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	March 20, 2002	atimes.com

Front

The man to watch in Saudi Arabia
By John Rossant

Part 1: The return of Saudi Arabia's Red Prince

Although the route of succession was clear after the November 1953 death of King Abdulaziz, the founder of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, the institutional framework of government was very weak: a formalized Council of Ministers had been created only one month before the aged monarch's death.

Abdulaziz's eldest surviving son and successor, King Saud's half-brother Faisal bin Abdulaziz, was quickly named prime minister and Saud appointed his 23-year-old half-brother Talal bin Abdulaziz as minister of communications, with responsibilities for roads, bridges and other transport infrastructure. The young man was the only member of the al-Saud family with any knowledge of modern contraptions such as telephones and airplanes. He'd been adept at rigging up a telephone line to Murabba Palace, for a time the only working line in the capital. And he was one of the first princelings actually to own his own plane.

There were other ways in which Talal distinguished himself from his less-worldly older brothers. For one, he had become the first important Saudi royal to discover the joys of Beirut. By the early 1950s, the Lebanese capital was starting to come into its own as the Paris of the Middle East. The great Arab metropolis of Cairo had been the traditional vacation spot of wealthy Arabs, but a radical chill was now in the air in the Egyptian capital. In the spring of 1952, mobs shouting nationalist and anti-Western slogans had surged through downtown Cairo, trashing nightclubs, bars and other hated symbols of the ancien regime. And later in the year, a military coup overthrew the decadent reign of King Farouk, packing off the bloated playboy to a gilded exile across the watering holes of Europe.

Abdulaziz's progeny were starting to become accustomed to luxury. For the first time, after all, oil money was starting to pile up handsomely in royal coffers in Saudi Arabia. That made it possible for the Gulf princelings - feeling flush for the first time - to start summering in Beirut. One of the first Saudi princes to vacation in Beirut was the 24-year-old Talal, who showed up accompanied by nine of his khuya (members of his household) in the spring of 1954.

Talal and his younger brother Nawwaf (the recently appointed head of the Saudi intelligence services) were the first sons of Abdulaziz to start regularly vacationing in the Lebanese capital, setting off a vogue that was not to dim until the 1970s. By 1955, Talal would have even stronger links with Beirut: he married none other than 16-year-old Mouna al-Solh, the daughter of independent Lebanon's first prime minister, Riad al-Solh.

Al-Solh, a leader of Lebanon's Sunni community who had helped set up the Arab League, had been assassinated in Amman four years earlier. It would be an unusual marriage between Saudi royalty and wealth and Lebanese pan-Arabism.

Even by the quickly rising standards of the House of Saud, Talal was atypically wealthy. Together with huge tracts of land in the Riyadh area and the Murabba palace complex inherited by Umm Talal and her three children (Talal, Nawwaf and a sister, Madawi) in the early 1950s, Abdulaziz had given Talal and his brother Nawwaf a large farm of hundreds of hectares, al-Maather, just north of what was then the center of Riyadh. Maather would be at the very axis of the northern expansion of Riyadh in the 1960s and 1970s. That made Talal and Nawwaf, already wealthy as sons of Abdulaziz, even richer. With the oil boom after the quadrupling of oil prices in 1974, the Saudi government began raking in more revenue each hour from oil sales than it had made each year back in the 1930s. The price of land was soaring and Talal started selling off chunks of his Riyadh land for 9,000 riyals (around US$2,500) a square meter.

Shortly after their Beirut wedding, Talal and his young bride returned to the mud-brick Murabba Palace. By this time, though, the political center of gravity in Riyadh had moved a few kilometers to the north where the bear-like Saud was busy depleting Saudi Arabia's millions in oil revenues by expanding his own Nasseriyah Palace. It would be a sad comment on his kingship. The ghostly fading pink hulk of the palace is still visible today in Riyadh, its strange and vaguely art deco portholes and colonnades decaying in the desert sun. The gaudy palace complex became a byword of al-Saud extravagance and waste. Few noticed that the money was running out.

Prince Faisal did notice, as he was in charge of government accounts. The two half-brothers, four years apart in age, could not have had more different personalities. Saud was an oriental potentate of the old Arabian school. He learned a lot about how to be a good desert politician and became adept at keeping the rough and often irascible Bedouin tribes in check through his largesse. As was his father, the king was a copulation machine on a truly prodigious scale, coupling with scores of daughters from the main Arabian tribes. He is thought to have fathered more than 100 children, though no one, not even in his immediate family, ever compiled the exact number. Saud had unfettered control of the $350 million in annual oil revenue that the kingdom was starting to clear by the late 1950s, and he was wasting it on a massive private spending spree. And everybody, from government ministers to the palace pastry-chefs, seemed to be on the take.

In contrast, half-brother Faisal was positively frugal. He'd spread some wild oats as a young man, but had settled down to a monogamous existence. And he worried: about his brother, about the long-term tenacity of the House of Saud, about how the kingdom was going to pay its bills. It wasn't only that Saud's obsessive spending was forcing the oil-rich state into debt. The luxury of Saud's court and the outrageous corruption that infected every level of life in Riyadh was attracting notice in the region. Over in Egypt, the increasingly revolutionary Nasser regime, which had overthrown the monarchy in 1952, was training its sights on Riyadh.

The warnings were there for all to see around the Middle East. In mid-July 1958, Arab nationalist mobs lurched through central Baghdad and overran the rococo royal palace. They seized the royal family, lynched them, and dragged their bloody corpses through the downtown streets. It was to be a long, hot summer in the region. In Syria, Damascus was wrenched by a succession of military coups. And after the violent coup in Iraq, US troops were rushed to Lebanon by president Dwight Eisenhower to prevent left-wing nationalists - backed, it was feared, by the Soviets - from coming to power. It would be a foretaste of the US engagement of the 1980s and 1990s.

The al-Sauds themselves were increasingly split between opposing Saud and Faisal camps. Some princes now began to touch on the supremely delicate question of abdication in favor of Faisal. By March 1958, with the regional situation becoming more charged by the day, Faisal felt he had enough family support to act. In what must have been an extraordinary meeting, Faisal forced Saud to sign over full executive powers to him. In this Faisal had the crucial backing of key half-brothers such as Fahd and Abdullah, both of whom had particularly strong links with the tribes. In addition, Faisal played on the resentment of many sons of the late king Abdulaziz at the way Saud was repeatedly promoting many of his own estimated 53 male offspring. With dozens implanted in key positions in the ministries and the military, they became known derisively as "the little kings".

Through this slow-motion drama, the ambitious Talal was watching and planning his own moves. More than any other al-Saud, the 28-year-old prince had been seduced by the siren song of Arab nationalism then sweeping over the Middle East. Nasser seemed to be a hero, not an enemy. His links to the al-Solhs in Lebanon, through Mouna, had opened a world for him that exalted Arab unity, standing up to the West, and facing down the Zionist "usurpers" in Palestine. In Beirut, Talal was already the young patron of a growing circle of radical newspaper editors, performance artists and politicians. And alone among the top al-Saud royals, Talal had kept lines open to the radical regime in Egypt - the same regime whose radio stations were beaming incendiary broadcasts into Saudi Arabia.

Talal never ceased traveling to Egypt, where he had extensive property. After the 1952 revolution, when everybody was selling, Talal had picked up on the cheap an enormous baroque seaside palace in Alexandria that had been built by former King Zog of Albania. Through his links to Nasser, the young Saudi prince received special dispensation from having his properties expropriated by the increasingly left-wing regime. So close were the connections between Talal and Nasser that Mouna gave birth in Cairo to the couple's second child, in late 1960.

As the ideological rifts in the Arab world widened, Talal's flirtation with Nasser and revolutionary ideas was a very dangerous game to play. It was, after all, the height of the Cold War, and the Soviets were increasingly backing Nasser as their man in the Middle East. America, on the other hand, was doing its best to shore up traditional regimes like the al-Sauds. Nasser clearly enjoyed having a top member of al-Saud on his side, one who was increasingly carried away with the impassioned Arab nationalist rhetoric coming out of Cairo.

For Talal, increasingly a true believer in Arab nationalism, the ambience in Cairo was so much more satisfying than stifling Riyadh. Talal and Mouna would entertain Egyptian writers and actors at their large apartment in Zamalek, a plush, residential island in the Nile in the center of Cairo. Freewheeling discussions ranged from the corruption of Arab regimes, the obsolescence of feudal kingdoms like Saudi Arabia's, and the need for Arabs to assert themselves on the world stage to redress the wounds inflicted by the establishment of the Israeli state a decade earlier.

And Talal was growing increasingly impatient. Saudi Arabia, he felt, would have to be brought kicking and screaming into the 20th century. Who better to lead the change than he? After consulting with his brother and key allies in 1958 and 1959, Talal became convinced that the time to act was nearing. Talal and his allies began lobbying for political reforms in the Saudi system and as a group, they started to be known as the Free Princes.

The Free Princes seemed to be gaining the initiative as the 1950s were drawing to a close. They were helped by the fact that dissatisfaction was growing within the al-Saud regime and among the tribes at the draconian spending cuts Faisal had been pushing through in his attempt to balance government books. And Saud, still the king, sensed this and in a tactical alliance with Talal and the Free Princes at the end of 1960, in effect gained the upper hand and fired Faisal and his ministers.

It would be an unusual but short-lived experiment with radicalism. Talal was made minister of finance. Abdallah Tariqi, a savvy commoner engineer, was appointed oil minister. Within months Tariqi sided with his Venezuelan counterpart and helped set up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Military advisers from Nasserist Egypt were brought in to replace US army advisers.

Talal had finally arrived. He was beginning to be widely known as the "Red Prince". Egyptian jurists had already drawn up for him a draft constitution for Saudi Arabia, with elections, a parliament and a free press. Little matter this was for the most backward country of a backward Middle East. Talal looked as if he were now the key behind-the-scenes player in the new government, chairing meetings of the Council of Ministers from his own Fakhriya Palace.

But Talal was going too far, too quickly. The politically conservative Saud was merely using him to get at his rival Faisal, and Saud, probably backed by worried Americans, started pushing the brakes. The tactical alliance between the monarch and his radical half-brother blew apart. There could be no new constitution in Saudi Arabia, Saud announced, since the country was ruled by Islamic laws. The king was now unwilling to countenance any further reforms. Talal immediately countered by launching a blistering attack on Saud in Egyptian and Lebanese newspapers. Saud struck back immediately. While Talal was on a trip to Beirut in the summer of 1961, Saudi military units occupied his Fakhriya Palace in Riyadh looking for opposition documents and arms. And on August 16, Talal's passport was formally withdrawn.

But Talal and his followers - there were half a dozen Free Princes in all - had overplayed their hand. Neither Saud nor Faisal, nor for that matter most Saudis, were ready for the kind of radical political reform Talal had in mind. Talal seemed to be merely a puppet of Nasser. And some suspected that Talal and his brothers were less interested in reform than in pulling off their very own coup against the rest of the al-Saud family. The revolt - if it was one - failed.

Within weeks, most of the Free Princes were allowed to return in shame to Saudi Arabia, but only after signing public apologies that appeared in Saudi newspapers. Talal would be the only Free Prince never to apologize. He would wander between Cairo and Beirut for the next few years.

With Talal out of the way, the bitter struggle between Saud and Faisal would continue for another three years. Saud's ill health helped Faisal gain the upper hand, and by 1962 he had once again become head of government. But in early 1964, Saud tried to stage a political comeback (with the help of Nasser, an implacable foe of Faisal's). But Faisal had lined up crucial support within the al-Saud family and within the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia.

Faisal acted fast. At his insistence, a delegation of top ulema presented Saud on March 26, 1964, with a series of demands, including a huge reduction of royal expenses. When Saud refused, as Faisal knew he would, army and National Guard units surrounded his Nasseriyah Palace. A number of Saud's key supporters were arrested including Saud's son Sultan, the head of the Royal Guard. Within 24 hours, Saud's Royal Guard had sworn allegiance to Faisal. However, it would take until November for the ulema to issue a formal fatwa, a religious decree, deposing Saud and proclaiming Faisal monarch.

By the beginning of 1965, Faisal had very firmly taken over. Egyptian military advisers scuttled back to Cairo, and the Saudi regime embarked on the steady conservative course it has been known for the last three decades. Talal was eventually allowed to come back to Saudi Arabia, but under Faisal he would be an official non-person. For the next 20 years or so, Talal would be tolerated, allowed to prosper by cutting business deals. But by his actions, he had excluded himself - and his issue - from involvement in Saudi political affairs. He could keep his princely title, but that was about it. He would forever be known as the "Red Prince", the prince who tried to make a deal with Nasser, the arch-enemy of the House of Saud. For al-Talal - the Talal clan - the entrance to Saudi politics would be barred. Until, that is, Faisal had left the scene, murdered by a deranged nephew in 1975.

Thirty years after playing a central role in the gravest crisis to hit the Saudi monarchy this century, Talal is back on the scene. The denouement of the current crisis will be impossible to predict. But Talal, and his eldest son Alwaleed bin Talal, the leading "private" investor in Saudi Arabia, will bear watching.

((c) Heartland. This version has been edited by Asia Times Online.) To subscribe to Heartland, please email cassanpress@sina.com

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