Saudi Arabia “Laboratory for Bin Ladens,” Says Financial Times

By Lucy Jones

Following a May 29 attack by militants on a residential compound in Saudi Arabia which left 22 people dead, some European newspapers wondered about the future of the Saudi regime, while others worried about rising oil prices.

“As things stand, Saudi Arabia provides near laboratory conditions to incubate thousands of Bin Ladens,” said Britain’s Financial Times on June 1.

“The oil-dominated economy produces few jobs to employ a fast-growing, restless population,” the paper continued. “Neo-central planning inhibits investment, while getting Saudis into jobs now occupied by millions of foreigners raises costs because locals get paid, on average, three times more.”

Concluded the publication, “Security, although vital, is not enough to ensure stability. That requires reform.”

“The killers had another target: the ruling royal family,” said David Usbourne writing in the UK’s Independent the same day. “The House of Saud, which numbers upwards of 20,000 people and has had the kingdom in its grip since the 1920s, is held in suspicion by nearly everyone who is not a member of it,” he said.

“Even the Americans have rumbled its failures in combating terrorism since September 2001,” Usbourne continued. “But more important is the hatred of the ruling clan among many Saudis, who are denied anything approaching democracy.”

“In a situation where no one has the slightest idea what might, or should, replace that regime, who can guarantee that the tap will always be turned on for eight million barrels a day?” asked The Guardian on June 1.

According to Germany’s Abendszeitung of the same day, by attempting to create an oil crisis, the militants were “hitting at the West’s very foundations.”

The U.S. wants lower energy prices while the Saudis want to remain an ally of Washington, said the June 1 Berliner Zeitung. “All this being the case, one has to fear that the terrorists will continue to attack the United States and its allies,” the paper argued.

“Sooner or later Osama bin Laden’s followers will attack an oil source and thereby cause crude oil prices to race up even faster,” said Spain’s Expancion the same day. “The most sensible thing would be to exert soft pressure on the regime to allow democratic reforms and to eliminate radical elements.”

Gas prices already were soaring, bemoaned Bild Zeitung on June 1, just as Germans were about to start their vacations, and the attacks may cause them to rise further.

**UK’s Guardian Says “Maximum” Transfer of Power Necessary in Iraq**

Following the May 17 killing of Iraqi Governing Council interim leader Ezzedine Salim, European newspapers questioned what will happen when power is handed back to the Iraqis at the end of June.

As head of the Council, Salim “played a major role in this exit scenario,” wrote Germany’s Südkurier in Constance on May 18.

His assassination is “a huge blow to Western hopes of a peaceful transfer of power on June 30th,” said the UK’s Daily Mail of the same day.

“The terrorists hit the coalition in one of its most vulnerable spots: its inability to find allies in Iraq who might be capable of assuming power after the handover,” wrote Patrick Sabatier in France’s Libération of May 18.

The same day, however, Düsseldorf’s Westdeutsche Zeitung characterized the situation in Iraq as “so hopeless” that “even the murder of the president of the Governing Council can hardly destabilize it any further.”

Most newspapers agreed that the transfer of power would be unlikely to abate the violence in Iraq.

“Frontlines in this war don’t just run between the American occupiers and the Iraqi resistance; they cut right through Iraqi society,” said Germany’s Stuttgarter Nachrichten the day following Salim’s assassination.

“The foreign civil administration will leave on [June 30], but Iraqis and remaining coalition soldiers will continue to be attacked,” said the May 18 edition of Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza.

“There is only one ray of hope in all this mess,” said the UK’s Guardian the same day. “Since so little has yet been decided, it is still possible to insist on the maximum transfer of power, not only because the Iraqis are entitled to it, but also because anything less will only reinforce skepticism and mistrust in the Middle East.”

Court-Martialing of U.S. Soldiers Said “Not Enough” to Restore U.S. Image

A “monumental and tragic fiasco,” was how France’s May 7 Le Monde described the situation in Iraq, following the publication of photos which showed U.S. troops abusing Iraqi prisoners being held in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib jail. The “devastating effect” of the torture revelations, the paper said, “completes the discrediting of an American image already singularly undermined by the post-war management of the situation in Iraq.” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the newspaper following publication of the images that he had “never seen such hatred for the United States in the [Middle East] region.”

“Bush has created what is in effect a gulag” that stretches “from prisons in Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the world,” wrote former Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal in The Guardian of May 6. An editorial in that day’s edition said the incidents at Abu Ghraib were not isolated, but rather were part of “a much wider system of degradation and torture which has been deliberately exported to Iraq with an imperial contempt for the coalition’s own proclaimed values.”

“Court-martialing a dozen imbeciles in uniform will not be enough to restore the moral credibility of American democracy,” France’s Le Nouvel Observateur opined May 7.

“It is always tempting to blame mistreatment of prisoners on rogue guards,” wrote the previous day’s Financial Times in London. But, the newspaper continued, an investigation had shown “the breakdown in standards in the treatment of prisoners was far more than the actions of a few individuals.”

“[U.S. Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld masterminded a brilliant campaign to topple Saddam Hussain but he failed to plan for the post-war period,” the paper continued. “Only his departure will convince public opinion…that [the U.S.] president is serious when he says Abu Ghraib is not the true face of America,” it concluded.

Berg’s Beheading “Morally Inexcusable,” Says Le Monde

On May 12, many European newspapers printed disturbing images of the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq, Nick Berg. Those who carried out the killing claimed they were avenging the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

“An abomination too far,” was how France’s Le Monde described the videotaped beheading, which appeared on an Arabic-language Web site used by militants. The abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib jail “has aroused legitimate indignation” among all Arabs and around the world, the newspaper said. But now, it added, “we would hope to see equally unanimous condemnation” of this “morally inexcusable crime.” The paper concluded by asking, “For how long can Muslim communities...in Europe go on trusting imams who refuse to condemn, clearly and publicly, such barbarous acts?”

“A more scrupulous and vigorous approach to human rights” is needed if soldiers from all nations in Iraq are to avoid Berg’s fate, wrote the Guardian on May 13. “Partly this is because…the scale of its own abuses shows so little sign of diminishing,” it continued. “The U.S. does not bring a solution to the spiraling crisis in Iraq a single step nearer by even threatening, much less carrying out, revenge attacks for the killing of Mr Berg.”

**Gaza Raids “Motivated by Revenge,” Says The Guardian’s Jonathan Steele**

“Israel’s latest outrages in Gaza have produced a rare but tiny hint of American disapproval,” wrote Jonathan Steele in The Guardian of May 21. His opinion piece followed Israel’s series of bloody raids on Gaza in mid-May. “For the first time since the Israeli assault on West Bank cities two years ago,” Steele pointed out, “the United States has abstained on a critical U.N. resolution rather than vetoing it.” He went on to say, however, that Israel’s latest actions in Gaza “are motivated by revenge, cynicism and desperation.…As such, they have destroyed the political and moral capital that [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon briefly acquired when he announced his unilateral plan to close the Israeli settlements in Gaza,” he concluded.

“Sharon seems to think he cannot break his pledge to President George Bush that he would withdraw from Gaza,” said an article in the May 22-28 issue of The Economist. “So his decision to send his army into Rafah may be his way of signaling, as a prelude to withdrawal, that he has not gone soft.”

Chechen President’s Murder Seen As “Humiliating Defeat” for Putin

The killing of Chechnya’s President Akhmad Kadyrov in a May 9 bomb attack in Grozny is “a terrible blow to President Putin’s pride,” wrote Moskovskiy Komsomolets on May 11. “No sooner had he declared at his inauguration that ‘we have halted the threat of international terrorism,’” the newspaper noted, “than comes this persuasive proof of the opposite.”

Wrote the same day’s Novyye Izvestia, “All the assurances by the Russian military that the situation in Chechnya was under control and rapidly normalizing, that the rebel forces were gradually withering away, have been devalued.”

Kadyrov’s assassination was an “ignominious, yes humiliating defeat” for President Putin, Norway’s Aftenposten agreed May 11.

But Sweden’s Sydsvenska Dagblad of the same day said the problem lay with Putin’s “dismissal” of attempts to find a political solution to what it called “the Chechen tragedy.” “Instead,” the paper said, “he relied exclusively on military means. This also makes him even more dependent on the forces which do not want any solution to the conflict.”

However, writing in The Guardian of May 12, Vanora Bennett took a different tact. As Mufti of Chechnya in 1997, Bennett wrote, Kadyrov had engaged in “big religious talk…hands cut off, stonings, and sinners fined in camels.

“Kadyrov’s religious fervor waned abruptly with the rise of the tough and energetic Putin,” the writer continued. “There was no mileage in Sufi mysticism any more. So Kadyrov dropped God and went over to the Russians he had once fought.

“By the time he was assassinated,” Bennett noted, “he had become Moscow’s puppet Chechen president.”

Lucy Jones is a free-lance journalist based in London.