Ayoon Wa Azan (the 'tourist' press)

Do the readers know that Saudi Arabia is being swept by a secret Arab spring? I admit that I did not know either. Why? Because, as it was implied in the sentence I began with, and unlike what has happened in other Arab countries where the revolutions brought much upheaval, bloody confrontations and murder and destruction, the Arab spring in Saudi Arabia is “secret”. This was what the Washington Post claimed in a lengthy article it ran on October 19, which was then picked up by the London paper The Independent on October 24. The New York Times reported about a so-called revolution on Twitter – and not on the streets –with similar reports in the Financial Times, the electronic paper The Huffington Post and the major agency the Associated Press. I can perhaps argue that this is because of envy from a wealthy country with limited problems, but one must not underestimate major international news sources as such. What is more proper is to say that they chose to make mountains out of molehills, and overlooked the most important aspects of the issue. If we accept the figures mentioned by the Western sources about the number of Shiites in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, then they represent 10 percent, or two million out of 20 million Saudis. So when two protesters are killed, or to be more precise, a man who is on the list of the 23 most wanted men for killing security officers, the victims would not be representing one in a hundred or one in a thousand, but one in a million. There is no massacre taking place there, and the number of those killed in traffic accidents is much more than that. I condemn all killings, and I do not accept for even one protester to be killed or wounded. This is what I have always maintained, and it applies to al-Qatif and al-Awamiyah. Therefore, I am not writing to justify or downplay the killing, but only to say that the incidents in the Eastern Province are extremely limited in scope, and do not represent a secret or overt revolution as the Western press seems to wish it to be for reasons only Jacob knows, as they say, or Benjamin… More importantly, as I stated above, and what goes beyond the killing of a protesters – which again I condemn –, there is the question of what has motivated the recent unrest. While the people of the region, who have benefited from a 500 billion riyal package to boost the local economy recently, may have legitimate demands, there is a small segment among them with foreign allegiance, which operates at the behest of the ayatollahs in Iran. This segment seeks to secede to establish a theocracy like the one in Iran, or in other words, to starve the citizens and take them back to the dark ages. The Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr was arrested. The Western media treated him like he was some kind of a champion of freedom and human rights. But he isn’t so. Instead, he is a Shiite cleric who is inciting against the regime, and encouraging and supporting armed confrontations. Nimr is loyal only to Iran, which harms the Saudi Shiite community, as a vast majority of them want nothing more than equality in rights and duties, and for their living standards to be improved, which is their right. Some Western newspapers and agencies are of the highest possible caliber, and are beyond reproach. But there is a “tourist” press where a reporter may interview an activist or two, and end up believing that what he heard from them is set in stone. I know the Eastern Province like none of these tourist reporters do. I know that Prince Mohammed bin Fahd, after being made the Governor of the province, made the demands of the Shiite community one of his top priorities, and visited their towns and villages, received them in his office, and established good relations with them on par with all the population of the Eastern Province. I am also familiar with the efforts undertaken by Prince Fahd bin Salman, his deputy in the nineties, a decade that saw so much tumult, beginning with the invasion and subsequent liberation of Kuwait. Indeed, Prince Fahd established direct ties with the Shiites of the region, and I saw him receive them and listen to their requests. But the agents of Iran tried and continue to try to ruin this relationship. Finally, the Foreign Affairs Committee in the British House of Commons, which includes MPs from different parties, had the gall to condemn what it termed the 'brutal repression' of demonstrators in Bahrain, and the Saudi role in it. Yet I do not remember that the Committee ever condemned the repression of demonstrations in London. Those MPs have always voted to impose ‘crippling’ sanctions on Iran and have starved its people, not the country’s leader or the ayatollahs in Qom. Yet at the same time, they support the attempts by Iran’s agents to establish clerical rule in Bahrain. In other words, they want to topple this kind of regime in Iran, but support its establishment in Bahrain, and I will say nothing more.  -- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.