Saudi Arabia now run by a dictator

JOY and pride among Saudi women, who are at last allowed to drive. Delight in the car dealerships, which anticipate a lot of new business. And dismay among the families of the 1.4 million chauffeurs, almost all from South Asia, who have been earning about $US1000 ($NZ1466) a month driving Saudi women around. But it will take a lot more than this to change Saudi Arabia.

Just before driving became legal for women, 17 female activists who have been campaigning for years against the driving ban were arrested. Eight have now been released, but the others are facing possible trial in a counterterrorism court and long prison sentences for their activism. Does the right hand know what the left is doing?

Yes, it does. Letting women drive is part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s project to win popular support by modernising some aspects of daily life. Looking like he is giving in to popular pressure is definitely not part of his programme. The change must look like a free gift from his hand, not a retreat in the face of public protest.

The notion Mohammed bin Salman is liberalising the Saudi system is a fantasy. Having ruthlessly sidelined all rival claimants to the throne — his father, King Salman, is 82 and ailing — he has now centralised power to an unprecedented extent. Saudi Arabia was a traditional, deeply conservative monarchy that always ensured there was a fair degree of consensus among the elite. It is now a dictatorship.

MbS, as he is known, is an impulsive man, and one of his bigger mistakes was to invite the UN’s special rapporteur on antiterrorism, Ben Emmerson, to visit the country to report on how it was reconciling the need to prevent terrorism with respect for human rights. Emmerson came back in early May. His report was unusually frank for a diplomatic document, and in a subsequent media interview he went well beyond that.

The Saudi antiterrorism law was written in a way that criminalised all dissent, he told The Guardian. Torture in Saudi jails was commonplace, the guilty officials went unpunished and Saudi Arabia ‘‘is undergoing the most ruthless crackdown on political dissent that the country has experienced in decades’’.

‘‘Reports that Saudi Arabia is liberalising are completely wide of the mark,’’ Emmerson said. ‘‘The judiciary has now been brought entirely under the control of the King, and lacks any semblance of independence from the executive.

Put simply, there is no separation of power in Saudi Arabia, no freedom of expression, no free press, no effective trade unions and no functioning civil society.’’

Moreover, MbS’ successes in crushing dissent within the country have made him overconfident about his skill in foreign policy. He summoned Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri to Riyadh and forced him to resign, only to see Hariri get his job back in alliance with Hizbollah, a Shia Islamist group that MbS utterly detests.

He declared a blockade of Saudi Arabia’s small but wealthy neighbour, Qatar, to force it to close down the Al Jazeera network, the most influential Arabiclanguage news service, and to break its ties with Iran, the country MbS fears most. One year later Al Jazeera is still alive and kicking, and Qatar has moved closer to Iran.

And in his biggest blunder, he launched a military intervention in the Yemeni civil war to defeat the Houthis, a Shia tribe that has captured most of Yemen and that he believes (wrongly) is controlled and armed by Iran.

Saudi Arabia’s air strikes have killed thousands, its ally the United Arab Emirates has thousands of troops on the ground — and three years later the Houthis still control most of the heavily populated parts of Yemen, including the capital.

It’s not exactly Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam — the Saudis have no troops on the ground, and the Emiratis are mostly using foreign mercenaries — but the Yemeni intervention is very expensive, deeply embarrassing and probably unwinnable. In the long run, it may be MbS’ undoing.

The wealth has been more widely shared in Saudi Arabia than in most oilrich countries, and for the nonpolitical majority life is still pretty good. Even for women, things are very gradually getting better: 60% of Saudi university graduates are female, and now they can drive too. But the country is now being run by an erratic and overconfident dictator.