Tariq Ali:In Princes’ Pockets (review of books on Saudi Arabia)

[muriel_volestrangler]

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America’s Kingdom took ten years to research and write and Vitalis has clearly enjoyed himself. He sees Aramco as a microcosm of the colonial order at home and abroad. His aim is to destroy the foundational myths of the company – which he does in style. Aramco’s treatment of the native workforce, he argues, was not unusual, and he describes US mining companies in the late 19th century dealing with indigenous tribes in Arizona and New Mexico in similar fashion. The work camps set up in Saudi Arabia were a replica of what had been tried out in Maracaibo in Venezuela after the discovery of oil there in the 1920s.

The story he tells, of the Aramco workforce’s struggle against the ‘racial wage’, has not been told in detail before: strikes from below, angry confrontations at management level, blatant racial discrimination against Saudi workers and managers and ‘divide and rule’ tactics on the part of Aramco. There were no ‘honorary Whites’ (as the Afrikaners labelled the Japanese) here. Bosses and engineers were exclusively white Americans, many from Texas, most imbued with prejudices which were the legacy of slavery, the Civil War and the institutionalised apartheid that followed the brief flowering of formal equality during Reconstruction. Vitalis mentions the prevalence of Ku Klux Klan membership in the industry (it’s worth remembering that by 1925 the Klan had four million members, making it the largest organised political movement in US history).
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Tariki persevered. He uncovered evidence that proved beyond any doubt that 2 per cent of AOC profits had been guaranteed in perpetuity to Faisal’s rogue brother-in-law, Kamal Adham, who later became head of Saudi intelligence and a director of BCCI. The Council of Ministers cancelled the AOC contract. Four months later, Faisal removed Tariki from his post, replacing him with an able lawyer, Ahmed Zaki Yamani (later kidnapped with other colleagues at the OPEC building in Vienna by Carlos the Jackal and his gang), who immediately rushed off to tell Aramco that Tariki was being removed from its board of directors. Tariki never found employment in the oil industry again and ended up an exile in Beirut. An Aramco spy who met him during this time in Cairo reported back to his superiors: ‘I asked him how he would envisage a change in regime. He said that it would be very simple. A small army detachment can do the job by killing the king and Faisal. The rest of the royal family will run for cover like scared rabbits. Then the revolutionaries will call Nasser for help.’

It didn’t quite happen like that. The aged Ibn Saud was retired, and Crown Prince Faisal became king. It was only after his nephew Prince Faisal ibn Musa assassinated him for personal reasons in 1975 that Tariki and a few other dissidents could return home. Faisal is largely responsible for the Saudi Arabia that exists today, with its reliance on Wahhabism for social control. Even though his brother and father before him had sought to institutionalise Wahhabi beliefs, they were more relaxed about it. Faisal believed that the only way to defeat Nasser and the godless Communists was by making religion the central pillar of the Saudi social order and using it ruthlessly against the enemy. It was Islam that was under threat and had to be defended on all fronts. This pleased his allies in Washington, who were tolerant even of his decision to impose an oil embargo against the West after the 1973 war, something that has never been attempted since. Visiting Western politicians were surprised when the king gave them copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but his deeply felt anti-semitism was treated as an eccentricity. There is nothing on or off the record to indicate that a single US or European leader enlightened him by pointing out that the Protocols were forgeries.
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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n14/ali_01_.html