by Giles Whittell Fifteen girls died when Saudi religious police blocked rescue efforts and left victims to perish in a blazing school. But this time the sheikhs are being held to account. Our correspondent says pressure for reform is growing http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-383044,00.html On a potholed street in suburban Mecca stands a four-storey building with grilles over its windows and a locked front door. Its breeze block construction is almost Soviet in its shoddiness. It is unused now and empty, but once it was a school. Then something terrible happened. One morning in March a teenage girl retreated to the stairwell to smoke a cigarette. She dropped the butt, without extinguishing it, into a pile of litter. Half an hour later a fire was raging and more than 700 girls were trying to get out. There was only one staircase and when the children stampeded, it collapsed. When they reached the front door it was locked. The only person with a key was the school?s illiterate male guardian. He was nowhere to be found. The fire brigade could have forced an entry, but the headmistress needed permission from a higher male authority to call them. Instead she fled the building and ordered that the door stay locked behind her. Volunteers rushed to help; so did members of the muttawa, Saudi Arabia?s self-appointed religious police, who are drawn, like many of Osama bin Laden?s disciples, from the most faithful followers of the national Wahhabi Islamic creed. One of them picked a quarrel with a regular police captain, warning that there could be no contact between rescuers and girls if the latter were not fully covered. Inside, clothing was not the main concern. ?I pushed forward with the crowd because I was afraid of the fire, but the locked door stood between the girls and life,? one survivor says. ?Some girls jumped from the top of the stairs, but I was overcome by smoke. I only woke up in hospital.? A?ysha Akbar, another survivor, says: ?I tried to run, but my foot got jammed in the cast-iron banisters of the staircase. I fell and the other girls were trying to jump over me but some stepped on me. They broke my leg and ankle.? Some say the muttawa prevented the fire brigade from entering the building; others that they forced girls back inside for trying to flee without wearing their full-length black abayas. Either way, what should have been an orderly evacuation turned to chaos. When it was over, 15 girls were dead. That afternoon the editor of Al-Nadwa, Mecca?s largest newspaper, made what in Saudi Arabia was an immensely brave decision. He ordered no-holds-barred coverage of the fire ? its causes, witnesses, survivors, victims and implications. To his surprise, so did his counterparts throughout the country. The tragedy at Girls? School No 31 became the occasion of sustained outrage at the failings of the Saudi system and the blind inhumanity of the muttawa. The Arab News, a progressive English-language daily based in Jeddah, understood quickly that the factor most likely to prise open the subject of the clerics? influence on politics for critical public debate was the alleged role of the muttawa. The paper sent a team of reporters to Mecca with instructions to find eyewitnesses, if there were any, to specific instances of religious police forcing girls back into the building. None came forward, but the debate erupted anyway. What was clear was that the school door had been locked and the muttawa had hindered efforts to open it. That was outrageous enough. ?Maybe one or two girls died as a result of being turned back,? deputy editor Jamal Khashoggi says. ?But the attitude that led to the door being locked, the attitude of the religious police, killed more. If it had been open, no one would have died.? The habits of decades of censorship and self-censorship simply evaporated. The story ran on every front page in the country, not with bland evasions but with heart-wrenching eye-witness accounts ? many obtained from hospital bedsides, where Saudi reporters had almost never ventured before ? and poems written by survivors to their dead friends and sisters. Tahani Ahmad El-Harethy was nursing a broken pelvis when Al-Nadwa found her in plaster in the Al-Noor hospital. She describes something reminiscent of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster. ?It happened during the first period,? she says. ?Girls panicked, screaming and pushing each other at the front door, which was locked. Some girls in front of me were killed as they were squeezed against the door.? The agony was, if anything, even more intense for those left powerless outside. Shayeb Haroun Moussa rushed to the school with his son on hearing of the fire, only to find his daughter already dead, ?lying there on the pavement, by the tyre repair centre?. Reporters revealed that previous safety warnings about the building had been ignored, and exposed the headmistress who, by most accounts, had fled instead of ensuring the safety of the girls. Four months on, the fire has grown in significance. No one knows if it will be the turning point that Saudi Arabia?s embattled liberals have been awaiting for decades, but this much is clear: it was the moment that reformist Crown Prince Abdullah went public with his bid to modernise the powerful but sclerotic petro-kingdom that he has run since King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995. The Crown Prince is in a race that Washington demands he win. US pressure for reform has intensified since the revelation that 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudi-born. Last week that pressure peaked with the leak of a confidential briefing to the Pentagon?s defence policy board calling Saudi Arabia ?the kernel of evil . . . active at every level of the terror chain?. It even suggested bombing Saudi oilfields if Riyadh fails to stop exporting terrorists. The briefing laid bare a rift within the Bush administration between anti-Saudi hawks and defenders of the longstanding US-Saudi axis, but it also played into the hands of Saudi conservatives on the defensive since the fire in Mecca. Doubt has been cast on claims that the religious police actually forced girls back into the burning school, but serious damage to the country?s religious establishment ? the chief obstacle to reform ? has already been done. The Presidency for Girls? Education, which religious leaders controlled and through which they enforced the rigid segregation of Saudi women, has been merged with the Ministry of Education. The change may sound cosmetic, but its implications are enormous. For the first time since King Faisal legalised girls? education in the 1960s there is the prospect that it might come to mean something: that girls might follow the same curriculum as boys, receive more vocational training and less religious indoctrination, and even enjoy an unemployment rate lower than 95 per cent on graduation. Currently, women may work only in health and education. They are barred from driving and from selling their jewellery or going to hospital except with a male guardian. They face execution if convicted of adultery, but many risk it anyway, taking their servants as lovers. ?The Presidency for Girls? Education was one of the most important outlets for the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia,? says Jamal Khashoggi. ?It was theirs. They ran it. They were seen as the only people to be trusted with the welfare of our girls. Now the education minister has a free hand. I know him, and he wants major change.? Saudi Arabia is the great, infuriating exception to almost every rule of world affairs. It marginalises half its population almost as rigourously as did the Taleban, yet retains the dutiful respect of every leader in the West. It is rich, but not remotely democratic. It is all but closed to outsiders and shows little yearning to open up. Its judicial system is based entirely on religion; sharia is the only law. Its human rights record would fit the 15th century better than the 21st (?Two pickpockets have their wrists amputated,? says a recent government press release), yet no government that matters has called it to account. It is a land of 7,000 princes and one king, unchallenged internally despite his love affair with a country that millions of his subjects hate ? the United States. That affair brings in a staggering $100 billion a year in foreign exchange, enough to fund a breakneck arms build-up and a per capita GDP of nearly $7,000. This is barely a quarter of the figure 20 years ago but still ensures the short-term stability of the regime because so many key players, including the clergy, get much more. The ship of state floats, of course, on oil. Saudi Arabia sits on a third of the world?s oil reserves, most of them close to the surface, cheap to extract and surplus to local requirements. By turning to them or leaving them alone, the Saudi oil minister can manipulate world prices more or less at will. For the past 30 years Riyadh has resisted abusing this power. The world has come to depend on the Saudi system, and as events have shown since September 11 it will take more than the World Trade Centre attacks to upend it. Yet the fire in Mecca shook it to its core. Crown Prince Abdullah sensed the wave of indignation almost before it hit. The fire gave him a rare opportunity to take on the religious establishment without ceding an inch of moral high ground, and he seized it. The tragedy was an ?unacceptable? result of ?negligent, incompetent and careless officials,? he wrote in a public letter to his brother Prince Sultan, ordering him to ?start now to investigate what happened?. Scapegoats would have to be found, but few predicted who. Immediately after the fire Ali Al-Murshid, head of the Presidency for Girls? Education, had smugly declared that he would keep his post till he died. A month later he was gone. His department has been taken over by Qaidir Ibn Olayan Al-Quraishi, a secularist with the Crown Prince?s full backing and plans to shrink the number of compulsory Koranic texts at secondary school ? for boys and girls alike ? from seven to one. To understand why the Mecca fire was so crucial, you have to go back to 1991. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, despite having spent $50 billion on state-of-the-art American weaponry Saudi Arabia was in no position to take him on alone. Its forces looked good but barely knew how to operate their anti-aircraft guns. Riyadh was next on Saddam?s list, and the only way to deter him was to invite American troops on to Saudi soil in massive numbers. For the royal family it was an instinctive move. King Fahd and his inner circle have an almost obsessive reverence for US muscle and know-how. But for the religious leadership on which the House of Saud has depended for its authority since 1932, it was sacrilege. Hosting Operation Desert Storm cost Saudi Arabia $60 billion, wiping out a large portion of its reserves. Yet the political debt the regime incurred to the religious establishment by allowing 500,000 infidel GIs into the sacred land of the Prophet?s birth weakened it far more. Progressives hoped the prospect of war and its attendant media invasion might trigger a rush of liberal reforms, but those hopes were swiftly dashed. A group of 45 women who drove into the centre of Riyadh in November 1990 demanding driving licences were not only denied them, but arrested. After the war, religious leaders called in the government?s debt by tightening their control of girls? education. It was to remain uncontested for ten years. Crown Prince Abdullah did once try to revisit the issue of women?s driving licences but the clergy cried foul. He backed down, and the surreal sight of thousands of Saudi women being driven by their sons ? or foreign males imported for the purpose ? endures. What started as a symbiotic pact between Wahhabism and the royal house of Saud was turning into a naked power struggle. Since September 11 that struggle has fuelled an unprecedented public debate on who counts as uli al-amr ? ?those with authority?. Who?s in charge in Riyadh? The question is that simple. The religious elite has claimed it shares authority with the royal family. Crown Prince Abdullah has retorted that they are mere advisers. The fire in Mecca was his chance to prove it. Thanks to the 15 teenagers who died, Saudi women can now hope that their daughters will study the same curriculum as their sons, and even that they might eventually share similar job prospects. But they shouldn?t hold their breath. The Crown Prince has more pressing concerns than the emancipation of women. Even with most of them kept off the labour market, the country faces soaring unemployment. More than half of its 15 million people are under 20, and each year 400,000 of them go straight from university to joblessness. The result is a growing reservoir of disaffected young males, contemptuous of cooperation by their own government with America or Israel and highly susceptible to al-Qaeda?s calls to jihad. ?The royal family is stuck between the religious establishment and this rising generation on the one hand, and the US on the other,? says Mai Yamani of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. ?The US is demanding reforms, but Crown Prince Abdullah is seen by the Wahhabi religious establishment and the new breed as compromising himself by talking about full normalisation of relations with Israel? ? as he did in a bold peace initiative in March. The stakes could hardly be higher. As Eric Rouleau writes in this month?s Foreign Affairs, if the royal family?s radical new opposition is not controlled ?it could tear apart a strategic alliance (between Saudi Arabia and the US) that has lasted since World War II?. What can the Crown Prince do? In the short term he may be forced to crack down on rather than expand those freedoms his subjects now enjoy, especially if President Bush brings thousands of young Saudi radicals on to the streets in solidarity with their Iraqi brothers by attacking Baghdad. ?I see increased repression to control the new opposition at all costs,? Yamani says. But in the long term there are grounds for hope. The Mecca fire produced an unequivocal win for Saudi Arabia?s reformists over its theocratic dinosaurs. Meanwhile Washington has demanded more reforms, and if history is any guide it will get them in the end. For what it?s worth, the US still has King Fahd?s undying trust. Last month he flew to Geneva for a routine cataract operation that one Swiss doctor could have performed. Instead a team of surgeons was flown in to perform it ? from America. |