International Worker No 240, October 11, 1997

Hypocrisy and the Saudi regime

By Chris Talbot

The Socialist Equality Party condemns the brutal treatment inflicted by the Saudi regime on the two nurses, Deborah Parry and Lucille McLauchlan. There can be no doubt that their conviction for the murder of their friend was based on confessions extracted under torture and that their treatment and trial denied basic democratic rights. Apparently they will not face beheading because of a sordid blood-money deal worked out with the victims brother, but could still face flogging and jail sentences.

Torture, public beheadings and floggings are the regular practice of the state apparatus run by the Saudi royal family. According to Amnesty International, this year alone there have been 107 beheadings for murder, rape and drug smuggling. Between 120 and 200 floggings have taken place, in some cases publicly. These are carried out using a metre long bamboo cane.

Political parties outlawed

The regime outlaws all political parties and trade unions. There is complete press censorship and denial of access to human rights organisations. After the bombings of the Saudi Arabian National Guard training centre in the capital city, Riyadh, in 1995 and the US military complex at al-Khobar in June 1996, hundreds of people were detained without trial for months and denied access to lawyers and their families.

There are hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers in the country, particularly from the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia. These workers are on temporary contracts and are at the mercy of their employers who can deport them at will or extend their contract, forcing them to work in virtual slave conditions. Often they are forced to work a six day week, 10 or 12 hours a day, living in specially constructed barracks. Their passports are held by their employers who control all their movements. Police are called in to deal with any opposition, so at any given time there are hundreds of foreign workers in Saudi jails awaiting deportation.

Even the small percentage of workers who are Saudi nationals, like the Shi'ite oil workers on the east coast of the country, suffer appalling social oppression as well as religious discrimination. In 1980 a revolt of these oil workers, inspired by the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, was drowned in blood.

King Fahd and the 5,000 or so members of the Saudi royal family live in conditions of fantastic luxury, based on the billions they have made from the country's oil wealth. Fahd himself spends little time in the many palaces he has built, but occupies a yacht the size of an ocean liner where he can indulge his appetites away from the religious authorities. He has become so fat that he is carted about in a wheel chair.

The obscene parasitism of the royal elite means that they live in constant fear of revolution, which necessitates ruthless police repression.

Imperialism responsible

Our condemnation of the Saudi regime has nothing in common with the hypocritical denunciations made by the capitalist media or the Labour government. Oppression in Saudi Arabia is not due to Islamic values or archaic customs awaiting the civilising mission of Robin Cook and the British press. The wars and repressive regimes in that region are a direct result of the drive for the profits from oil, particularly by British and American imperialism.

After World War One, Britain divided up the Middle East, drawing the borders of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq, and setting up stooge regimes to govern each country. This divide and rule strategy was used to suppress rebellions by the Arab people. By 1932 the Saudis in the Arabian peninsula, led by King Ibn Saud, drove out their Hashemite opponents, who ruled in Iraq and Jordan, in a campaign of terror. The indebted Saudi regime gave oil concessions to US companies. It was again bailed out during World War Two by the US government when revenues from the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca dried up.

As British imperialism continued to decline, the US saw Saudi Arabia, along with the newl ycreated Zionist state of Israel, as its means for imposing a stranglehold over the oil wealth of the region. Whilst the oil corporations took the greater part of the profits from the region, the Saudi royal family built up enormous personal wealth.

Britain was forced to accept US hegemony, but British oil companies also took their share of the profits from the region. Britain propped up the smaller feudal regimes of the Gulf States, brutally suppressing an uprising against the Sultan of Oman in 1957 for example.

The 1974 oil crisis quadrupled the price of crude oil. The Saudi regime became increasingly important for US and British companies, especially arms manufacturers. The regime purchases a vast array of high technology military equipment both to suppress internal opposition and police the Middle East as a whole,

Under the Thatcher Tory government, British armament companies won huge contracts in the teeth of US competition. The Al Yamamah deal involved sales of British planes and ships worth £20bn to the Saudi regime. Millions of pounds were made in commissions by British politicians and millions paid in bribes by the government. Thatcher's son, Mark, was heavily involved. Using the relationship between Jonathan Aitken, Defence Procurement Minister under John Major, to Prince Mohammed, son of King Fahd, further arms deals were made. Aitken s now under police investigation after his libel case against The Guardian newspaper collapsed.

Labour's fake concern for human rights

The Blair government's pledge to restrict arms sales to regimes with poor "human rights" records is empty rhetoric. No threat to the profits of the arms industry or the oil corporations is intended. Robin Cook's mild criticism of Saudi justice is restricted to the highly publicised case of the two nurses. Behind the scenes there is a frantic round of diplomacy to ease the treatment of the nurses whilst saving face for the Saudi royal family. According to The Guardian, the man who is smoothing the relationship between the Labour government and the Saudi royals is none other than Jonathan Aitken. Meanwhile lucrative exports to the regime continue and further arms deals are being negotiated. Last year exports from Britain totalled £2.5bn, of which a quarter were in armaments.

Genuine opposition to imperialism and vile regimes like that in Saudi Arabia is only possible on the basis of a socialist movement which is politically independent of the Labour government. An end to repression and militarism can only be achieved by uniting working people internationally against the profit system.

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