodity has been facing delirious prospects of a setback because of highly critical situation in Bahrain in particular where anti-ruler protests have raged for a month and where the kingdom has now sent its troops under the umbrella of six-state Arab Gulf Co-operation Council. Bahrain is a Shia-majority state while the Saudi Arabia's oil-producing province adjacent to this state is also an overwhelmingly Shia-majority area.
Syria is another example where minority rules the majority. But the Alawite rulers of Syria face a less formidable challenge to their rule as compared to the Khalifas of Bahrain. The reasons behind Bashar al-Asad's relative success in containing the unrest are many. While some of them were discussed in previous chapters of this series, the "Sunni Card" played by the chief of Baathist party of Syria following the exile of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them Sunnis, helped him articulate a new relationship, which had suffered a serious damage after the Hamma massacre of people from this sect in 1982, with the majority Syrian population. Bashar was said to have turned a blind eye to the underground system that grew in his country to accommodate the exiled Iraqi militants. Hence, the valuable help extended by an Alawite ruler has not become a distant memory for the majority population of Syria.
The Middle East, particularly the countries that comprise the Arabian Peninsula, was already experiencing post-traumatic shock-and-awe disorder roiled by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, which had upset the traditional sectarian power arrangements in the Middle East. Referring to US President Barrack Obama's June 2009 Cairo University speech, Deborah Amos in her Eclipse of the Sunnis says that in his message to the faithful, President Obama exhorted that "the fault lines must be closed among Muslims and he especially noted the fault lines between Shias and Sunnis, a historic chasm, often dormant, newly pried open by the US-led war in Iraq. The divide that has seeped into the social fabric of the region is not principally about religion, but about power and the vacuum created when an American army toppled a Sunni tyrant."
She argues: "The immediate opportunity this offered to Iraq's Shiite community was well understood. Ever since the failure of the George H W Bush administration to support the Shiite rising against Saddam in 1991, Americans had recognised the potential for an alliance with the Shiite majority against Saddam." She adds: "excluded from US thinking ahead of the war in 2003 was the ripple of consequences across all Sunni communities in the Middle East that Saddam's removal would create... ."
Why is Saudi Arabia so different, so separate and even so exceptional in relation to the wave of democracy that has swept across the Arab world from Morocco in North Africa to Oman on the Arabian Peninsula? Can Saudi Arabia remain immune from the Arab spring? Should the youth of Saudi Arabia have the same rights and aspirations as their other Arab brothers and sisters?
These questions still form the crux of debates on the "democracy contagion" that is spreading fast across North Africa and the Middle East. Some Middle East experts believe that the problem in Saudi Arabia is not only about the marginalization of minority community of Shias, but also the lack of political reforms and creation of job opportunities for youth who constitute over 50 percent of the kingdom's population and a very large number of them have also studied in the West.
Reasons that deal with kingdom's oil production and its centrality to the Muslim world seek to suggest that mixed signals are coming out from the kingdom where King Abdullah is still quite popular despite growing demands for the introduction of a constitutional monarchy and a parliament in the kingdom. A country that could play the most important role towards realisation of such objectives-the United States of America-seems to have put, albeit reluctantly, its weight behind pro-democracy forces in the kingdom to the utter chagrin of the House of Saud.
While still on top, the US seems to be increasingly keen on the introduction of a new strategy in relation to Saudi Arabia with a view to securing Washington's economic interests in particular for the next two or three decades by encouraging-covertly and overtly-relatively young people of the royal family to take power even if its game-plan also gives birth to a constitutional monarchy and a parliament in the richest Arab state.
US administration's remarks that Washington supports a set of universal rights, including the right to peaceful assembly and to freedom of expression, and those rights must be respected everywhere, including Saudi Arabia, have greatly incensed the Saudi monarchy. Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal responded to these remarks by saying that his country "completely rejects any intervention in its internal affairs."
A leading Saudi newspaper, The Arab News, for example, has also tried to convey Riyadh's anger by terming Washington's behaviour in relation to the richest Arab state "insulting" which can, according to the newspaper, only exacerbate the "already strong anti-American sentiment" in the kingdom.
In an editorial titled "The main principal", the newspaper seems to have taken strong exception to the use of word "must" in the US State Department's statement. It remarks: "President Barrack Obama thinks he can lay down law to Saudi Arabia". The newspaper argues that "Washington's blundering approach to Saudi Arabia is part and parcel of an even great political failure. Its Middle East policies have never been more disorganised or illogical. Rather than clear-cut policy, the Obama administration has taken refuge in political correctness." In this regard, the newspaper cites the example of Libya where, according to the newspaper, the US stand is "incomprehensible".