Vision 2030 and poverty in Saudi Arabia

Growing up in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, I was acutely aware that Saudi society was divided along class lines. There was the royal family and the super-rich, the middle class and the poor masses - all strictly segregated socially and culturally.

Like many other Saudi cities, Jeddah, where I lived and worked as a journalist between 2005 and 2010, was divided in two: the northern part of the city was reserved for royalty and upper middle-class families, while the southern part was where migrant workers, undocumented migrants and poor and middle-class Saudis lived.

Not being a member of the wealthy class, I too lived in the southern neighbourhoods.

Every morning, on my way to the office of the daily al-Madina newspaper, where I worked, I would pass by a street vendor, Om Mohammed, a widow and a mother of five. The death of her husband, the main breadwinner of the family, had forced her to start selling second-hand clothes on the street in order to make ends meet. Two of her sons had had to drop out of school because she could not afford to support their education. While public schools are free in the kingdom, the state does not cover additional costs for students, including school materials and food.

She herself had not received a proper education and was semi-illiterate, which made it difficult for her to go through the heavily bureaucratic process of applying for financial aid from the Ministry of Labour and Social Development. Another hurdle was that such payments could only be made into a bank account, which she could not open because she did not have the money for the minimum deposit required to open one. In Saudi Arabia some 7 million citizens do not have bank accounts, almost 60 percent of whom are women.

Om Mohammed lived in the Kilo 6 slum which had no proper sewage system or running water and flooded every time it rained. She, like her neighbours, was reduced to carrying water from the ablution fountains of the nearby mosques, to drink and wash with.

Om Mohammed is one of millions of Saudis stuck in a vicious circle of poverty on the peripheries of cities whom the world rarely sees or hears about.

Although the government rarely releases statistics, it is estimated that around 20 percent or more of the 34 million Saudi citizens live in poverty. Many of them are women or members of female-headed households.

For decades, successive Saudi governments have done little to alleviate the suffering of their country's poor. They have been reluctant to openly talk about their existence because recognising poverty necessitates recognising income inequality and the unfair distribution of wealth in the oil-rich country. 

Under King Salman and the reform project of his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the situation is no different. Vision 2030 not only is unlikely to help uplift the poor, but the austerity measures it comes with are likely to push parts of the middle class into poverty.

Addressing poverty with charity

Throughout Saudi history, charity has been the central approach to addressing the issue of poverty. Being a Muslim country and the custodian of the two holy mosques, Saudi Arabia obliges every individual and corporation to donate 2.5 percent of their wealth to the government as part of the Islamic system of zakat. The government, in turn, is supposed to distribute it to poor families.

Needless to say, this approach was never successful in addressing the root causes of poverty in the kingdom.

In 2002, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who at that time was crown prince, paid a visit to the poor neighbourhood of al-Shemaysi in Riyadh. The move was unprecedented for a royal and marked the beginning of various initiatives by the state to address poverty.

After he became king in 2005, Abdullah created the National Poverty Reduction Strategy and the Supplementary Support Programmes which started to distribute monthly and one-time payments to poor families through the labour ministry. It was this programme that Om Mohammed was hoping to access but could not because of its bureaucratic hurdles.

Despite King Abdullah's efforts, poverty persisted. In 2013, amid the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia had its own public self-immolation incident. Mohammed al-Huraisi, a watermelon seller, set himself on fire after he was told he did not have permission to sell his produce at a street corner of a poor neighbourhood in Riyadh.

The orphaned daughters of Mohammed al-Huraisi are seen with their grandfather Ali Abdullah al-Huraisi at their home on the outskirts of Riyadh on May 22, 2013 [Reuters/Faisal Al Nasser]

According to a 2017 UN report, the anti-poverty measures taken by the Saudi government over the past decade were "inefficient, unsustainable, poorly coordinated and, above all, unsuccessful in providing comprehensive social protection to those most in need".

At the same time, the Saudi authorities continued to ignore the problem and keep public attention away from it. Saudi officials would avoid using the word "poor" in public statements and substitute it for vulnerable or needy persons or low-income families.

They would also clamp down on those publicly criticising the government for not taking adequate action. In 2011, bloggers Firas Buqna and Hussam al-Darwish were arrested for posting a video documenting the tough living conditions in al-Jaradiyaa, a poor neighbourhood of Riyadh.

In 2014, the government played down a report by Sami bin Abdul Aziz Al-Damigh, a professor at King Saud University in Riyadh, on the poverty problem in the kingdom. Al-Damigh proposed setting a poverty line for the country, which the government rejected.

Vision 2030

When King Salman came to power in 2015, the Saudi economy was going through the shock of a major oil price slump. In a matter of months, the oil price had gone done from $100 to $50 per barrel, cutting in half oil export profits, which accounted for about 87 percent of Saudi budget revenues.

The kingdom needed to take major austerity measures and the king decided to empower his son, Mohammed bin Salman (also known as MBS) to spearhead them. In 2016, the then deputy crown prince announced Vision 2030, a reform project based on a report produced by the controversial US-based consulting company McKinsey.

Vision 2030 is supposed to transform Saudi Arabia by weaning it off oil. It proposes ambitious steps to diversify its economy by growing the private sector and scaling down the public one. The main pillar of the project is the privatisation of Aramco, the Saudi state oil company, which has garnered much attention internationally.

But the less-publicised economic initiatives include privatising important public service institutions, like hospitals and schools, slashing public sector employment and increasing taxation. Currently two-thirds of employed Saudis work for the state; under Vision 2030, it is supposed to go down to 20 percent.

Soon after the project was announced, MBS started to implement some of its harshest provisions. In September 2016, the government announced pay cuts for public sector employees. In 2017, it released a timetable for decreasing subsidies for fuel, natural gas, electricity and water over the next few years. In 2018, the government introduced a value-added tax of 5 percent on most goods and services.

Fuel prices in Saudi Arabia almost doubled in 2018 as a result of a subsidy cut. Octane 91 went up from 0.75 riyals to 1.37 riyals (from $0.20 to $0.36) [Reuters/Waleed Ali]

These economic decisions sent prices of basic commodities, including fuel, soaring, which not only hit hard the Saudi poor, but also affected middle classes, who have been dependent for generations on state largesse. All of a sudden, middle-income households found themselves unable to pay for housing and their basic necessities. This caused a wave of public anger and capital flight; many Saudis decided not only to transfer money out of the country but also to emigrate.

In 2016, the government estimated that as many as one million Saudis had left the country to seek livelihoods abroad in a short period of time. The crackdown on dissent that the government unleashed under the guidance of MBS further worsened the situation.

MBS's anti-poverty measures

Despite purporting to transform Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030 does not mention in any significant way the issue of poverty in Saudi Arabia. Among its many different programmes, there are only two which seem to focus to some extent on socio-economic ills.

The National Transformation Program (NTP) has a number of declared goals, including "increase the percentage of residential areas, including peripheral areas, covered by health service from 78% to 88%" and "increase the percentage of population with access to water services from 87% to 92%". The Housing Program aims to "increase the percentage of home ownership among Saudi citizens to 60%".

But, needless to say, none of these measures can alleviate the structural causes of poverty in Saudi Arabia. And as Saudi economist Ihsan Bu Haliqa pointed out in 2016 after the unveiling of Vision 2030, "there is an urgent need to restructure the social safety net" in Saudi Arabia which should have happened before the reduction of public spending on subsidies.

Because it did not, there was no buffer to protect lower-income households when cuts in public spending were implemented that could muffle the reaction of the public. Growing dissatisfaction and the risk of social unrest forced MBS to roll back some of his plans, bring back bonus payments for public sector employees and introducing a new Citizen Account Program disbursing money to families in need.

These direct cash transfers may help some families cope with the sudden rise in prices of basic commodities and rent, but it will not help pull them out of poverty or provide them with financial security in the long-term.

Charity did not alleviate Saudi Arabia's poverty problem in the past and it won't now, either. These stop-gap measures do not address structural inequality. They may defuse tension in the short term but will not stave off the storm that is coming. The World Bank itself has warned that the country faces a "looming poverty problem".

Examples in other countries abound of how neoliberal policies, privatisation of public services and austerity measures worsen structural poverty and lead to social upheaval. Even if Saudi Arabia manages to achieve economic growth under Vision 2030, this would not alleviate the socio-economic problems the majority of Saudis (the poor and the middle classes) face. We already know that the idea of wealth "trickling down" to the poorer layers of society without major wealth distribution policies does not work.

As lawyer Yahya al-Shahrani has pointed out, if the government really wanted to protect the poor, it would have taxed the rich instead of imposing a flat tax on everyone and cutting subsidies.

We have to remember that Vision 2030 is implemented in a society rife with patronage networks and by a state that does not have proper separation of powers. This means that wealth will not necessarily change hands with privatisation and the privileged few at the top of the Saudi society will continue to disproportionately benefit from the economic transformation.

And as Bu Haliqa has mentioned, in the absence of labour protections, pushing more Saudis to the private sector would expose them to even more exploitation and abuse. Private companies already pay on average 60 percent less than public ones for the same job.

What Vision 2030 envisions is dismantling the Saudi "rentier" state. While in theory, this may be a positive step, in practice, it undermines the basis of the unwritten social contract between the Saudi population and the house of Saud. Loyalty to the ruling family has been predicated on redistribution of the country's oil wealth.

Vision 2030 aims to increase home ownership among Saudi citizens to 60 percent  [Reuters/Sultan Al Fahed]

If this contract has to change and wealth has to be extracted from the population through taxation, then political and social reforms will also have to be undertaken. There will have to be transparency and accountability for how the taxpayers' money is spent, for taxation without representation is tyranny.

That of course is not part of Vision 2030, which is why any criticism of its provisions has been met with repression. Saudi economist Essam al-Zamil and Al-Watan columnist Saleh al-Shehi, among many others, have already been imprisoned for their public criticism of the plan. In fact, anyone who has dared express anything but praise for the crown prince has been pressured, jailed or exiled.

For now, repression and monetary handouts might work to suppress public anger but they will not do away with it.

And there are already cracks showing. The Saudi middle class, which has long been a supporter of the political status quo, is increasingly dissatisfied. The austerity measures could impact significantly its political orientations, and lead to political and economic unrest. One form this dissatisfaction is taking is the increasing number of Saudis fleeing the country and some of them are already starting to organise politically in exile.

If Vision 2030 is not revised to address major socio-economic ills and poverty, inequality and injustice will continue to grow and Saudi Arabia will likely face major political instability in the future.

This article was first published at Al-Jazeera English

In Saudi Arabia, the Prince has no Clothes

Five years ago, crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman popped up on the Arabian Peninsula, raging across the earth sowing conflict, slashing the jugular of free speech, stoning freedom of expression, and filling prisons with those having different opinions. He plays many roles at once: militarist, politician, and economist, all with the mind of a policeman. He is even the champion of entertainment and charity. He has been bestowed with all the awards of the land one can possibly receive, and even let some of them go to his brothers. And he surrounds himself with a new, unreservedly devoted, oligarchy.

One evening, his subjects could be heard whispering in cafés that their young prince has drained the people’s resources on a catastrophic and devastating war, creating armed conflicts in neighbouring nations, and that he obviously doesn’t give a shit that his people have been affected by rising prices and fat rents and swelling electricity and water bills.

Citizens began paying for all services. They whispered that normal people now pay half their salaries for austerity politics and that the migrant workers have become sacrificial lambs suffering the consequences of the regime’s mistakes, forced to pay huge sums to stay in the kingdom of the two holy mosques. The people must pay unjust taxes while this youngster wastes their millions on fairy tale castles, fine art, and luxury yachts.

One subject whispered: that youngster lacks the experience to lead. His capricious and absolutist decisions will only lead to disaster. But the only choice we have is to applaud him, emigrate, or be jailed—and in the worst case, have our throats slashed.

One beautiful day, a dubious consultancy firm arrived to give advice to the government and the king. These firm travels across the world to sell illusions, claiming that only the prudent and wise can truly understand their magnanimous plans and big ideas. The youngster had heard about them and ordered his court to invite them. The meeting took place, and without hesitation he showered them with huge sums of cash. The firm promised the new autocratic regime magnificent visions about which everyone else would be jealous. The consultants emphasize that only the wise and savvy have the capacity to comprehend the end results of the plans they mean to propose. Those who cannot see the advantages in their way of thinking belong those less intelligent ranks.

After a while, the young prince sent his minister to check out how the work with the visions of the future was going. The minister was scared that he would fail to understand these grand visions. The consultants explained the amazing changes the nation’s economy would experience, which had been damaged by sinking oil prices long before the new visions even began to take form. But the minister really couldn’t see those changes, and also didn’t understand what the visions were supposed to be built upon in the first place. He anyway asserted to the prince that the visions were very nice. He said they contained powerfully beautiful images of neoliberalism.

The people applauded. The newspapers wrote that they had never before seen such a lovely economy as this, and that the young prince was a fantastic and revolutionary reformer who will cure the people of their oil addiction.

The young price allowed himself to be interviewed by the international media and was depicted clothed in his new visions. The people again applauded and looked forward to finding out more about them. A great carnival was arranged to display the new visions. His majesty’s portrait was raised across the city. His underlings cheered, not in delight, but rather in fear. No sooner had the young prince captured the nation’s heart, then a voice rang out: “But this vision is bare!” Another cried: “Why were we not allowed to take part in crafting these visions?” After a while, his subjects saw that these visions were nothing more than pretty words, lacking any content or realistic solutions. The number of those in poverty rose, while the rich got richer. They saw that there were no checks and balances in the young price’s decision. They saw how the middle class had been left behind for the whimsy of the market and monopoly. They saw that there was no civil society that could protect the individual, and that the regime had remade the economic system without any corresponding political or democratic changes.

A bold writer and expert of the economy raised his voice, criticizing the visions. He pointed out all the mistakes and vagaries they contained. He warned the nation was selling out its natural resources. The king arrested him. Many others criticized the autocratic regime and its conflicts with bordering nations. They too were arrested, and some were forced to flee.

When the visions failed to achieve their promised changes, the prince realized that his advisers had lied about the magical powers the visions were supposed to have. He saw that his cousins had a malicious hidden agenda. He arrested them and held them in luxury prisons, forcing them to pay dearly for his freedom to ease his own economic burden. He demanded from them total, unhesitating loyalty.

To dampen the people’s anger, he opened the nation to circuses, cinemas, wrestling matches, and concerts. He handed out breadcrumbs, reinstating the bonuses and small privileges enjoyed by social servants and the military. Meanwhile, he led campaigns for silencing critical voices. Writers drowned in silence and filled the nation’s prisons, while the world hailed the young tyrant for allowing women to drive—while taking from them the right to speak. He gave women necklaces and better careers at the same time as he held his own mother under house arrest, so she could not rebel against him.

The world is occupied with the elegant young prince’s decrees, while the free word hides itself in fear, the free word that is stoned and whipped. There is no solace for women, who he keeps under his political mantle, so they cannot be heard. There is no comfort for the true reformers forced into silence in the prisons of the prince—the naked king.

Don’t ask, Don’t tel: The “Right” to Drive for Women in Saudi Villages

Sunday, June 24, 2018, was a historic moment in Saudi Arabia, as women drove their cars for the first time following the end of the driving ban. However, for some of them, the decision to lift the ban in the kingdom was less relevant, not because they are ultraconservatives or anti–women driving activists but because they have been driving for years in Saudi villages, remote areas, and across agricultural cities without facing major reprisals. 

There have never been actual provisions in the Saudi traffic rules that explicitly prevent women from driving. Instead, the ban on women driving was culturally and socially constructed, enforced by the traffic police and the Ministry of Interior and morally supported by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Pre- vention of Vice (commonly referred to as the “religious police”). 

Women’s-rights activists used Article (32) of the Traffic Law, which stipulates that “no person shall be permitted to drive any vehicle before obtaining the neces- sary driving license,” to defend their right to sit behind the wheel and to prove that they are not lawbreakers but law adherents. Activists argued that, by means of the use of the gender-neutral term person, this provision is not limited to men. Failing to issue driver’s licenses to women thus lacks a legal base. This reading of the law encouraged Saudi women to defy the ban for decades, from the November 6, 1990, car demonstration in the city of Riyadh to the 2009 petition and later the well-known 2011 Women2Drive campaign and the October 26 call in 2013. Alongside these actions, intellectuals submitted various motions and letters to the ruling royal fam- ily to demand an overturn of the infamous ban.

People in central cities in Saudi Arabia, such as Riyadh and Jeddah, have heard the stories of women villagers and Bedouins carrying handguns for protection and driving pickup vehicles over hundreds of miles through a harsh environment to work on their families’ farmland, bring their kids to school, go to grocery stores, harvest crops, and transport livestock to the market. The complex natural terrain in these villages, which often lack good infrastructure, renders driving an important issue for all family members, as it is the only means of mobility through mountains and desert plains. The stories of these women have been rarely covered by local press. One exceptional report was published in 2010 in the Saudi Al Riyadh Newspaper, where they wrote about Norah Hamdan, a fifty-five-year-old woman who told the newspaper that she had been driving big tankers to bring clean drinking water to her village and to other villages for years and that she had never experienced disrespect or harassment (www.alriyadh.com/541008). The report on Hamdan was presented in cautious language, mentioning the stories of women driving outside urban areas yet emphasizing that women in cities would be permitted to drive only when society was ready. Given Hamdan’s story, it was initially difficult to fathom how women in Saudi Arabia’s most conservative communities were driving their vehicles without back- lash, unrest, or defamation campaigns, while women’s-rights activists protesting the ban had their passports confiscated or were imprisoned or forced into exile.

Gradually, I realized that women driving in their villages and in small provinces was normal because their family survival depended on the motor vehicle, given the lack of public transportation. Male household members leave home from dawn until dusk to work in nearby cities, leaving Bedouin women responsible for tak- ing care of their families’ daily needs. The limited financial incomes of the families prevent them from hiring private drivers to carry the work on their behalf. More- over, hardworking mothers and their daughters in villages cannot hire drivers, as this puts them in a state of khalwa, or “seclusion” in an enclosed area with a man who is not a relative, which is forbidden according to the Saudi interpretation of Sunni Islam. This leaves women in the hinterlands with no alternative to sitting behind the wheel in order to manage family affairs. 

For these reasons the police have traditionally turned a blind eye to such situations, as families’ livelihoods depend on the ability of women to drive in these areas. As a result, police officers do not target female villagers despite the illegality of their defying the ban. Moreover, police authorities do not have the capacity or the resources to effectively patrol remote areas, resulting in their acceptance of this sit- uation. This also demonstrates the pragmatic nature of the Saudi regime. Knowing that preventing female villagers from driving may cause tension and jeopardize the villagers’ livelihoods, thus potentially leading to popular uprisings, the authorities have opted for following an unwritten policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” 

While women in urban areas were banned from driving, women in villages would express their surprise at the punitive measures taken against women caught sitting behind the wheel in big cities. Women in rural areas often recall that their female ancestors rode horses and camels and argue, therefore, that there is no reason for them not to drive cars as a form of modern transportation. Aware of the enforcement of the ban in urban areas, however, female villagers driving their cars close to the borders of large cities would switch their seats with their teenage sons or male relatives to avoid problems.

Saudi women in the periphery faced trouble with the authorities for the first time coinciding with the Women2Drive campaign. The Saudi police’s severe mea- sures and crackdown on women campaigning to drive cars in 2011, in the wake of the Arab Spring, was extended to villages even though women there had not demanded an end to the ban. This was the case of a Saudi woman in a small village in Al-Qassim region, who was arrested with her mother and sister as she drove a Datsun pickup truck. The leaders of the village defended the woman driver, arguing that she was not defying the rules but had always driven because of family need. As the ban was socially constructed and legally supported, the tolerance toward women driving vehicles in some of the most conservative villages in the kingdom is also socially constructed and motivated by the local need for it. 

The question is, If women were allowed to drive outside central cities, why did the regime arrest the 1990 car demonstrators and the Women2Drive campaigners? Why, at the time of this writing, in October 2018, do prominent women’s-rights activists who fought for the right to drive remain behind bars after the lifting of the ban? 
 
People in Saudi Arabia live under an order that regulates and controls every aspect of their public and private lives through a system of rewards for those who show loyalty to the regime and its ideology, as well as a system of harsh punishments for those who dare to defy political and social norms. By means of this dual system the regime ensures full control of society. The royal family strives to keep issues related to women’s rights under the control of the patriarchal political system, as the regime fears a bottom-up approach to change that might spark the popular imag- ination and lead to further demands for sustainable reforms. Thus rights are granted by the king only when he so wishes, not in response to people’s demands. It is within this context that the authorities’ tolerance toward women driving in villages needs to be understood, as this allows the regime to avoid popular discontent or a “revo- lution of the hungry” in the hinterlands. At the same time, women’s-rights activists challenging the regime narrative in big cities has always led to crackdowns, because the regime fears that this will lead to demands for greater democratic change by its people. 

The different treatment of women driving in villages and cities shows that the Saudi regime continues to reserve for itself the absolute right to interpret women’s needs and priorities. It also demonstrates the totalitarian nature of the system, where individual narratives and demands outside the state’s interests and agenda are not tolerated. Now the major challenge for Saudi women is to safeguard these limited positive steps, such as the right to drive; work to challenge patriarchal norms; and push forward for further holistic and sustainable gender reforms. Women in central cities as well as in the peripheries continue to suffer and fight in one way or another against both a political system that regulates and controls every aspect of public and private life and an entrenched patriarchal social structure that keeps them in political, social, and legal shackles.

HANA AL-KHAMRI is a writer and analyst who has worked for a local Saudi Arabian newspaper. Currently based in Sweden, she writes for the Washington Post and Al Jazeera English, among other publications. She is also the national program coordinator for the organization ActionAid, working on improving girls’ and women’s rights. She is author of Women of Ink: Female Journalists in Gender-Apartheid Saudi Arabia (forthcoming). Contact: alkhamri.hana@gmail.com. Twitter: @hanaalkhamri.

JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 15:2 • July 2019© 2019 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies

A Boy in the Saudi Kingdom of Men - A True Story

Mohammed (MO) Al-Khamri






I unleash my tied up spirit in the vast city of barricades, dancing, disguised by the open air, to the sound of hip-hop music. My big smile and curly hair are my companions in this free dance; where some of my thick hairlocks cover my ears to protect them from this city sunken in its fakeness and virtuous claims: "Are you a boy or a girl?" I am a human!


I shout and I hit the ground to break the chains of the patriarchal city and the gender-based norms that restrict me. A girl comes to me out of nowhere and pulls my hair: "Is this your natural hair?" Yes, ma’am, this is not a wig, like the huge fakeness that is covering you from head to toe. I warn you, if you lay a hand on my hair again, it will be trapped inside by my wavy, loyal and stubborn Soldiers, and you will not be able to escape the intertwined tangled threads.


A cascade of thick hair locks fall down on my wide forehead that is worn-out with over thinking and fatigue. My glorious threads conceal many questions that have come in the form of wide wrinkles penetrating my twenties. These wrinkles are engraved with every slap, denouncement, punishment, and exclusion I face because of my beautiful, curly hair and my dancing soul.


Why is my city waging a war and conspiring against my very peaceful hair and very peaceful steps ?


"My son, cut your hair": My mother repeats the same sentence every morning, every evening, and with every encounter, out of love and fear for me of this city; a city that is shaken by the thick wavy hair of a young man with neat yet untamed curly threads that are impossible to be straightened; threads that are contrasting with the traditional image of the Middle Eastern man.


"Do not come back to school until you cut your hair and stop dancing": The high school principal prevented me from getting into the school because my hair is capable of “inciting the imitation of  infidels and revolutionaries” My hair “threatens society and its virtuous values”. I rub my head! Why all this? I resist and manage to got into class, just to be hit by the teacher's stick on my shoulder and dragged by my hair where some threads fall down as martyrs of the violations and beatings I had to face. I run away tapping and talking to my hair: “They will not let me enter the school until I redeem you as a sacrifice. Many around me are waiting for you, they want you to fall, to be swept away, to be buried in the trash and become nothing in order to live in the city of men!"


“Cut your hair, stop dancing or you will be arrested!” On my way to work, a policeman stops me, his eyes fall on my huge curly hair, and along with his colleagues they mock me and laugh at me because of my curly “Afro” hair, or “Kadash”. When I protest, I am sent to detention on charges of having thick curly hair and for dancing freely. I was arrested and the accused was my hair, my dance that did not steal, did not hurt anyone, did not kill. There is no universal law to defend my right to keep my thick curly hair, my dancing body regardless of my gender, there is no lawyer to defend me. I am surrounded by soldiers who begin a session of humiliation and degradation of me. "You are a girl when you let your hair grow like that and dance… you are not a man"


I remain calm and let out a deep breath from the deepest point of my soul, while my hair locks fly with pride in front of them and drop down on my face. They push me and kick! My silence kills them, a death sentence on my hair is announced and the appeal is  rejected. I am resisting for my hair... for my dignity... For the last hip hop dance. But they tie me up and hurl curses at me. They begin to cut my hair arbitrarily, brutally and violently.. My hair is clipped from the roots for this sick masculinity to prevail. My hair is distorted during this violent process and I lose all my beautiful curly threads..


The soldiers of the city withdraw with their uniforms and equipment, leaving me behind drowning in the middle of a pile of hair and a great sadness in the detention room. They leave me bleeding from the head with even deeper scars in my soul. I curl up on the floor, surrounded by a thousand threads of my curly hair. But then,  suddenly, a voice comes to me...


"Mohammed, do not be sad... we will grow again!"

Torture, reform and women's rights in Saudi Arabia

Women are being tortured for demanding basic rights in 'reformist' Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Saudi Arabia.

by Hana Al-Khamri

30 Nov 2018

Today, every critical voice in Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly under threat, but the Saudi women's rights activists are feeling the pressure the most, writes Al-Khamri.[File:AP]

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On November 20, Amnesty International published a report detailing how Saudi women's rights activists, arbitrarily arrested in a government crackdown earlier this year, have faced sexual harassment and torture during their interrogation. Citing three separate testimonies, the rights group said the detainees were held in solitary confinement and faced repeated electrocution and flogging, leaving some of them unable to stand or walk. One of the activists reportedly tried to take her own life repeatedly inside the prison.

Saudi Arabia has a long history of forcefully silencing women who dare to stand up to the kingdom's unjust laws and patriarchal gender norms. Almost four decades ago in 1990, 47 brave Saudi women were harshly punished by the authorities for participating in a major driving-ban protest - they were arrested and their passports were taken away. Some of them were even sacked from their jobs or expelled from their schools. 

But until recently, despite being abused, harassed and at times jailed, most Saudi women's rights activists were managing to avoid the full force of the regime's violence due to their high socioeconomic status. Their skin colour and religious and tribal identity were also playing a role in determining the level of abuse and harassment they were subjected once they were arrested. While undocumented female migrants and poor, underprivileged Saudi citizens were treated abominably in the kingdom's prisons, Saudi activists from privileged backgrounds were being dealt with with relative restraint.

Amnesty International's latest report, however, reveals that even a privileged background can no longer protect women's rights activists from the brutality of the country's current leadership.

This move towards indiscriminate oppression is a natural expansion of the kingdom's de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's (MBS) one-dimensional approach to all forms of dissent and opposition.

Stifling all forms of dissent

For years, the Saudi regime has been making a clear distinction between individuals campaigning for social rights without directly challenging or blaming the political system, and individuals who are demanding, or supporting the calls for, holistic political reform and constitutional monarchy. While the regime usually allowed some limited and informal breathing space for the former, the members of the latter group always faced systemic and relentless repression.

This is not the case any longer.

READ MORE

Mohammed bin Salman: The dark side of Saudi Arabia's crown prince

Under MBS' oppressive and unilateral rule, regardless of their nature and aims, all ground-up efforts to bring about change and social reform are being swiftly stifled. In the eyes of the current leadership, every single organic, bottom-up rights movement is a threat to the authoritarian system - a threat to the survival of the pseudo-reformist, despotic rule of the young crown prince.

The new leadership does not care whether a critic is a woman or a man, from a privileged background or not. Whether someone is trying to improve the Saudi society within the limitations of the current system, or calling for constitutional monarchy. MBS has a "you are either with me, or against me" mentality - no critic, opponent or dissident gets an easy pass under his rule. 

This is why Saudi women's rights movements, which for the most part demand reform within the existing political system, are facing the worst crackdown since their formation in the early 1990s.

'Cosmetic' reforms

The Amnesty report on the torture and sexual abuse of prominent female Saudi activists, which came on the back of the controversy surrounding the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, was another blow to the "reformist" image MBS has been working hard to maintain since taking power three and a half years ago.

The testimonies cited in the report not only demonstrated the regime's indiscriminate brutality, but also showed the world yet again that MBS' reform efforts, especially on the women's rights front, are purely cosmetic.

OPINION

Why did Saudi Arabia lift the driving ban on women only now?

by Hana Al-Khamri

In June this year, the international community welcomed and praised the Saudi leadership's decision to allow women to drive. While many across the world saw this development as a confirmation of MBS' reformist credentials, anyone who had been watching the kingdom closely knew immediately that this had nothing to do with giving women more rights and autonomy and everything to do with improving the new leadership's image in the West and encouraging foreign investment.

After all, using women's issues for political leverage has long been part of the Saudi playbook. For example, in 2001, just three months after 9/11, Saudi authorities granted women with national ID cards for the first time in the kingdom's history, in an apparent attempt to gain some favour in the West and protect the royal family. A decade later, in 2011, women were allowed to participate in municipal elections and two years later they were appointed to the consultative Shura council for the first time. Both reforms were implemented not to elevate the status of women in society, but to stop the ideas of Arab Spring from taking root in the kingdom.

Today, MBS is following in the footsteps of his predecessors by making cosmetic and inconsequential women's rights reforms for political leverage, while forcefully silencing the cries for genuine reform. But he is also going one step further than his ancestors and succumbing to McCarthyism in his efforts to consolidate power. He is accusing all the critics and opponents of his leadership - regardless of social status, political inclination, gender and attitudes towards the monarchy - of treason and he is questioning their loyalty to their country.

MBS, with the help of his father King Salman, has already assigned loyal figures to all important sovereign positions, especially in the judiciary. Since his rise to power in 2015 and amid an escalation of politically motivated arrests in the Kingdom, hundreds of new judges and prosecutors loyal to him have been appointed to important positions. Last year, the Presidency of State Security, a security body overseen by the king, was created to combine the counterterrorism and domestic intelligence services under one roof. This presidency, which is naturally loyal to the current leadership, also has total authority over the fates of all political prisoners.

As a result of these efforts, the "reformist" crown prince has transformed Saudi Arabia into a prison. Under his rule, hundreds of writers, human rights activists (some of them minors), academics, economists, clerics and opponents within the royal family have been arrested simply because they dared to disagree with him. Women's rights activists were put in jail on trumped up charges of "treason". Moreover, they were sexually assaulted and tortured during their incarceration.

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All this clearly demonstrates that MBS' blueprint for "reform" excludes the reshaping and rewriting of the social contract between the citizen and the state on democratic grounds, in a way that would ensure active political participation, promote freedom and respect civil, political and women's rights.

MBS views reform only as a useful tool to help him gain favour with the West and consolidate more political and economic power. Therefore, it should not surprise anyone that the reality on the ground in Saudi Arabia is nothing like the reformist dream MBS has been trying to sell abroad. The "reformist-minded" Saudi leadership is waging a covert war against Saudi Arabia's already suffocating civil society.

Not the time to call for more 'reform'

Today, every critical voice in Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly under threat, but the Saudi women's rights activists are feeling the pressure the most. Unlike male activists in the kingdom, they are fighting against both an authoritarian political system and a patriarchal social structure that keeps women in political, social and legal shackles.

While pretending to implement a reform agenda that aims to elevate the status of women in Saudi Arabia, the current leadership is oppressing women further by classifying any real demand for rights and freedoms - even when they do not threaten the political system - as an attack on national cohesion.

As the Amnesty report clearly demonstrates, every Saudi woman who wants to have a say on her place in society is now facing the threat of not only harassment, incarceration and intimidation, but also torture and sexual abuse.

For this reason, this is not the time to speak of reform in Saudi Arabia. Instead, it is time to speak up about the crisis of legitimacy, oppression, brutality and the shrinking civil society in the country.

Saudi Arabia is undoubtedly going through one of the darkest periods in its recent history, however, all is not lost.

Despite all the torture, harassment and intimidation by the regime, and the pressures of a highly patriarchal society, Saudi feminists are still inventing creative methods to demand their rights and change their lives. They are displaying great resilience in the face of absolute repression and this remains a source of true inspiration and hope.