Yesterday the Union Jack at Whitehall flew at half-mast in Abdullah’s honour. IMF leader Christine Lagarde suggested that the king had been a promoter of women’s rights, albeit a ‘gradual’ one.US President Barack Obama expressed his personal sympathies, and those of the American people, on Abdullah's death.
"As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions. One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the US-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond," he said.
Vice-President Joe Biden tweeted that he would lead a delegation to Riyadh to pay respects.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron said Abdullah would be remembered for his "commitment to peace and for strengthening understanding between faiths".
Certainly the late king did maintain a policy of consistent friendship with the West, and in fairness, he did make a few steps towards the emancipation of women (eg. allowing them to study at a tertiary level on a limited basis, and sending two female athletes to the London Olympics). But the fact remains that he presided over one of the absolute worst regimes in the world, a regime that will continue unchanged under the rule of his half-brother Salman.
The massive list of Saudi human rights violations hardly needs repeating. The regime imposes the death penalty for crimes such as apostasy, homosexuality, adultery and practicing witchcraft, including through stoning to death and crucifixion. Rape victims can be publically flogged for licentiousness. A blogger who made comments critical of Islam is now facing 1,000 lashes, ten years’ imprisonment and a fine of a million Saudi riayls. Women are still not allowed to drive (although King Abdullah did try to overturn this), and women who have been caught driving have been prosecuted under the country’s anti-terrorism laws (ironically, women can fly planes). The evidence of women remains at half the weight in the court of the evidence of men.
Even though Saudi Arabia formally abolished slavery in 1962, the regime is known to be complicit in human trafficking, and the 9 million foreign workers in the country doing manual labour and other menial tasks, mostly people from the third world, have virtually no rights and no legal protection. Thousands of women and girls are kept in conditions of sexual slavery. They are routinely subjected to the violence of the legal system – in 2011 a Sudanese man was beheaded for practicing black magic.
There are local elections, but political parties are banned, the media is censored and the country remains under the kleptocratic absolute rule of the sons and grandsons of Ibn Saud. Practically every position of power and influence is held by a man of the House of Saud, and there is no shortage of them – Ibn Saud had 22 wives and 45 sons, and his sons have followed suit. Between them they have accumulated over twenty billion dollars.
It is hard to imagine that the leader of regime like this would have been fêted so widely in the democratic world had that regime not been Saudi Arabia. It is the great exception to our human rights agenda, and our support for the regime our greatest hypocrisy.
But what can we do? If the House of Saud embargoes oil exports to the west, we’re screwed. And better to have an ally in the War on Terror in Riyadh than an enemy, even though the House of Saud funnels money into extremist organisations as part of the quite-literal unholy alliance with the Wahabist clerics that keeps it in power.
We have had some unpleasant allies in the past, out of necessity. Stalin’s USSR, for example. But is this really a case where we need to do the same? Maybe it is.
