CAIRO - Saudi Arabia, home to a quarter of the world's
oil reserves and
the birthplace of
Islam, faces growing popular opposition to the American
campaign in
Afghanistan - anxiety
that could force the Saudi government to temper its crucial
cooperation
in the US pursuit of
Osama bin Laden's network, analysts and diplomats say.
In the past week, the powerful Saudi interior minister
has warned his
countrymen not to
sympathize with bin Laden and his followers - an acknowledgment
of the
popularity the
Saudi exile enjoys in his homeland. The religious
affairs minister,
meanwhile, has reminded
the populace that no one other than the king could declare
holy war, a
move meant to head
off such calls from popular and more radical preachers
in the kingdom.
Across the country, home to Islam's two holiest shrines,
at Mecca and
Medina, prayer
leaders - with a rare forum for public expression in
the restrictive
kingdom - have
dismissed the minister's warning and urged a holy war
against ''the
enemies of Islam.''
Others praised bin Laden as a ''true Muslim hero.'' Both
calls were
issued amid reports in
an Arabic-language newspaper that Saudis were volunteering
to fight in
Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia's government has weathered such opposition
before, most
notably during the
1991 Gulf War when US troops were stationed on Saudi
land. But the
anxiety on the part
of Saudi leaders over popular opposition to the US-led
campaign in
Afghanistan points to
the delicate balancing act the Saudi government has faced
for much of
its history - a deep
alliance with the United States that, in public, cannot
appear so deep.
''The more they're seen as closely associated with the
US, the more
difficult for them to
justify their own pronouncements that they have independence
of decision
making,'' said
Aziz Abu Hamad, a Saudi analyst in Riyadh. The United
States ''doesn't
realize that if the
government cooperates more they will jeopardize their
own security.''
Saudi leaders, so far noticeably reluctant to endorse
the US campaign,
began this week to
air their displeasure with the course of the attacks
on a fellow Muslim
country.
Their messages, albeit subtle, suggested that Saudi Arabia
is
increasingly uneasy with the
duration and scope of the US campaign, both in its military
attacks on
Afghanistan as well
as the less visible moves against financial sources of
Osama bin Laden's
network, many
of which traditionally sprung from Saudi Arabia's elite.
US officials have publicly said that they are satisfied
with the support
the Saudis are
providing. ''The cooperation has been much better than
the general
public perception,'' said
Robert H. Pelletreau, former assistant secretary of state
for Near
Eastern affairs.
But requests for more cooperation may be dangerous, Hamad said.
So far, the Saudis have allowed the United States to use
a sophisticated
command and
control system at Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh
during the strikes.
More help will be
needed to crack down on funding believed headed
for bin Laden's network
- something the
Saudi government has sought to do since 1993 - and in
the investigation
into those behind
the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, analysts
say.
With Egypt and Israel, Saudi Arabia remains one of the
pillars of US
foreign policy in the
Middle East, a strategic region in a world dependent
on fossil fuels.
The US-Saudi alliance dates to 1945, when President Roosevelt
met King
Abdul Aziz
aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. It has weathered
four
Arab-Israeli wars, and it
grew far deeper and more public after Iraq's invasion
of Kuwait in 1990,
which led to the
arrival of US troops on Saudi soil.
But the relationship, bound by oil, remains sensitive.
While the Cold War united them as opponents of the Soviet
Union - the
United States
because of communism, Saudi Arabia because of atheism
- the Saudi
government has
shied away from appearing too close in public to a country
unpopular for
its support of
Israel and increasingly perceived as hostile in
foreign policy and
lifestyle to Islam.
''They have a lot of ambivalence toward us and we have
a lot of
ambivalence toward them,
but our mutual interests are so strong, they've overridden
the
ambivalence,'' said David
Long, a former US diplomat in Saudi Arabia. ''Our mutual
interests are
so close that the
policies have stayed remarkably close for the last 60
years.''
The crisis today, analysts and diplomats say, has introduced
a new and
perhaps more
dangerous element into that relationship. The test, they
say, could
prove as severe as the
1991 Gulf War, which gave rise to a dissident movement
- both militant
and peaceful -
upset about the arrival of US soldiers on land considered
by Muslims to
be sacred.
The challenge revolves around bin Laden himself, a Saudi
exile who was
long a hero in his
country for fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in
the 1980s.
That campaign, backed by the United States in one of its
biggest covert
operations ever,
joined bin Laden with many of the 6,000-strong Saudi
royal family. Among
his supporters
were Prince Salman, the powerful governor of Riyadh,
and Crown Prince
Abdullah, all but
certain to be the next Saudi king, who donated dozens
of trucks in the
war's early years.
On his return to Saudi Arabia, bin Laden was in demand
as a speaker in
mosques and
homes across the desert kingdom. More than 250,000 cassettes
of his
speeches are said
to have been distributed, and they usually sold out as
soon as they
appeared.
Bin Laden was forced into exile in Sudan in 1991 and his
passport was
revoked three
years later when he refused to quiet his forceful opposition
to the
royal family. But he
remains a symbol to the politically disenchanted in the
country,
particularly among religious
youth, who face a future in which population growth isn't
keeping up
with the creation of
jobs, in an economy that is still overwhelmingly
dependent on oil.
''They always have to be careful because he's a very charismatic
guy,
and they have a
partially marginalized younger generation,'' Long said.
That popularity is not only among the young. A Saudi journalist
said
that some of his
newsroom colleagues began crying as they listened to
bin Laden's
videotaped message
and his denunciation of US policies on the night the
US campaign
started.
Bin Laden's place in conservative Saudi society has merged
with the
unpopularity of those
strikes. As in much of the Arab world, the campaign is
seen as directed
less at bin Laden's
network and more at a fellow Muslim country.
Images broadcast on Al-Jazeera last week inflamed viewers
in Saudi
Arabia and
elsewhere with footage that graphically detailed an American
strike on
Kabul: crying and
wounded civilians, houses pulverized in the attack.
''If you talk to anyone, even a secular Saudi while he
is finishing his
glass of whiskey, and
you ask him about how does he feel about bombing Afghanistan,
he will
say this is
harram[forbidden], this is wrong, this is ridiculous,''
said Jamal
Khashoggi, deputy editor of
the English-language Arab News. ''So, yes, there is a
general unease.
People are not
comfortable with the bombing, especially the way it's
turning out to
be.''
Source: Daily Globe, Boston