SAUDI CROWN PRINCE TELLS OF HIS DRIVE FOR RIGHTS AND REFORM
Mohammed bin Salman speaks of the ‘real Saudi Arabia in the 1970s’
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is expected to meet US President Donald Trump in Washington today, with mutual rival Iran high on the agenda.
But Prince Mohammed, 32, will also be keen to speak about his sweeping social changes in the kingdom and assertive foreign policy that includes the war in Yemen and diplomatic feud with Qatar.
The prince on Sunday gave an interview to CBS News on Sunday in which many of his reforms were discussed.
His promotion of women’s rights has included the relaxing of clothing restrictions, a push for more in the workforce and lifting the long-running ban on them driving.
But guardianship laws that require women to seek the permission of male relatives for some activities remain.
“We have extremists who forbid mixing between the sexes and are unable to differentiate between a man and a woman alone together and their being together in a workplace,” Prince Mohammed said.
“Many of those ideas contradict the way of life during the time of the Prophet. We are all human beings and there is no difference.”
He acknowledged that Saudi society was dominated by conservative Islam, which he traces back to 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the seizure by extremists of the Grand Mosque in Makkah.
“We were victims, especially my generation, who suffered from this a great deal,” Prince Mohammed said. “This is not the real Saudi Arabia. I would ask your viewers to use their smartphones to find out.
“They can Google Saudi Arabia in the 1970s and 1960s and they will see the real Saudi Arabia easily in the pictures. We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries.
“Women were driving cars. There were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia. Women worked everywhere. We were just normal people developing like any other country in the world until the events of 1979.”
The prince spoke of his anticorruption purge, which resulted in many of the kingdom’s princes and business leaders being detained for several weeks in Riyadh’s luxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel.
“What we did in Saudi Arabia was extremely necessary” and legal, Prince Mohammed said.
He recovered more than “$100 billion” in ill-gotten wealth from those held. But that was not the point, he added.
“The idea is not to get money but to punish the corrupt and send a clear signal that whoever engages in corrupt deals will face the law.” The crown prince spoke of his own wealth, but said most of it was spent on his people. “As far as my private expenses, I’m a rich person and not a poor person. I’m not Gandhi or Mandela. But what I do as a person is to spend part of my personal income on charity. I spend at least 51 per cent on people and 49 on myself.”
As heir to the throne after his father, King Salman, the young prince could be set to rule the kingdom for the next half century or more.
Asked what could stop him, Prince Mohammed replied: “Only death.”
We were just normal people developing like any other country in the world until the events of 1979