HEADLINE news on the Saudi troop build-up on the Yemen border points to deeper-seated problems. PAUL WALKER probes the facts. A DEEPENING crisis is developing in Saudi Arabia.
At the centre of this process are the now visible signs of the end of the House of Saudi, the family which has governed Saudi Arabia, with western backing, forover half a century.
Rather than strengthening the dictatorship in Riyadh, the Gulf War has unleashed forces which are now undermining a regime which practices torture, murder and wide spread repression as everyday tools for maintaining control over its own population.
At the heart of the crisis is the instability which the war brought to Saudi finances. The Saudi contribution to the war was some £35 billion - more than a drop in the ocean for a nation which has an annual GDP of around £80 billion.
Borrowing
prices since the mid - 1980s and In response the Saudi monarstate spending in 1994, and this has been for a number of tees and Coface, the French exlays to companies exporting to Saudi Arabia and the "very grave" financial situation which Such a crisis has opened up a space for a domestic political opposition to emerge. There are two opposition groupings, both of which work within the political framework of Sharia Law.
To the right is the development of a pro-Iranian fundamentalist grouping, based in Oasim, a town in the heartland of the Nejd desert.
Clerical radicals The radical clerics at the centre of this movement are a new generation of thirty somethings whose politics are relayed on cassette tapes sold in shops throughout Saudi Arabia.
They are the product of Islamic universities and schools set up by the Saudi regime. Poor British Aeropace: friend of torturers regimes throught the world Saudi families received grants to send their children to these insulutons. sands.... of young men unates make them a perfect social base for fundamentalist ideas which attack the House of Saud for corruption, hoarding of wealth and subservience to the United States.
The liberal opposition, organised around the Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights, is made up of clerics and university protessors.
It has no social base to speak of and while it represents a genuine development of political forces in Saudi Arabia largely exists outside of the country itself given that its domestic backers, who publicly launched the Committee in May 1993, were immediately jailed.
The Saudi regime, faced with such opposition has resorted to widespread repression.
Crackdown
Over 1,600 people were arrested at the end of 1994 in dawn raids throughout Riyadh. This was the most recent chapter over events over the last two years which have witnessed both an upsurge both in public discontent and public executions.
The traditional tactic of a ruling class in deep trouble is to try and unite the nation against a common foe. This perhaps explains the increase in tension between Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
In the last month there have been a series of clashes between Yemeni and Saudi troops on their disputed border. The most serious fighting erupted on January Ist 1995 in the al-Yatmah and Khanjer regions, near the strategic oil fields in northern Yemen.
There followed negotiation bia moved large numbers of troops and military hardware to the disputed area.
Whatever the outcome of this dent that things are not what they It is also clear that the oft repeated claim of the British Foreign Office and British Aerospace, the main military supplier to Saudi Arabia, that Saudi Arabia is not another Iran, are beginning to ring hollow.