Behind Saudi’s public face, a dark side
Praised by some as a reformer, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman dismays rights advocates
When he hosted last October’s glittering global investment conference in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had the world at his fingertips. Thousands of investors, corporate chieftains and government leaders flocked to the kingdom to hear the charismatic young heir to the Saudi throne outline his plans for modernization of the reclusive kingdom, and to be invited along for the ride and the profits.
“Only dreamers are welcome to join,” Mohammed told his audience.
As a second conference approaches this month in Riyadh, Mohammed, 33, seems far less dashing. Over the past week, many who had planned to attend have abruptly cancelled, scrambling to distance themselves from what they now see as a runaway train headed for disaster.
Their distress stems from the still-unfolding story of Jamal Khashoggi, the self-exiled Saudi journalist allegedly killed and gruesomely dismembered this month by Saudi agents inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
To some of Mohammed’s foreign admirers, it is still inconceivable that the ebullient and charming prince — widely known by the initials MBS — could be responsible for such barbarity.
Still others, many of whom have spent time with the prince, say they would be shocked but not surprised. They describe a dark and bullying side of a young man in a hurry, one who has absolute power and does not tolerate dissent.
“This never would have happened without MBS’s approval. Never, never, never,” said a former senior U.S. diplomat with long experience in the kingdom through several administrations.
While Mohammed’s fans in the West have seen him as a future Lee Kuan Yew, the modernizing first premier of Singapore, MBS himself is known to refer to China, with its authoritarian leadership and soaring economy, as a better model for Saudi Arabia. He has chafed at the criticism of his human rights record, complaining that it has received more Western scrutiny than that of Russian President Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“I didn’t call myself a reformer,” the crown prince said in a Bloomberg News interview this month.
If Khashoggi’s disappearance shocked Westerners, they were simply not paying close attention to events in the kingdom, and the lengths to which the crown prince has been willing to go to quash dissent, say seasoned Saudi human rights advocates.
In an initial wave of executions after Mohammed’s abrupt installation as the immediate heir to his father, King Salman, followed by waves of arrests over the past year, he has been ruthless in asserting power. Saudi authorities have spread fear by detaining billionaires and grassroots activists alike, showing that no one is untouchable. And they have worked to ensure that the arrests are hardly discussed, threatening the relatives of those arrested and forcing them to sign pledges of silence, and holding trials in secret, the rights advocates say.
This style of governance has occasionally made for odd spectacle. A few months ago, when a prominent women’s rights advocate was arrested at her home, the authorities surrounded it with so many klieg lights and armed men that residents thought it was a film shoot, according to Yahya Assiri, a London-based Saudi human rights activist. When people wandered out to see what was happening, they were rounded up and told never to speak of what they had seen, he said.
The maintenance of silence may be one of the crown prince’s greatest successes. Assiri said his networks of activists on the ground in Saudi Arabia has withered, with more and more people who reported on rights violations and arrests leaving the secure chats rooms where they once shared information.
“A large number are in prison. Some are afraid. Some completely disappeared, and we know nothing about them,” he said in an interview in his London office a few days before Khashoggi’s disappearance.
It is not just dissidents who have gone quiet. In the hyper-nationalist environment the crown prince has nurtured, there is no benefit to sticking one’s head up, whatever the topic. “Everyone wants to prove that he or she is a patriot,” said one wellknown political analyst in Saudi Arabia. “There is no tolerance.”