Checkbook diplomacy of Saudis revealed
BEIRUT — It seems that everyone wants something from Saudi Arabia.
Before becoming the president of Egypt, Mohammed Morsi wanted visas to take his family on a religious pilgrimage. A Lebanese politician begged for cash to pay his bodyguards. Even the state news agency of Guinea, in West Africa, asked for $2,000 “to solve many of the problems the agency is facing.”
They all had good reason to ask, as the kingdom has long wielded its oil wealth and religious influence to try to shape regional events and support figures sympathetic to its worldview.
These and other revelations appear in a trove of documents said to have come from inside the Saudi Foreign Affairs Ministry and released Friday by the anti-privacy group WikiLeaks.
While the documents appear to contain no shocking revelations about Saudi Arabia, say, eavesdropping on the United States or shipping bags of cash to militant groups, they contain enough detail to shed light on the diplomacy of a deeply private country and to embarrass Saudi officials and those who lobby them for financial aid. And they allow the curious to get a glimpse of the often complex interactions between a kingdom seen by many as the rich uncle of Middle East and its clients, from Africa to Australia.
In a statement carried by the Saudi state news agency Saturday, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Osama Nugali, acknowledged that the documents were related to a recent electron- ic attack on the ministry.
He warned Saudis not to “help the enemies of the homeland” by sharing the documents, adding that many were “clearly fabricated.” Those who distribute the documents will be punished under the country’s cybercrimes law, he said.
Nugali also struck a defiant tone, saying the documents were essentially in line with the “state’s transparent policies” and its public statements on “numerous regional and international issues.”
More than 60,000 documents have been released so far, with WikiLeaks promising more to come. They include identification cards, visa requests and summaries of news media coverage of the kingdom. The most informative are diplomatic cables from Saudi embassies around the world to the Foreign Ministry, many of which are then passed along to the office of the king for final decisions.
Many of the cables are incomplete, making it hard to determine their date and context, and very few indicate which requests were approved by the king and ultimately carried out.
Most documents focus on a turbulent period in the Middle East, beginning after the popular uprisings that toppled Arab leaders in 2011 and continuing through early this year.
Clear in many of the documents are efforts by Saudi Arabia, a Sunni power, to combat the influence of Shiite Iran, its regional rival, as well as Iranian proxies like Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militant group and political party.
Cables about Iraq suggest efforts to support politicians who opposed Nouri al-Maliki, then the Shiite prime minister of Iraq.