The date of September 11th every year brings us to mind as well 15 on 19 hijackers were Saudis: the controversies, never exhausted and even carried in the American courts, on the oblique relations of members of the House to Saud with the terrorism of Qaedist go beyond this fact and they invest the historical Saudi "sponsorship" of the Jihadist movements in countries where the Sunni Muslim community is fighting against hostile forces and, in general, of thatoff-spring of the Wahabite regime which is the Salafi movement.
In the media and in the political debate there is no lack of positions against the enemy Nation of Liberty, women's rights, respect for religions other than Sunni Islam in its most primitive form. From the parts of Riyadh, however, no one blushes for those fifteen "comrades who are wrong" (the reader forgives the writer in the style of the seventies), nor for sponsorships that in fact the western chancelleries have tolerated well, when not supported by the best agencies intelligence of the world. Concerns in Saudi Arabia are other and concern the very survival of the state and the systemic impact of a catastrophic crisis in Saudi Arabia. But let's go by order ...
Today, the attention of the media and the leaders is directed above all to the Deng Xiaoping of the Arabian peninsula, that Mohamed bin Salman who for three years has proposed to the sleepy Arab country an agenda of economic and social reforms to make the rest of the numerous clan pale, often rebellious to changes and undecided in proposing alternatives.
MBS, like the crown prince he loves to be called, he has done nothing different from what happens in the other principalities and kingdoms of the Region, certainly not governed by a tribal council of ten thousand members. In fact, he tried to (1) centralize power to the detriment of the interests of a few chieftains, (2) eliminate the farce of succession to sovereign octogenarians of decrepit brothers, (3) create a decision-making center capable of governing the country - characterized by a very large demographic pyramid, that is, with many young people under 18 - without going through assemblies of the Saudi clan, (4) implement reforms capable of producing true economic development, social mobility and, ultimately, (5) to remove the risk of an explosion of the Saudi society, crushed - on the one hand - by an elite of idlers and - on the other - by millions of young unemployed and low skilled. In doing so, unlike the great Chinese reformer, MBS has implemented a regional policy of regional power, trying to steer all the countries of the region according to the interest of Riyadh, with the aim of avoiding someone - especially among the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council - led policies that harmed the interests of the Saudi Kingdom or, in the long run, could undermine its existence. Because if from the 2001 Riyadh is the center of attention for its nefarious "sponsorships", from the 2011 - the year of the so-called "Arab Springs" - it does not cease to buffer the flaws of a status quo endangered - in turn - from many and fierce challenger: Iranian intrusion, and American negligence, Russian interference, Turkish neo-Ottomanism, the ambitions and intrigues of Qatar (often paired with the Muslim Brotherhood), independent political-military decisions - from the European Union - and sometimes misguided French and British, as well as Daesh (the Islamic State), Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations that often have in Saudi Arabia a real fifth column but also the main enemy to be killed. Thus, for seven years Riyadh has continued, for example, the military occupation of the Kingdom of Bahrain, allowing the House al Khalifa - Sunni - to reign undisturbed on a country - formally democratic - with a Shiite majority in such a way as not to offer the full body Shiite minority present in Saudi Arabia examples of redemption; in the same way, the Saudis offer a blank economic-political-military check to the regime of General Al Sisi in Egypt, without which Ikhwan would have profited from the political chaos and the socio-economic problems of the country.
What about the economic-military support to the various Syrian "rebels", without whom Washington could not play the big game against Tehran and Moscow in Syria? In Libya, the match of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi went hand in hand with that of Cairo, offering the government of Tobruk and General Haftar a more concrete foundation of the generic friendship of the States and the support - interested and ambiguous - of France. The war in Yemen deserves a separate discussion, in which MBS and his royal parent Salman threw themselves without revealing to public opinion (but is there one, in the Western sense, in the Saudi country?) That they did not intend to win it, but only to demonstrate to the world that Saudi Arabia can also fight wars and build alliances, without asking someone to defend it, as had always happened in the previous seventy years.
The reader will object to the writer that Riyadh led by Salman & Son is making a miserable figure in Yemen. In this regard, the writer reminds you of a name: Lissa. The newborn Kingdom of Italy certainly did not make a great impression on the occasion of the first real war. And the next occasion, with the first Italo-Abyssinian War and the Battle of Adua, went even worse if possible. Yet neither failings minò the unified State of the Italians. The "not won" war in Yemen, in short, shows that the Saudi leadership has an unshakable will, despite objective military limits, which are expected.
In short, from the parts of Riyadh one can only continue to put pieces, while the country awaits the implementation of a serious program of reforms, more than ever necessary to avoid disintegration. The announced deferral but not the cancellation of the listing on the stock exchange of Saudi Aramco seem to go in this direction. The reforms are no longer postponed because, if for Italians Libya is an obsession for illegal migratory flows, for MBS it is a nightmare, because what happened in the Libyan "sandbox" could happen, if the country will not be "Sterilized" in the Arabian Peninsula: a war of all against all, on a tribal basis, in a relatively rich society.
Let's try to understand what the problem is, which pushes all Saudi leaders - not just MBS - from 2011 onwards to shove against everything and everyone, sometimes dabbing the wound like in Bahrain other times reminding fool like in the case of " almost a seizure "- just a year ago - of the Saudi citizen Saad Hariri (in the opening picture, first on the left), which for the second job is the Prime Minister of a sovereign state, Lebanon.
"The secret of Switzerland's cohesion lies in the fact that the country is divided into two perpendicular fracture lines: Germans and French, on the one hand; Protestants and Catholics, on the other. This situation determines the fact that a Swiss Catholic German will feel closer to the French-speaking coreligionists than to the German-speaking Lutherans"1.
In fact, net of the Ticinesi and Romanci, the "figures" of Switzerland speak of an apparent absolute majority of Swiss-speaking Germans divided into two minorities between Lutherans and Catholics, avoiding that straddling of the majority that has undermined the Soviet Union, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Spain and Yugoslavia. If MBS could change the tribes of which the Saudi kingdom is constituted - from the clan of al-Saud - which has barely managed to clean up the most hostile elements - in two or three ethnic groups, such as Kurds and Arabs in Syria, we are certain that would do it: then, it would be enough - let's say it, even if not politically correct - deport one or more minorities and assign them a specific and homogeneous territory as it happened in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, to regain some peace of mind. Instead, the division between Sunni and Shiite, typical of the entire region of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, contrasts a fragmentation, in fact, in clan, each of which is spread on the territory and not concentrated in a geographical area.
In short, Saudi Arabia is more like Libya than Syria. And as such, if the internal crises should explode, it would not cease to erupt, like a volcano for too many decades in quiescence and with a too fluid magma to solidify again quickly. Unfortunately, the consequences of such a crisis would not be regional - as in the case of Libya - but global and systemic, with consequences on the level of energy, trade, alliances for all the powerful actors involved.
The writer reserves, hoping not to have bored you with this, to draw different scenarios for Saudi Arabia in a future article.
1 Ambassador Edouard Brunner, interviewed by the writer in the 1999.
(photo: web / Twitter)
