IT’S COMPLICATED: Saudi Arabian Arrest Wave Shows Crown Prince’s Bid to Control Change.
Dozens of high-profile Saudis are locked up in jail, many of them denounced as traitors. Hundreds, possibly more, are barred from leaving the kingdom. And others have quietly left their homeland with no plans to return, creating the rudiments of an overseas Saudi dissident community.
Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has gone further than any of his predecessors to relax the kingdom’s strict social rules. But he is also overseeing one of the most ruthless crackdowns on perceived dissenters that Saudi Arabia has experienced in decades.
After high-profile autumn roundups of what the government said were dissident clerics and corrupt businessmen, the latest wave of arrests, in May, have focused in part on women and men who pushed for the right of women to drive, even though the Saudi government is set to begin recognizing that right on June 24.
The message behind the crackdown, which has come despite scant evidence of public dissent, is that the crown prince alone intends to dictate the pace and scope of change in Saudi Arabia, critics say.
“We were hoping for a more balanced society, more rights,” says a Saudi rights activist who has come under government pressure. “Instead what has happened is more repression, just with a different ideology.”
Government supporters see the development differently. “The country is going through tremendous disruptive change and it has a wide spectrum of political opinion—from religious conservatives to Western liberals,” said Ali Shihabi, who is close to the Saudi government and executive director of the Arabia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
“If you want to affect change, which is long overdue, there is no way you can bring all those constituencies together,” he added. “So you need an authoritarian approach—and that means you are going to limit freedoms for a while.”
Bringing the Kingdom into the 21st Century — or even the 19th — was never going to be pretty. But if bin Salman can pull it off, the results will be worth it.