Christopher Davidson - After the Sheikhs - The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies

The most recent bout of speculation centres on succession in Saudi Arabia, as the main players are all very elderly and in some cases are perceived as having differing viewpoints on key issues such as relations with the US, the influence of the religious establishment, and women’s rights. A spate of deaths at the top of the establishment, which already seems to have begun, could see an unpopular king being installed and will likely expose deep divisions within the ruling family. In turn, this could easily force a stalemate or prompt a coup d’état in the kingdom. The current king, Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud, is fairly well liked. However, he is now believed to be about eighty-eight, having outlived a number of his younger brothers and relatives. Notably, his crown prince since 2005, Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud, died in 2011 aged eighty-three. Seemingly with little choice, Abdullah then appointed another of his younger brothers, Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud as his crown prince and successor.

Having served as Saudi Arabia’s minister for the interior since 1975, Nayef was believed by many to be responsible for a large number of human rights abuses and incidents of torture. Further illustrating the precariousness of Saudi succession prospects, Nayef was known to be one of the most conservative members of the ruling family and was thought to have cultivated many opponents. According to a 2003 New York Times article, Nayef’s alleged promotion of extremist elements in the kingdom was sufficiently extensive to prompt a US Senator [788] 131. Charles E. Schumer. to write a letter to the Saudi Ambassador to the US asking that Nayef be removed from office due to his ‘well-documented history of suborning terrorist financing and ignoring the evidence when it comes to investigating terrorist attacks on Americans’. [789] 132. New York Times , 1 August 2003.

More recent criticism focused on Nayef’s apparent stance on conservative values and women, with one diplomat remarking that ‘He [Nayef] is a conservative who will give more rope to the religious establishment than any of his brothers would’ while others have speculated that recent reforms that have made it easier for women to work and have aimed to curb extremism in the education system would have been abandoned if he had succeeded. Certainly there was evidence that Nayef had obstructed some economic reforms in his earlier role as minister for the interior and, a month after Abdullah’s announced appointment of the first female deputy minister, Nayef was reported to have publicly stated that he saw no need for female members of the Consultative Council. [790] 133. Press TV , 26 December 2010. Indeed, a leaked US diplomatic cable from 2009 claimed that ‘Nayef is widely seen as a hard-line conservative who at best is lukewarm to King Abdullah’s reform initiatives’ and at a gathering for foreign journalists held in late 2011 at his house in Riyadh he was reported to have ‘…answered a question about whether Saudi Arabia would improve its relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was surely coming to prominence in Egypt… by lambasting the questioning journalist, excoriating him as a terrorist sympathiser and raging on until 4am about the many plots targeting the House of Saud’. [791] 134. New York Times , 23 October 2010.

With Nayef’s death in June 2012, the immediate succession crisis seems to have passed, as Abdullah has now been able to appoint his seventy-six year-old brother Salman bin Adul-Aziz Al-Saud as crown prince. As the kingdom’s long serving governor of Riyadh and with a reputation as a good diplomat and peacemaker, [792] 135. Al-Akhbar , 3 November 2011. Salman seems to have to have managed his relationship with the religious establishment more carefully than Nayef. And more recently, as minister of defence since 2011, he appears to have enjoyed much better relations with the Western powers than his predecessor. Overall, he is expected to continue with many of Abdullah’s policies and reforms. [793] 136. Reuters, 18 June 2012. Nevertheless, given that the combined age of the Saudi king and crown prince is now 164, the prospect of several further rapid successions in the next few years or months is all but certain. With a very large number of contenders and competing factions within the higher echelons of the Al-Saud dynasty, the likelihood of destabilising disputes or unsuitable and unpopular office-holders is very high. In particular, at some point in the very near future there will need to be a generational shift from the sons to the grandsons of the former patriarch Abdul-Aziz bin Saud. With several ‘branches’ having formed around Abdul-Aziz’s forty-five sons, many of which have forged relationships with other Gulf states and foreign powers, such a struggle could easily tear the monarchy apart. Both Nayef and Salman, for example, were part of a powerful seven member bloc of full brothers — the Sudairi Seven. [794] 137. The Sudairi Seven are named after their mother, Hassa bint Ahmed Al-Sudairi, who hailed from a powerful tribe from the interior. Now there are only five left, but their number includes the new minister for the interior [795] 138. Ahmed bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud. and they can serve as one of many counterweights to the king’s power. Already there have been key defections from Abdullah’s aforementioned ‘Allegiance Commission’, which was set up in 2005 to help choose successors in an orderly manner and avoid such problems. Notably, in late 2011 Talal bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud resigned his membership, having earlier criticised what he referred to as a ‘monopoly on Saudi power by an unnamed faction within the royal family’. [796] 139. Associated Press , 16 November 2011. Talal’s criticism was first voiced in 2007.

The Gulf monarchies have faced down different opposition movements over the years, but these have not been broad-based and represented only narrow sections of the indigenous populations. Moreover, the Gulf monarchies have generally been strong and confident enough to placate or sideline any opposition before it has gained too much traction. The Gulf monarchies have also been very effective in demonising opponents, either branding them as foreign-backed fifth columnists, as religious fundamentalists, or even as terrorists. In turn this has allowed rulers and their governments to portray themselves to the majority of citizens and most international observers as being safe, reliable upholders of the status quo, and thus far preferable to any dangerous and unpredictable alternatives. When reformist forces have affected their populations — often improving communications between citizens or their access to education — the Gulf monarchies have been effective at co-option, often bringing such forces under the umbrella of the state or members of ruling families, and thus continuing to apply the mosaic model of traditional loyalties alongside modernisation even in the first few years of the twenty-first century.

More recently, however, powerful opposition movements have emerged that have proved less easy to contain, not least because they are making the most of potent new modernising forces that have been less easy for governments to co-opt. As a result an increasing number of regular Gulf nationals have become emboldened enough to protest against and, often for the first time, openly question their rulers. In 2011, spurred on by developments elsewhere in the region, these opponents and critics have presented the most serious challenges yet to the ruling families. In something of a perfect storm for the incumbent regimes, the Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Syria have not only given hope for those Gulf nationals and Gulf-based movements committed to serious political reform and to unseating the current autocracies, but they have also made it harder for the Gulf monarchies to depict their new enemies as anything other than pro-democracy activists or disillusioned citizens who have recognised the inevitable collapse of the political and economic structures underpinning their rulers. Furthermore, the 2011 revolutions — or at least the first few waves of protest in Tunisia and Egypt — have also helped expose the Gulf monarchies’ strong preference for supporting other authoritarian states in the region and their fear of having democratic, representative governments take shape in neighbouring states. The initial responses of most of the Gulf monarchies were markedly anti-Arab Spring, even if they later tried to change tack. This had a massive delegitimising effect on the ruling families and governments involved, as in the eyes of many of their citizens they positioned themselves as part of a distinct and anachronistic counter-revolutionary bloc.