Saudi Crown Prince’s Mass Purge Upends a Longstanding System (JMD quoted in NYT)
LONDON — A midnight
blitz of arrests ordered
by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia over the weekend has ensnared dozens of its
most influential figures, including 11 of his royal cousins, in what by Sunday
appeared to be the most sweeping transformation in the kingdom’s governance for
more than eight decades.
The arrests, ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman without formal charges or any legal process, were presented as a
crackdown on corruption. They caught both the kingdom’s richest investor,
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the most potent remaining rival to the crown
prince’s power: Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, a favored son of the late King
Abdullah.
Prince Mutaib had been removed from his post as
chief of a major security service just hours before the arrests announced late
Saturday night.
All members of the royal family were barred from
leaving the country, American officials tracking the developments said on
Sunday.
With the new detentions, Crown Prince Mohammed,
King Salman’s favored son and key adviser, now appears to have established
control over all three Saudi security services — the military, internal
security services and national guard. For decades they had been distributed
among branches of the House of Saud clan to preserve a balance of power in
Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s biggest oil producer and an important American
ally.
In the same stroke, the crown prince has cowed
businessmen and royals across the kingdom by taking down the undisputed giant
of Saudi finance. And over the last several weeks he has ordered enough
high-profile arrests of intellectuals and clerics to frighten the remainder of
the academic and religious establishment into acceding to his will as well.
Apolitical scholars who used to speak freely in
cafes now look nervously over their shoulders, as Crown Prince Mohammed has
achieved a degree of dominance that no ruler has attained for generations.
“It is the coup de grâce of the old system,” said
Chas W. Freeman, a former United States ambassador. “Gone. All power has now
been concentrated in the hands of Mohammad bin Salman.”
Why the crown prince acted now — whether to
eliminate future opposition or perhaps to crush some threat he saw brewing —
was not immediately clear.
At 32 years old, he had little experience in
government before his father, King Salman, 81, ascended to
the throne in 2015,
and the prince has demonstrated little patience for the previously staid pace
of change in the kingdom.
He has led Saudi Arabia into a protracted
military conflict in Yemen and a bitter feud
with its Persian Gulf neighbor Qatar. He has taken on a business elite accustomed to
state subsidies and profligacy by laying out radical plans to remake the
Saudi economy, lessen its
dependence on oil and rely instead on foreign investment. And he has squared
off against conservatives in the religious establishment with symbolic steps to
loosen strict moral codes, including a pending end to the longstanding ban on women
driving.
Crown Prince Mohammed’s haste, however, may now
come at a price, because the lack of transparency or due process surrounding
the anticorruption crackdown is sure to unnerve the same private investors he
hopes to attract — including through a planned
stock offering of
the huge state oil company, Aramco.
Saudi Arabian businessmen and royals anxious about
the crown prince’s plans were quietly moving assets out of the country even
before the arrests.
“Some of these are businessmen with international
status, and if they are caught in this web then it could happen to anyone,”
said James M. Dorsey, who studies Saudi Arabia at the S. Rajaratnam School of
International Studies in Singapore. “How is that going to inspire confidence
and attract foreign investment?”
The Saudi Arabian news media, however, celebrated
the arrests as a long-awaited cleanup, appealing to populist resentment of
self-enrichment enjoyed by the sprawling royal family and its closest allies.
Almost everyone in the capital, Riyadh, and other
big cities like Jeddah has heard stories about princes absconding with vast
sums that had been allocated for a public project.
The arrests are “a frontal assault on some members
of the royal family and the impunity with which they have operated in the
past,” said Bernard Haykel, a professor at Princeton University who studies
Saudi Arabia.
“It was something that had to be done,” he said,
even though the absence of a judicial process “sends a chill down the spine of
foreign investors.”
President Trump on Sunday appeared to give a tacit
endorsement of the arrests in a
phone call with King Salman. A White House summary of the call contained no
references to the arrests, and said Mr. Trump had praised Crown Prince Mohammed
for other matters.
Three White House advisers, including the
president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, returned just days ago from the latest
in at least three high-level Trump administration visits to Saudi Arabia this
year.
Nearly 24 hours after the arrests were announced,
no Saudi authority or spokesman had identified those arrested or the charges
against them.
The Saudi-owned satellite network Al Arabiya
reported only that a large number of arrests, including 11 princes, had been
ordered by an “anticorruption committee” that just hours earlier had been
formed under the direction of Crown Prince Mohammed. A royal decree granted the
committee powers to detain individuals or seize assets without any trial,
process or disclosure.
A list of those arrested began circulating over
social media shortly after midnight Sunday, and by Sunday evening senior
government officials were reposting the list. News organizations around the
region were reporting its contents without contradiction by either the Saudi
government or individuals.
In the case of the most politically potent of the
detainees, the former security chief Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, the Saudi
government appeared on Sunday to have started a social media campaign seeking
to make him the new face of public corruption.
Analysts said the list appeared to reflect
individuals with a reputation for self-enrichment and those representing rival
power centers within the kingdom. Others included the power broker who once ran
the royal court under King Abdullah, and the owner of one of the biggest
private media companies in the region.
But another was a top aide to Crown Prince Mohammed
himself — Adel Fakeih — who had been considered a driving force behind the
ambitious program of economic reform, leaving analysts puzzled about the
motives.
In what appeared to be an unrelated episode, a
helicopter carrying another Saudi royal, Prince Mansur bin Muqrin, the deputy
governor of Asir Province, which borders Yemen, was killed on Sunday along with
a number of other officials when their helicopter crashed. Al Arabiya, which
reported the crash in a brief
dispatch, did not identify
the cause.
The history of the house of Saud was sometimes
punctuated by violent intrafamily strife in the decades before the founding of
the modern dynasty, in 1932. Since then, the family has maintained its unity in
part by spreading its top government roles and vast oil wealth among different
branches of the sprawling clan. Most important was the division of the three
main security services, which constitute the hard power on the ground.
King Salman, however, quickly named his favorite
son, Mohammed, as his defense minister, chief of the royal court, a top
economic adviser and deputy crown prince. Then, this June, the king removed his
nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef, from his position as crown
prince and his powerful role of interior minister in charge of the internal
security forces, secret police and counterterrorism operations. Evidently
anxious to forestall resistance, the king also placed the demoted nephew under
house arrest. A campaign of leaks spread rumors that he had become addicted to
painkillers and other drugs.
It was unclear why the crackdown targeted Prince
Alwaleed bin Talal, who is best known for his past and present investments in brand-name
Western companies including
Twitter, News Corporation, Apple and the Four Seasons. Prince Alwaleed has been
a vocal supporter of the crown prince’s plans to attract outside investors to
Saudi Arabia. But when a committee of 34 senior family members — known as the
allegiance council — approved
Prince Mohammed’s elevation to crown prince, one
of the three dissenters was from Prince Alwaleed’s branch of the family, the
Talals, according to people familiar with the voting.
Michael Stephens, who studies Saudi Arabia at the
Royal United Services Institute in London, recalled the bloody purges other
leaders in the region have sometimes used to eliminate rivals. What Crown
Prince Mohammed was doing, Mr. Stephens said, “is a more genteel way of making
sure there are no challenges to your power.”
Time will tell, Mr. Stephens said, whether the
arrests signal a slide into despotism or “whether we will look back and say
Mohammed bin Salman is the one guy who saw the wall coming and managed to
hurdle it.”
Reporting was
contributed by Declan Walsh from Cairo, Neil MacFarquhar from Moscow, Nicholas
Kulish from New York, Eric Schmitt from Washington and Mark Landler from Tokyo.
Comments
Post a Comment