Saudi Arabia: The Coming Storm

The Coming Storm

Peter W. Wilson, Douglas F. Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315286990
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Some of the best writings on issues involving local government can be found in journals published by the American Society for Public Administration or journals with which ASPA is associated. This volume includes 30 of the most outstanding articles that have been published.

1 LAND AND PEOPLE

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It has often been said that Saudi Arabia is the only family-owned business recognized by the United Nations. Of the nearly two hundred countries in the world today, only one is named after its rulers. The name Saudi Arabia, literally Arabia of the al-Saud, was adopted in 1932, less than a decade after the country was united by dynasty founder King Abdulaziz bin Saud.¹

The al-Saud’s presumption can be forgiven as their country occupies some of the harshest land in the world. As late as eighteen thousand years ago, the Arabian peninsula was a grassy savannah blessed with ample rainfall, vegetation, and wildlife. But the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the Ice Age led to a prolonged drought. Over time, the rivers evaporated and the once fertile land turned to desert, leaving behind only fossils and dried up riverbeds, or wadis, as reminders of a more fertile period.

There have been some compensations. Through another quirk of nature, the peninsula was covered by shallow seas several million years ago. As the abundant mollusks, brachiopods, and other creatures died, they slowly sank into the seafloor. When the sea receded, the floor was subsequently compressed at high temperatures under layers of sedimentary rock to form oil and natural gas. Today, the Kingdom’s oil reserves are the largest in the world.²

Saudi Arabia’s second blessing is just as important. At the start of the seventh century A.D., the Prophet Mohammed began preaching Islam in the small oasis town of Mecca where he was born. The new religion spread quickly and was centered around the Prophet’s birthplace. Today, the world’s devout Muslims pray facing Mecca five times daily. Saudi Arabia, by virtue of its guardianship of Mecca and the Prophet’s burial place in Medina, is the spiritual home of Islam and one-fifth of the world’s population.

Location and Borders

Saudi Arabia covers 70 percent of the Arabian peninsula or an area of approximately 2.2 million square kilometers. It is roughly the size of Greenland, an area equal to the American states of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California. Seas form two of the country’s borders. To the west, the Kingdom is skirted by the Red Sea, an important world trade artery. To the east, the Kingdom’s frontier is limited by the shallow Persian or Arabian Gulf, which serves to transport 60 percent of Japan’s oil, 30 percent of Europe’s, and 10 percent of the United States’. Saudi Arabia controls neither sea, an important strategic concern for the House of Saud. Iran, by its command of the Straits of Hormuz, controls the chokepoint of the Persian Gulf, while access to the Red Sea is controlled by Egypt at the north, and Yemen and Eritrea at the south.

The Kingdom’s land boundaries are less clear. Its northern borders with Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait are the best delineated. The frontier with Jordan was last adjusted in 1965 when the two countries exchanged small slivers of territory to give the Jordanians additional footage near their port of Aqaba. Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq was settled in 1922 when British officials representing Baghdad and Abdulaziz signed the Treaty of Mohammara. Ironically, one of the losers in that accord was Kuwait, which saw its southern border with the Kingdom shifted 160 miles northward as the al-Saud were compensated for territorial concessions to Iraq.³ The Kingdom also shares two Neutral Zones with Kuwait and Iraq. The one with Kuwait was evenly divided in 1966 with each country agreeing to share its oil resources. The one with Iraq was divided as well, following agreements reached in 1975 and 1981.

Saudi Arabia’s eastern and southern boundaries are more troublesome. The Kingdom’s border with fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member, Qatar, was the scene of clashes in November 1991 and again in the fall of 1992 when Saudi troops reportedly attacked the Qatari frontier outpost at al-Khofous. Two Qatari soldiers and one Saudi lost their lives in the latter incident. Peace was only restored three months later when an agreement was signed in Medina, following Egyptian mediation. Both sides promised to respect the existing 1965 border agreement, and Saudi Arabia recognized Qatari control of al-Khofous. In return, Qatar acknowledged Saudi sovereignty over the strip of territory which separates it from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).⁴

Saudi Arabia also has long-standing border differences with two other GCC members—Oman and the UAE. Borders between the two and the Kingdom remain fluid, the legacy of British control over Oman and the Trucial States, as well as centuries of conflicting tribal claims. Fighting broke out over the al-Buraiymi Oasis in the late 1940s and early 1950s between the Saudis and the British and their allies but proved inconclusive. Saudi Arabia and the UAE reached a settlement in 1974 when the latter received control of several villages in the oasis in return for a strip of territory along its Qatari border. Omani-Saudi conflicting border claims were resolved in a separate agreement in May 1990. Settlements notwithstanding, all sides continue to publish conflicting maps of the area, and the Kingdom continues to use border disputes, real and manufactured, as a means to pressure its smaller neighbors to comply with its wishes.

Saudi Arabia’s southern border with the newly united Yemen remains the most unclear. The unification of Yemen in 1990, and that country’s subsequent support of Iraq in the Kuwaiti conflict, only exacerbated deep-seated Saudi suspicions that Sanaa remains committed to regaining what it lost sixty years ago in the 1934 Asir War. That conflict cost Yemen the Asir region and Najran Oasis, and Yemenis have never been reconciled to their loss. In addition, the border from the Najran Oasis to Oman remains undelineated, and skirmishes are common. The boundary issue has grown in importance as large quantities of commercially exploitable oil have been discovered in the area, resulting in new claims and counterclaims, as well as isolated attacks (see Chapter 3).

Physical Characteristics

The Arabian peninsula is dominated by a plateau that rises from the Red Sea and falls gently to the Persian or Arabian Gulf. The plateau is centered on a great Precambrian shield of rock that is inching imperceptibly away from Africa, widening the Red Sea and slowly pinching shut the Persian Gulf at the Straits of Hormuz. The peninsula is also cut by two mountain ranges. The first runs along Saudi Arabia’s ambiguous borders with Oman and Yemen while the second passes along the western spine of the peninsula, starting just north of Medina and continuing south into Yemen. Saudi Arabia is divided into four distinct and major regions, none of which has any year-round running streams or rivers.

The Hejaz

The coastal strip that runs along the Red Sea and the highlands that rise above it comprise the Hejaz, or “Barrier.” Roughly corresponding to the Kingdom’s Western Province, the Hejaz covers an area of 150, 000 square kilometers and encompasses the port of Jeddah, the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Taif, and the industrial city of Yanbu. Ranging in elevation from sea level to heights of more than 2, 500 meters in the mountains south of Mecca, the Hejaz has traditionally been the most cosmopolitan section of Saudi Arabia, thanks to the holy cities and the annual influx of pilgrims fulfilling their religious duties.

The Hejaz’s coastal strip, known as the Tihama, is characterized by oppressive heat and humidity and sparse rainfall. Prior to the oil boom, the majority of the Tihama’s residents survived by herding, subsistence farming, or rudimentary commerce such as the pilgrim trade. Even today, the Tihama remains relatively undeveloped, and its inhabitants among the poorest in the country. The Tihama also is subject to earthquakes. The last one occurred in 1985, resulting in a few deaths and the destruction of several villages.⁵

Towering over the Tihama is the Hejaz’s second zone, the Western Highlands. Containing some of the Kingdom’s oldest and most developed cities, the Western Highlands are crisscrossed with trails dating from before Christ when camel caravans traveled to Yemen for frankincense, an aromatic resin especially beloved by the ancient Egyptians and Romans. Caravans often stopped in Mecca, which even before the founding of Islam was the peninsula’s religious center. The highlands have long been favored by the Kingdom’s elite as a summer resort, for daytime temperatures rarely climb above 113 F. (45 C.), and nighttime lows are cool and refreshing. The city of Taif, in fact, is the country’s unofficial summer capital.

The Nejd

The Nejd, or “Highland,” physically dominates the Kingdom. Corresponding to the country’s Central Province, the Nejd encompasses the cities of Riyadh, Buraidah, Qassim, and Hail. Meeting the Western Highlands at elevations upward of 1, 525 meters, the Nejd slowly slopes downward to an elevation of 600 meters near the Persian Gulf and al-Hasa. The Nejd is among the driest areas in the world and receives on average only 100 milliliters of rain per year, although wide fluctuations are normal. Temperatures are severe. During the summer, highs of more than 129.2 F. (54 C.) are not uncommon. Humidity, in contrast to the rest of the country, is pleasingly low. Winter temperatures occasionally dip below freezing, and snow and sleet occur.

The Nejd contains the Kingdom’s three main deserts. To the extreme south is the largest, the Rhub al-Khali, which covers approximately 647, 500 square kilometers and has the distinction of being the largest continuous sand area in the world. The Rhub al-Khali often goes for years without rain and is so inhospitable that its name literally means the “Empty Quarter.” The Nejd’s second largest desert is the al-Nafud, encompassing 57, 000 square kilometers in an area just south of the Iraqi and Jordanian borders. The al-Nafud is the most striking of the Kingdom’s deserts with its alternating red and white sands. The al-Dahna is the third Nejdi desert, and links the previous two in a wide arc of sand more than 1, 300 kilometers in length but with a width narrowing to only 50 kilometers in some places.

Containing roughly one-half of the Kingdom’s population, the Nejd is the spiritual and cultural heart of the Kingdom. The ruling al-Saud dynasty has its roots in the Nejd as did Mohammed al-Wahhab, the preacher whose fundamentalist vision of Islam, known to outsiders as Wahhabism, is now followed by 85 percent to 90 percent of Saudis.

Al-Hasa

Conquered by Abdulaziz from the crumbling Ottoman Empire in 1913, al-Hasa, literally “Sandy Ground with Water,” corresponds to the Kingdom’s Eastern Province. Al-Hasa’s topography is unspectacular as it drops from its juncture with the Nejd to sea level at the Persian Gulf. Al-Hasa’s coastline is shallow and irregular, punctuated by salt marshes.

The region’s chief population centers are al-Khobar, Dammam, Dhahran, and al-Hofuf, the latter being the site of the Kingdom’s largest oasis with thousands of acres of date palms. Al-Hasa is also the home of the Kingdom’s sizable Shiite minority. Estimates put the Shiite composition of the province’s overall Saudi population at between 35 percent and 50 percent, or approximately 500, 000 to 600, 000.

Al-Hasa also houses the bulk of the Kingdom’s oil and petrochemical facilities. The state oil concern, Saudi Aramco (the former Arabian-American Oil Company—Aramco) has its headquarters in Dhahran while the industrial city of Jubail has become the country’s largest producer of petrochemicals.

The Asir

The fourth region of Saudi Arabia is the smallest and also the most densely populated. Taken from Yemen after the 1934 war, the Asir (or “Difficult”) is the Kingdom’s most geographically diverse region. It is also the most active geologically with frequent tremors. The Asir holds the country’s highest mountains, with the tallest at over 3, 000 meters located just north of Abha, the region’s capital. The province also en...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Storm Clouds
• 1. Land and People
• 2. The Political System
• 3. Foreign Relations
• 4. Military and Security Forces
• 5. The Saudi Economy
• 6. Social Issues
• Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors