Fragile Future for Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is a nation on the brink of change. What exactly is this change and how it will play out is the subject of the new book, “On Saudi Arabia,” by journalist Karen Elliott House.

House has covered Saudi Arabia for 30 years as a diplomatic correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

She says as the leadership of their nation ages and its younger generation seeks direction, concern for stability is a major concern for many Saudis.

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Aaron Schachter: Saudi Arabia is a nation on the brink of change. The kingdom is ruled by an aging royal family and there’s no set roadmap for passing the baton to a younger generation of leaders. How this transition is shaping up is the subject of a new book called On Saudi Arabia. It’s by Karen Elliott House. She’s a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who’s been covering Saudi Arabia for 30 years. House says many Saudis are worried that change could bring instability.

Karen Elliott House: Saudis are very dependent on their government for livelihood and if they think their government may not be there it worries them. They want an efficient, honest government that provides them with wellbeing and they are worried that the old rulers now who have an average age about 80 are simply too out of touch.

Schachter: Well it’s not necessarily that people in Saudi Arabia want democracy, they want stability. Is that it?

House: They want a bigger share of the oil revenue. The population in the kingdom has literally exploded over the last 30 years, so you have nearly 20 million Saudis and the lifestyle has declined as the population has increased. And people know that the oil revenue is still enormous and they say I want my share.

Schachter: I wonder if there’s a discrepancy between the old and the young. I mean in the past the royals have ruled backed by religious authority, and I wonder if you find that the new generation is questioning the system both of the strict religious rulers controlling things and the monarchy.

House: The young people are questioning absolutely everything because thanks to the internet, the Alzou regime is not able to control what Saudis know any longer. So their ability to use religion to legitimize whatever they decide to do has sharply diminished. Even the young religious students at Imam University, their premier university, when I met with young men from that university, you asked them what religious leader do you turn to for guidance? And they say I don’t, I read the Koran and decide myself. I mean in a country like Saudi Arabia that’s absolute heresy, you’re not listening to the religious establishment.

Schachter: That sounds a little bit shocking and maybe from a Western perspective, a little bit hopeful.

House: I think it is hopeful when people start to use their own minds. I mean I know a lot of Americans think that the Arab Spring has left us worse off in the Middle East as a whole. I firmly believe it has left us better off because Arabs are going to have to start whether in Egypt, or Tunisia, or Syria or even ultimately, Saudi Arabia, they are going to have to start taking responsibility for their decisions and their lives and stop blaming other people. The real problem I’m convinced off on the Arab street, if you say why do they “hate us” — I don’t believe they do hate America, I believe they are frustrated because all of these countries have enormous numbers of now educated and unemployed youth.

Schachter: Now Saudi Arabia quelled its own version of the Arab Spring groundswell basically by paying people off. With this issue coming back to the fore with the protests over the movie and so on, do you think Saudi Arabia will escape the unrest that we see on our television screens now?

House: I personally think it won’t, but I think that’s few years away because the government did try to buy peace, $130 billion the king passed out, when the annual budget of the country, this past year was $180. So it was almost a doubling of the kingdom’s budget. The problem with that is that once you get people something it’s very difficult to take it back.

Schachter: Right, they expect it.

House: They expect it, so the government has vastly increased its expenses and yes, oil brings them a lot of money, but there is a very well grounded financial institution called Jadual that estimates that by 2014 the government spending will exceed oil revenue and the kingdom gets almost all its revenue, 90% of its revenue from oil.

Schachter: In your book you point out that the old regime needs to hand over the reigns of power to the younger folks. Is that something you can foresee happening smoothly?

House: I think it will be very difficult for the royal family to make the generational change smoothly because they don’t have agreement on how to do it, so the safest thing is to continue to pass it from one elderly brother to another and the kingdom may destabilize during that process.

Schachter: Do any of them seem to know how precarious things are?

House: I think the older ones by and large, I mean Colonel Prince Salman, when I talked to him he said we can’t have democracy here because every tribe would be a party and then we’d just have chaos. So we aim for consensus. We consult, and when the people we consult with don’t agree, we decide, which is a great way of saying we have consultation as a cover for us doing what we want to.

Schachter: Right.

House: But increasingly people know that it’s kind of like in this country where the republicans and the democrats blame each other, congress can’t cooperate, so we can’t do anything. And increasingly Americans and the Saudis know that it is up to their leaders to figure out how to solve those things.

Schachter: Karen Elliott House is the author of On Saudi Arabia. By the way, the question why do the still hate us is coming up a lot these days. You can hear more of what House had to say about that and read my blog post on the subject; that’s at theworld.org. You’re listening to PRI.

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