Dispatches from the Arab Spring: Understanding the New Middle East

Saudi Arabia

89 SaudiArabia toby c. jones saudi arabia’s aging leaders were deeply shaken by the revolutionary ferment that swept through the Middle East in early 2011.They watched in frustration as Egyptian and Tunisian publics threw their longtime dictators from power. Anxiety turned to horror as opposition movements mobilized closer to home, especially in the small kingdom of Bahrain. There, just off Saudi Arabia’s eastern shore, tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters launched an ill-fated campaign to end authoritarian rule in one of the Al Saud’s longtime vassal states in February. Riyadh’s sense of urgency regarding the regional upheaval was on full display by mid-March, when the kingdom dispatched military forces to Manama, Bahrain’s capital, to provide cover for a brutal crackdown on the demonstrators. This military intervention was the most visible sign that the political elites in Saudi Arabia sought to contain the regional fallout of the Arab Spring. Over the course of the year, Saudi Arabia clearly emerged as the region’s most powerful and determined counterrevolutionary force ( Jones 2011b).1 While the kingdom’s leaders supported the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya and, only after months of killing and fence-sitting, came out inAugust in favor of the fall of Syria’s Bashar alAssad , the reality was that they did not support the forces of democracy 90 Toby C. Jones in those places ( Jones 2011c). Rather, they hoped for outcomes that would serve their interests, preserve some semblance of the political status quo, and, most important, help them in their struggle to check the ambition of their primary rival, Iran. However, for all their anxieties about regional politics and the geopolitical consequences of democratic change in theArab Middle East, the kingdom’s elites were also unnerved by the specter of political change at home. Indeed, with autocrats falling or under pressure across the region, they had good reason for concern. Although the kingdom was flush with oil revenues and redistributed some of its considerable oil wealth in order to placate its citizens, it shared many of the social and political characteristics that helped mobilize revolutionaries elsewhere. In the land of oil opulence—SaudiArabia had brought in more than $500 billion in oil revenues since 2009— many suffered from grinding poverty, with several million people living below the kingdom’s own standard for what counts as poor. Crackdown Riyadh was well aware of the social despair and the kinds of frustration it generated. Authorities took extreme measures to keep citizens from shedding light on such problems, however. In October 2011 Saudi authorities arrested Firas Buqnah, a filmmaker, and his crew for producing and broadcasting a documentary on poverty in Riyadh (Hill 2011). There were other engines of potential dissent as well. Saudi Arabia is home to a large, restless, and underemployed generation of young men and women who are educated and savvy and who harbor expectations of not only greater economic opportunity but also greater political opportunity .The previous decade had seen repeated calls from this generation for political reform and for the expansion of social and political rights. Perhaps the most visible were women activists, who demanded not only the right to drive but also real political rights, an end to draconian restrictions on their movement in the public sphere, and the abolishment of an oppressive guardianship system (Al Nafjan 2011). Disillusioned youth were proving to be a potent force of change in the first years of the new century across the Arab world. Up to the events of 2011, while there had been rumblings for political reform in saudi arabia 91 Saudi Arabia, a popular uprising was yet to materialize. There had been small indications that powerful tensions and the forces of rebellion simmered beneath the surface.The most notable had been in SaudiArabia’s Eastern Province, home to all of the kingdom’s oil wealth as well as a large restive Shiite community, the members of which had long been victims of discrimination, persecution, and oppression. Small groups of Shiites in villages across the Eastern Province took to the streets in February and March 2011, partly in support of the uprising in Bahrain but also partly to demand amelioration of their frustrations at home. Another round of unrest took shape in October, with Shiites again taking to the streets demanding political reform, the release of political prisoners, and an end to their second-class status...