Saudi Arabia

F

Arab-Israeli Conflicts

In 1967, as the Arab-Israeli conflict intensified prior to the Six-Day War, King Faisal expressed full support for Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and dispatched 20,000 troops to Jordan to face Israeli forces. In June all Saudi oil exports to Britain and the United States were suspended, but diplomatic ties were not broken; oil trade was resumed after the Arab defeat. An Arab summit conference later in the year resulted in Egyptian withdrawal from Yemen, and the Saudis extended large-scale aid to Egypt to compensate for the loss of revenue caused by the closing of the Suez Canal during the war. King Faisal continued to call for pan-Islamic action against Israel and, under internal pressures, criticized alleged United States involvement on Israel’s side. He remained unwilling, however, to articulate a militant anti-Western position, and in 1971 Saudi Arabia and five other Persian Gulf states concluded a five-year pact with 23 Western oil companies, including 17 U.S. firms. In July 1970 Saudi Arabia formally recognized the republican government of Yemen after seven years of intermittent border fighting.

Saudi Arabia sent a small number of troops and weapons (notably aircraft) to aid the Arab states in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. In the aftermath of this conflict, the government played a leading role in organizing a short-term oil embargo against countries that had supported Israel and in quadrupling the international price of petroleum. The latter development, along with Saudi Arabia’s 1974 takeover of controlling interest in the huge oil company Aramco, greatly increased government revenue, thus providing funds for another massive economic development plan.

G

Financial Strength and Military Preparedness

In March 1975 King Faisal was assassinated by a nephew and was succeeded by his half brother Prince Khalid ibn Abdul Aziz. Khalid, however, was in poor health and his half brother, Crown Prince Fahd, became the power behind the throne. The country remained conservative, and its influence kept OPEC from raising its prices to the extent most member countries wanted. In 1980 it was announced that the Saudi government had taken full control of Aramco’s assets retroactively from January 1976. Much of the petroleum money that poured into the country was reinvested in the West or spent on arms, but domestic inflation and a barely manageable pace of development presented ongoing problems.

Saudi Arabia took a dim view of the conciliatory overtures by Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat to Israel in 1977, and after the signing of a peace treaty between the two countries in 1979, Saudi Arabia cut off financial aid to Egypt and severed diplomatic relations. The Islamic revolution in Iran that year and the subsequent seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by some 250 armed Islamists jolted the Saudi government, heightening awareness of its vulnerability to external and internal threats. The kingdom joined five other Arab Gulf states in 1981 to establish the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which focused on economic and collective security measures. Shared concerns about regional stability helped warm relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States. In 1981 the United States agreed to sell several Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes to the Saudis, an arrangement that provoked heavy opposition from Israel, which feared an upset of the military balance in the Middle East.

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King Khalid died in June 1982 and was succeeded by Fahd. As king, Fahd sought to maintain Saudi Arabia’s traditional Islamic values, while continuing the process of rapid modernization made possible by the nation’s abundant oil resources. In 1986 he assumed the religious title “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” in an effort to safeguard the Western-friendly Saudi regime from opposition by Islamic militants. Nevertheless, King Fahd faced difficulties within and beyond his country. In July 1987 at least 400 people were killed in Mecca when Iranian Shia pilgrims clashed with Saudi police. Relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia became increasingly hostile. Iran expressed its displeasure at Saudi restrictions on Iranian pilgrims by boycotting the hajj for several years. Relations between the countries began to thaw gradually in the 1990s.

H

Persian Gulf War and Developments in the 1990s

Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait in August 1990 had significant military, political, and economic consequences for Saudi Arabia. Despite opposition from some religious leaders and their followers, the Saudi government provided for temporary deployment on its own territory of hundreds of thousands of U.S. and allied troops. It also contributed forces to the multinational coalition that fought Iraq in the Persian Gulf War in early 1991. In order to allay some of the domestic opposition to non-Muslim forces stationed in Islam’s holy land, the Saudi government emphasized that several other Islamic countries had also sent forces to fight Iraq. Through the late 1990s Saudi Arabia allowed some U.S. forces to remain in the country, mainly to enforce so-called no-fly zones over southern Iraq. Religious opposition groups viewed the continued U.S. presence as a major point of contention with the government.

After the Persian Gulf War, Saudi Arabia increased its oil output to compensate for the loss of petroleum supplies from Iraq and Kuwait. Economic problems became evident, however, in 1993. The United States had insisted that Saudi Arabia pay for the costs of U.S. military protection during the war, costing the country $51 billion. Meanwhile, the Saudi economy was feeling the effects of a budget operating under deficit since 1983. War payments and declining oil prices forced the Saudi government to cut social and defense spending and take out loans from international banks. Despite these problems, in 1994 Saudi Arabia helped defeat a campaign by Iran and other OPEC member countries to lower OPEC’s overall production ceiling so that limited supply would prompt a rise in prices. As oil prices continued to fall in the late 1990s, Saudi Arabia reversed its position and led an initiative for OPEC to reduce production in order to raise the price of oil. In March 1999 OPEC, along with four independent oil-producing nations, approved a yearlong production cutback. Saudi Arabia committed to the largest cutback, reducing production by 7 percent.

Political reforms decreed by King Fahd in 1992 established a consultative council to serve in an advisory capacity, provided for a bill of rights, and changed the rules of succession. The Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura) was convened for the first time in December 1993. Social reforms were less evident, however. Saudi men and women still were not permitted to attend public events together, and workplaces remained segregated. Government officials in the United States voiced continuing concern about human rights violations in Saudi Arabia, particularly the abuse of prisoners by guards and police.

King Fahd remained an active sponsor of Islamic causes worldwide in his second decade as Saudi leader. In 1992 he conducted an extensive campaign to end the bloodshed in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The same year, Fahd’s government established diplomatic links with the Muslim republics formerly included in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. In 1994 Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasir Arafat visited Riyadh to discuss with King Fahd the prospects for peace in the Middle East. The meeting represented a significant rapprochement between the two leaders, whose relations had been strained since the Persian Gulf War.

In 1995 the governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen agreed to negotiate a settlement to a long-standing dispute over their shared border; the agreement followed several months of small-scale fighting in the border region. Five years later, in 2000, the two countries finally announced an agreement settling the border dispute. Meanwhile, in 1998 Saudi Arabia began production in an oil field lying in the disputed region of its border with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Saudi Arabia failed to meet the UAE’s demand for a share of the oil and gas produced from the field. In 1999 the UAE protested by boycotting an oil ministers’ meeting in Saudi Arabia that was to formally inaugurate the field.

Meanwhile, after suffering a stroke in November 1995, Fahd gave control of the country to his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, in January 1996. Fahd reclaimed his authority the following month, but actual power continued to shift to the crown prince because of the king’s overall poor health.

I

Islamist Opposition and Reform

Expressions of opposition to government policies and to the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia continued through the 1990s and beyond, creating tension in the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The Saudi government clamped down on Islamist militants but at the same time was forced to make some concessions to their demands. Islamist opposition stemmed from government-appointed religious leaders and from Islamic groups or individuals inside and outside the kingdom. In September 1994 the government arrested a large number of people—some of whom were religious officials or academics—for demonstrating against the arrest of two conservative clerics. In October the government created the Higher Council for Islamic Affairs, headed by a member of the ruling family, as part of an effort to dampen radicalism among the ulama. Later, the government removed several university chancellors and members of the Council of Ulama, replacing them with people deemed more moderate.

In November 1995 a car bomb killed seven people (including five Americans) at the offices of the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh. In June 1996 terrorists set off a bomb attached to a petroleum tanker truck at a housing center for U.S. military personnel in Al Khubar (Al Khobar), near Dhahran. The attack killed 19 U.S. servicemen and wounded more than 300 people (including many Saudis and Bangladeshis, as well as Americans). Severe shortcomings in the Saudi law enforcement and criminal justice systems came to light in the wake of these two episodes. United States officials expressed frustration with the quality of the investigations, the lack of cooperation with their Saudi counterparts, and the Saudis’ use of torture to extract confessions.

One of the most visible and strident opponents of the Saudi government was Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman. Exiled from Saudi Arabia in 1992 (and stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994), bin Laden promoted violent opposition to the Saudi regime and to the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia. The aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States in 2001 further complicated Saudi-U.S. relations. Of the 19 hijackers who carried out the attack, 15 were Saudi citizens, and all were connected to bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. While Crown Prince Abdullah quickly and firmly condemned the attacks, he refused to allow the United States to use facilities in the kingdom in its subsequent war on terrorism. In 2002 the United States began transferring many military facilities from Saudi Arabia to the neighboring country of Qatar.

Anthony B. Toth contributed the Population, Culture, and Economy sections of this article.

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