Privatizing Saudi Arabia: Why We’re Hearing More and More About Human Rights Abuses in the Kingdom

Raising selective, fake concerns about other countries’ human rights records is an old technique employed by the US and Britain. It is used as an ideological weapon to threaten “regime change,” the ulterior motives for which are often pushes for more privatization and market access.

SAUDI’S ROLE IN THE U.S.-LED GLOBAL ORDER
For decades, it has been begrudgingly accepted by the US and Britain that Saudi Arabia would be a “socialist” kingdom, in the very limited sense of the word socialist. The US State Department’s records from the 1960s and ‘70s state that the Saudi “public’s participation in the economic benefits deriving from oil income has greatly broadened ... There is little prospect ... of [king Faisal] or the Saud family being overthrown by any mass public uprising.” Faisal was assassinated by his nephew, but the house of Saud continued to rule. This is called maintaining stability in US and British foreign policy speak.

Basically a single-market economy, namely oil, the kingdom’s social control strategy has been to balance state hand-outs in the form of meagre social security to the many unemployed Saudis, while terrifying them with fanatical interpretations of Islam and public displays of sickening violence: limb amputations, floggings, and beheadings, all with keen US and British enablement in the form of military and police training, and arms supplies.

The kingdom is politically allied to the US and Britain. Being the world’s largest oil resource, it has the power to offset market and price fluctuations by exporting or not exporting its reserves. Exactly how this is done and precisely what political pressure is exerted remains a mystery. The most likely explanation is mutual self-interest and the fear on the part of the regime of being invaded by the US, which already has a military footprint in the kingdom:

A now-declassified US National Intelligence Council report notes that “[t]he Saudis might ... use oil policy to exert political pressure ... [but they] have acquired a much larger financial and strategic stake in avoiding policies that might hurt the West.” The report then articulates shared US-Saudi concerns, one of which is “[a]voiding circumstances under which the West might feel compelled to seize Saudi Arabia’s oilfields or its enormous foreign assets.”

So, the US, which wants to privatize the planet in a neoliberal global economy that favours elite minorities, has tolerated Saudi Arabia’s warped version of socialism. But pressure to “reform” continues to mount.

THE BROADER MIDDLE EAST
In 2000, the George W. Bush administration unveiled its wholesale plan to privatize (or “democratize” in policy-wonk speak) Arab-majority states (the “Greater Middle East” project, later known as the Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative).

According to the Congressional record, Mubarak’s Egypt, Gaddafi’s Libya, Ben Ali’s Tunisia, and Assad’s Syria were all on the list for major “reforms” and regime changes. These rulers were going to be “kicked out of office” unless the reforms were implemented, according to Leslie Campbell at the National Endowment for Democracy, speaking before the Arab Spring of early-2011.

Either these dictators had become too corrupt to serve the interests of US capital (as in the case of Ben Ali and Mubarak) or they were not pushing through the privatization “reforms” demanded by the US (Assad, Gaddafi). The interests of US banks and oil companies coincided with growing public discontent in those countries, which eventually erupted as the Arab Spring.

The US and Britain hijacked the popular resentment and exploited the Arab Spring. In Libya and Syria, both the US and Britain used terrorists as proxies. In other countries, they worked with peaceful revolutionaries. The US worked with some of the leaders of the Arab Spring, training in them in social media and so forth, only to betray them once the dictators were deposed and the new regimes were in power.

SAUDI: A BALANCING ACT
Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest oil reserves. The US and Britain support the dictatorship because they don’t want a genuinely socialistic government sharing the country’s oil wealth among its populace and manipulating global prices in ways not conducive to US interests. Ideally, they’d also like the oil revenues to be in private hands. But doing so would risk a popular uprising, given how fragile a society can become under privatization initiatives. As long as the oil remains in state-hands, the regime can pacify the public, in part, with free services. But greed has no limits and US planners continue to push for changes.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, the Arab Spring was not tolerated by the US or by the Saudi elites. The US wanted to keep the elites in power and pursue creeping privatization. The US wants to have its cake and eat it: to continue using the kingdom as an oil lever over other producers/exporters but also to risk that the population will push for a greater share of the wealth by eliminating public services. As a report by Chatham House puts it: “If the [Saudi] government’s ability to distribute largesse to the population is curtailed for the long term, it will need to focus on alternative sources of legitimacy.”

Today, there’s the Saudi Vision 2030, a glossy pamphlet promoting the wonders of privatization in the kingdom. It includes “introducing a number of laws and regulations; encouraging the private sector to build houses; and providing funding, mortgage solutions and ownership schemes that meet the needs of our citizens.” It also includes the privatization of certain educational sectors as well as health services.

A small percentage of Saudi’s majority-state-owned Aramco oil company was sold a couple of years ago, stoking major activity in the markets. Aramco has a Public Investment Fund which will finance some of the privatization initiatives. Given that the state-owned company has thus far had a hand in building so much infrastructure, the Financial Times comments on ongoing discussions about “opening up important industries to external influence,” meaning US and British investors.

WHERE “HUMAN RIGHTS” FIT IN
A few years before the Arab Spring, mainstream western media began to take notice of Mubarak’s appalling human rights abuses in Egypt; carefully omitting US and British support for those abuses in the form of arms sales, “aid,” and investments. The same thing had happened a few years before in the mid-2000s, when the now-deceased, secular dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, refused to participate in the US-led “war on terror” by expelling US military bases. Suddenly, British media noticed that Karimov was using child labour to produce cotton.

And so the story repeats with regards to Saudi Arabia. Marginal articles in left-wing, mainstream newspapers revealed the horrors of life in the kingdom. Then, suddenly, as the Vision 2030 was published, mainstream broadcasters in the US and Britain (notably PBS and ITV) brought those horrors to a wider audience. The shock-horror coverage of the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi fits the standard pattern. It is a mild warning to the Saudi elite (as we continue to sell arms and provide military training) that they’d better implement those privatization reforms, otherwise the “international community” (Britain and America) could make things diplomatically awkward.

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