CHAPTER 18
Soon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, in the summer of 1990, Iraqi agents started appearing at the ancient, blue-tiled shrine of Zaynab in Damascus. Shias had been visiting the shrine for centuries to honor Zaynab, spirited sister of the martyred Husayn (see the glossary, page 342). Since leaving Iran, Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar, leader of the Saudi Shias in exile, had set up his headquarters here, and it was to the sheikh that the Iraqis now came with a message from their president.
Saddam had always had a special place in his heart for the interests of the Saudi Shias, explained his emissaries, and had decided to offer Sheikh Hassan a radio station of his own in Iraq. This would enable the sheikh to beam his spiritual messages directly to his oppressed followers inside the Kingdom, while also encouraging them to rise up against the tyranny of the House of Saud. Along with the radio station there would also be funds to help support the expenses of the sheikh and his movement—and, perhaps, even, the use of a plane. Sheikh Hassan and his group of Shia exiles were being recruited to join Saddam in his anti-Saudi war effort.
“It was not worth even the effort of responding”—says the sheikh today with a sniff—“the idea that Saddam Hussein genuinely cared about the rights and worship of the Shia people.”
“We rejected the approach out of hand,” says Tawfiq Al-Seif, who was then the sheikh’s deputy. “We’d left Iran in order to prove our independence. Our loyalty was not to Iraq, but to a reformed Saudi Arabia.”
By the summer of 1990, Sheikh Hassan was heading the most effective opposition the House of Saud had faced to that date, thanks to the movement’s change of emphasis following their departure from Iran. Al-Saffar and his followers had abandoned the theme of Islamic revolution with its connotations of Khomeini. They were now presenting themselves in more universal terms, as the International Committee for Human Rights in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula—a hot button to press in these months that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.
“Our ‘Human Rights’ label attracted the American media like a magnet,” remembers Fouad Ibrahim, the historian of the dissident Shia movement. “Congressional researchers came asking for data. We received inquiries from the United Nations. We started working with activists like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch—and we used our contacts inside the Kingdom to hand out news stories around the world on Saudi arrests and scandals.”
Jaffar Shayeb, one of the sheikh’s political advisers who was pursuing his studies in the United States, opened a Saudi human rights office in Washington, where he organized a roster of articulate young Shia Saudis who were available to present their case on radio and television. Using this data, the Minnesota Lawyers Human Rights Committee produced Shame in the House of Saud, a scattershot dossier that set out the charges, some true, some exaggerated, detailing the Kingdom’s mistreatment of Shias, women, and foreign laborers. But the movement’s greatest triumph had come in the early months of 1990, when a government propaganda exhibition, “Saudi Arabia Between Yesterday and Today,” toured Washington, New York, and a series of other cities. At several of the openings, a dozen Shia demonstrators, their faces swathed in red and white Saudi headdresses, invited visitors to sign anti-Saudi petitions and shouted aggressive slogans loudly through their bullhorns, taking the chance they would never have at home to confront Saudi worthies such as Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, who was accompanying the tour.
“Salman! Ya Salman!” shouted the young Saudis angrily. “Fain hugoog al-insaan? Where are our human rights?”
“It was electrifying, and also scary,” remembers Faiza Ambah, one of the Saudi journalists covering the official party, looking out at the demonstrators. “It was a first. We knew they were Saudis behind the shomagh [headdresses]. We’d never seen Saudis demonstrating before.”
Local TV crews asked for interviews, the official Saudi delegation looked pompous as it refused to comment, and a multimillion-dollar PR initiative had the opposite effect.
“Then we jumped into our VW bus,” remembers one of the demonstrators happily, “and drove on to wait for them in the next city. They were trapped. They couldn’t cancel or refuse to appear, and they knew what was waiting for them when they arrived in town. It must have been a nightmare for them.”
That summer, however, the Gulf War brought a pause to the movement. The Shia exiles, like all other Saudis, were confronted with the prospect of Iraqi troops overrunning their homeland, and when they considered the options, Sheikh Hassan and his followers decided they were as patriotically Saudi as anyone else.
“We are ready to defend the nation and the independence of the nation,” declared a spokesman in response to Saddam’s invasion, adding that the sheikh and the movement’s leadership “urged Shia citizens to join military service for the purpose of defending the country.”
There was a little mischief in this second comment, since there were no Shia in the Saudi military, because the Saudi government had always refused to recruit them. But, in or out of the army, there was more than enough work to do, and the eight hundred thousand or so Shia of the Eastern Province set about it with gusto. They dug themselves in under the threat of Scuds and poison gas, and worked tirelessly providing food and shelter for the influx of half a million foreign fighting personnel. Meanwhile the Committee for Human Rights shut down its criticism outside the Kingdom for the time being, and supported Riyadh’s controversial alliance with America. The victory, when it came, owed not a little to Shia staunchness at home and discretion abroad.
From King Fahd’s point of view, the Shia support created a contrast that could hardly have been more stark. After a decade in which he had bet the shop on the Sunnis, lavishing money on the Wahhabis and giving them just about whatever they wanted, he found himself confronted by the petition-signing ingratitude of the Sahwah sheikhs and their criticism of the U.S. presence. He had financed his own opposition. Meanwhile the despised and supposedly untrustworthy Shia had committed themselves without reserve to the defense of the Kingdom. Occupying the most vulnerable part of the home front, they had not kicked up a moment’s distraction.
The king and his son Mohammed had been trying to speak, off the record, to Sheikh Hassan and the Shia leadership for years. They had dispatched emissaries to Iran, Syria, and Washington, though never with a suggestion of apology.
“It always ended up,” remembers one of their Shia interlocutors, “with the idea that the problem lay with us for being so extreme. As for ‘sorry’—that’s not a word you expect to hear from Saudi princes.”
But following the Gulf War there was a change of attitude: “They seemed more ready,” recalls Tawfiq Al-Seif, “to admit mistakes.” And the Shia side also shifted.
“We did not want to become governors,” says Sheikh Hassan. “It was not our target to remove the royal family. But we did want to eliminate racism and discrimination for the sake of our Shia people and for the sake of everyone in Saudi Arabia. We saw our movement like the antiapartheid campaign in South Africa. We felt that the time had come to talk.”
“By then,” says one government adviser, “they had worked out that, like a lot of minorities in this country, they would get a better deal from the Saudi monarchy than they would from any nonroyal government. The Al-Saud were the only horse to back. How could the Shia expect anything but oppression from the Wahhabis? The last thing they wanted was some sort of Islamist state with Sunni rule by the Sahwah sheikhs.”
The talking took place in London, with the Shia side represented by Al-Seif and Hamza Al-Hassan, a long-serving activist in exile, and the government by Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, chief adviser to Abdullah, the crown prince. A lively-minded and cleverly string-pulling man with a penchant for history, Al-Tuwayjri was nicknamed “T-1” by Western diplomats in Riyadh to distinguish him from the other members of his talented family. Ahmed Al-Tuwayjri, the activist and framer of the Memorandum of Advice, was one of his nephews.
“He was an inspiring and very clever person to talk to,” recalls Al-Seif, “and we were pleased to be meeting with someone we knew to be truly influential behind the scenes. He started by saying yes, he knew we had a problem, but that he did not want to raise our expectations. He was not certain he could deliver: we needed to realize that at that moment the government had a great deal on its plate.”
The first meeting took place in 1992 at the Knightsbridge Holiday Inn, where the three men sat in the coffee shop, chatting things out as if in a majlis at home. When they wanted some fresh air, they walked out to Hyde Park and continued their discussions, strolling beneath the trees.
“We talked from twelve until seven,” remembers Al-Seif, “and Al-Tuwayjri never took a single note. It was the first of several meetings, all of them pleasurable. He had a remarkable memory—every important detail we had agreed on was in the letters that he sent us later, after he’d reported to the crown prince, who had then gone to talk to the king.”
The two Shia reported, for their part, to their committees in exile, conferring particularly with Al-Saffar in Damascus and Jaffar Shayeb in the United States. There was fierce controversy among the rank and file about compromising with the Al-Saud, but the leadership wanted a deal.
“We had come to the belief,” remembers Al-Seif, “that being inside was better than being outside. Going home, we felt sure, would better enable us to bring about change.”
Negotiations took a step forward in 1993 when Al-Tuwayjri was replaced as the Saudi interlocutor by Othman Al-Omair, the London-based editor of the newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (“Middle East”). The dashing editor, who had a playboy reputation, was a less substantial figure than Al-Tuwayjri, but he came to the Shia as the personal representative of Fahd. His job was to get Al-Seif and his fellow negotiators to Jeddah for a face-to-face meeting with the king.
“We had three preconditions before we would go,” remembers Sadiq Al-Jabran, one of the four-man negotiating team. “The release of all political prisoners, the restoration of confiscated and canceled passports, and a general amnesty allowing all Shia exiles to come home without any further questioning or follow-ups. We couldn’t believe it. They didn’t bother to argue. They said yes to them all.”
On August 10, 1993, a telegram to Saudi embassies around the world notified consular staff that “gracious royal directives have been issued to the Ministry of the Interior to pardon all those of the Shia denomination who have conducted oppositional acts of all kinds, and allowing those who are outside the Kingdom to return if they wish.”
“We met in Damascus,” remembers Jaffar Al-Shayeb. “We were all a little bit scared. We’d made sure the New York Times published the story about the amnesty as a sort of protection. But none of us had valid Saudi passports. We’d decided that the first thing we’d do when we landed in Saudi Arabia was umrah [lesser pilgrimage], so we got off the plane in our towels. They let us in—they were expecting us—and we spent the first few days in Mecca, then Medina.”
“How was Medina?” was the first question that King Fahd asked as he greeted the delegation in his palace beside the Red Sea in Jeddah on Wednesday, September 22, 1993—a question intended to show that he did not share the Wahhabi distaste for Shia going to Medina to revere the Prophet’s tomb. The king clearly wanted to put his visitors at ease. He had taken off his mishlah, the dark, gold-trimmed cloak that Saudi royals only set aside socially when in the company of their family or the very closest of friends. He greeted his visitors wearing his simple white thobe.
“You are all welcome, my sons,” he declared.
It was a virtuoso Fahd perfomance, full of jokes and personal confidences woven into his habitual soliloquy of words and reflections. His son Mohammed, governor of the Eastern Province, sat beside him respectfully, saying nothing at all. Bandar bin Sultan, visiting from Washington, was also there, uncharacteristically silent.
The king talked regretfully about his bad leg. By 1993, looking more than his sixty-nine years, he was scarcely mobile, walking with difficulty. He was scornful on the subject of Yasser Arafat and Hussein of Jordan, the two former “friends” who had tried to kick the Kingdom when it was threatened by Saddam Hussein. Now, his implication seemed, he was talking in the company of true friends—“We need all our sons,” he said.
“I remember when I was minister of education and minister of the interior,” he reminisced, beginning to approach the issue. “I always made it a point to have good information on the Shia population. The Shia are equal citizens like everyone else. They are very hard workers. Every country in the world has problems, but they can always be resolved if people are willing to talk and listen.”
Tawfiq Al-Seif had been appointed spokesman for the delegation and explained that, in the long years of exile, many of the Shia had married foreign wives.
“The women will be given the choice of Saudi nationality if they want it,” said Fahd without ado.
To whom in the government could they come back and talk, asked Tawfiq, when it came to settling the details of this and other practicalities?
“I am taking charge of this entire matter personally,” said the king with a smile. “It is very dear to my heart.”
Fahd felt confident enough to play a little joke. One of the Shia complained that whenever a Saudi customs officer discovered Shia books in a suitcase, the books would get impounded and the Shia traveler would also be detained for questioning—in contrast to travelers who tried to smugglePlayboy, who simply had the magazine confiscated before being sent on their way.
“What’s this Playboy magazine?” asked Fahd, pretending ignorance.
Having compelled his visitors to describe the nature of Playboy to him with some embarrassment, the king then assured them that there was no problem. Readers of Shia literature would, in future, be treated with no less sympathy than the readers of girly publications.
After an hour and a half the audience was over, and the four Shia were out of the palace, surrounded by the nighttime picnickers and donkey riders of the Jeddah Corniche, wondering if the whole thing had been a dream. For the first—and last—time in their lives they had been tête-à tête with their king. They had made Saudi history. It was the first time that Fahd had ever sat down with his opposition face-to-face. And on top of it all, they were home!
As the days, months, and years went by, the details of the Shia reconciliation took a long time to work out: a decade later many elements of the deal are still being worked out. The king’s grand promise to take care of the matter personally meant, in reality, that no one took care of it, and voices in the Shia community were soon complaining that Sheikh Hassan had given up the leverage afforded by masked young demonstrators in Washington too rapidly and for too slight a price.
“Since His Majesty gave you his promise,” said Prince Nayef, straining a smile when the Shia leaders finally got to see him, “we shall investigate the best way to carry these things out.”
Nayef had seen the intelligence reports of Iranian aid to Shia movements inside Saudi Arabia, and he viewed his brother’s demarche with some reserve.
“In the end,” says Ali Al-Marzouq, “all we really got was our passports back. But that’s all right. We knew we could build on that.”