Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  So off we drove in convoy, winding our way east in the pouring rain and early-evening darkness to the eastern town of Al-Hofuf. I had driven this road myself once, in the dying days of Desert Storm in 1991, when the sky was black with smog from Kuwait’s blazing oil wells, US Army helicopters clattered overhead and the route was punctuated by numerous Saudi military checkpoints. This time I would have preferred to take the train, which makes the journey in half the time, but our escorts were not keen, opting to bracket our minivan with their patrol cars front and rear. We had applied to film in the tense town of Qatif on the Gulf coast, where there had been large protests recently by the Shi’a population, demanding an end to what they saw as discrimination by the Sunni government, and clashes with the security forces resulting in several deaths. Our application was turned down, whether for reasons of safety or politics we never found out, but we were relieved to get permission to film at all in Eastern Province.

  In the morning the skies had cleared and our interviewee, a prolific Saudi online blogger, was in the hotel reception ahead of time. Like Fahad, Ahmed Al-Omran was young, energetic, US-educated and full of ideas. A journalist with a degree from New York’s Columbia University, he was something of a rarity in the kingdom: a public commentator who operated outside the official media, using social media to focus his laser beams of criticism wherever he felt the government was failing. He had also written articles for the Guardian and other Western papers. Although he had his own critics amongst the country’s Sunni majority, who saw him as a Shi’a activist, Ahmed insisted to us that he did not have a sectarian agenda. I noticed we were both wearing similar Superdry shirts, and I also couldn’t help noticing that at twenty-six he already had the first flecks of grey in his close-cropped hair. That must be what being a Saudi dissident does to you, I thought, although Ahmed had managed to steer just short of crossing the line.

  Our tireless producer, Adam Jessel, had arranged to film our interview in Jebel Qara, an extraordinary collection of limestone caves embedded in a rock escarpment: a sort of Arabian version of E. M. Forster’s Malabar Caves in A Passage to India. They were so impressive and so mysterious that I almost forgot why we were there. Subterranean caves and wheelchairs are hardly a match made in heaven, so it took a certain amount of logistical planning to get me into their darkest recesses, with Stew hoisting me up on to his back and powering up some steep steps. I got the feeling that he would have been quite happy to continue halfway to Oman as some kind of weird endurance test, but instead I sat myself down opposite Ahmed the Blogger in a tiny cave, lit by a faint shaft of daylight from far above, as if on a stage lit by a theatre spotlight.

  ‘The fear barrier,’ he began, ‘the fear barrier of being critical has become lower and lower, especially in the past two years. The kind of rhetoric, the powerful language, the critical words that you now see online, especially on Twitter, is something unprecedented for this country.’

  Could it, I asked, ever reach a point where it threatens to topple the government or the way this country is ruled?

  ‘It’s not out of the question,’ replied Ahmed. ‘You might not see a big, popular street movement in a year or two, but in five, seven or ten years, who knows? I mean, who saw the Arab Spring in Tunisia or Egypt coming a few years back? Probably no one.’ I pointed out that those were republics, while Saudi Arabia was a tribal, dynastic kingdom, but Ahmed was adamant. ‘There is no way that these countries, the Gulf countries, with this kind of political structure, this kind of dependence on oil, this kind of government spending, this kind of corruption, this lack of freedom and justice, and people not being able to have a say in how to rule themselves, there is no way that these countries can sustain themselves for a very long time in the future.’

  It was a view I had heard before, but usually from Saudi-watchers sitting comfortably in the West, so I thought it was brave of Ahmed to say this on camera. And yet I recalled a certain enlightened crown prince in the Gulf telling me soon after the Arab Spring protests erupted in 2011, ‘I am certain that the way this region is ruled in twenty years will be very different from how it is now.’

  Yet Saudi Arabia is famously conservative, with many of its more traditional citizens highly suspicious of change, any change. We knew there was bound to be an opposing view to Ahmed’s and it was not hard to find it. On the outskirts of Riyadh lay the vast, sprawling camel market of Janadriya. It was a bleak place on that cold, grey January afternoon, spread out over several acres next to a windswept motorway embankment where old newspapers and other detritus flapped and tumbled in the wind – parts of Arabia can be distinctly unglamorous at times. There were corrugated-tin huts, tattered green Saudi flags and the occasional dark-brown and cream striped goats’ hair tent, with a satellite dish stuck in the ground next to it. Cameleers from Sudan in filthy white robes leaned against the metal pens, twirling their canes in the sand, while others unloaded bales of green hay. From the camels themselves came a constant cacophany of roaring and gurgling.

  We drove up to a small woven tent where several camel traders lounged inside against cushions, their conversation ebbing and flowing like a tide. Adam and our local fixer had already done the groundwork the previous week and we were welcomed inside. Gnarled logs were tossed on to a fire where a boy then squirted them with a long, purple stream of stinking paraffin, sending flames rearing halfway up to the tent roof, then immediately subsiding. Tea was offered, sweet and sugary in tiny glasses, then bitter Arabic coffee. This was how I had lived for weeks with the Bedu in Jordan in my twenties and it brought back fond memories, but Adam gently steered me back to the task in hand. The idea was to ask what people in this traditional part of Saudi society thought about the Arab Spring, but no sooner had I raised the question than the first man got up and walked out, muttering, ‘Excuse me, I’m not getting into this discussion.’ The stout, bearded and grizzled old man next to him, who had worked all his life with camels, stayed to give us his thoughts. ‘We have resisted the Arab Spring here, thanks to God, because we are good Muslims and because we respect our king.’ His eyes shone with righteous enthusiasm and I had no doubt he was being sincere, but I pointed out that surely there were plenty of good Muslims in countries like Egypt and Libya and they had had revolutions. Uncle Wa’id, as people in the tent addressed him respectfully, was adamant. ‘The Arab Spring will never happen here because we respect our God and our Islamic traditions.’ The young man next to him said almost exactly the same. By now my eyes were stinging from the wood smoke and the paraffin, and my teeth felt sticky from all that sweet tea. I noticed that the poor lad next to me, who could not have been much more than twenty years old, already had rotten teeth.

  We returned the next morning to film some of the heated bargaining going on outside. Camels hold a privileged position in Arabian society, especially here in the central Nejd plateau, with the finest animals being cossetted and spoiled almost like favourite sons. The day dawned dull, cold and white, which seemed to me manifestly unfair. While I remembered Saudi summers as being blisteringly hot, with a bleached white landscape, in winter these Arabian skies were more often clear, bright and blue. Yet here we were in January with this flat, colourless light that was causing our Australian cameraman to wince up at the sky and shake his head unhappily. If anything, the scene was even more bleak and unprepossessing than yesterday. A stiff desert wind was now whipping up clusters of discarded plastic bags and blowing them round in frenzied circles. An Indian camel boy walked past behind his small herd, his face wrapped by his chequered shimagh headdress against the dust and grit.

  We began filming and soon a car pulled up full of young men. ‘Where are you from?’ they demanded. ‘Are you from America?’ Instantly alarm bells rang in my head, so I replied in Arabic that I was from Europe. ‘And your friends?’ they asked. ‘They are just friends,’ I replied. They drove on. It was a perfectly innocent exchange and their questions were doubtless well meant, but still it was impossible for me to forget that when I was last
here, at the height of the murderous insurgency in the mid-2000s, cells of young jihadists would ask such questions about foreigners before selecting their targets. One carful of Westerners escaped back then only by saying they were from South Africa.

  I interviewed Abdullah, a man who had come to market with his sons to buy a camel for cooking. ‘The market has gone crazy,’ he complained. ‘A camel like this one,’ he said, patting a dark, woolly-fleeced animal sitting snarling in the back of a pick-up truck, ‘will cost you between 5,000 and 7,000 riyals (about £1,000). But that will feed a family for a month. We love the meat, we call it haashi – sometimes you see restaurants only for this. Camels are very important for our traditions, we have used them for meat and for transport for centuries.’ Almost everyone at the camel market was friendly and inquisitive, but one or two of the older merchants were starting to complain, understandably, that we were getting in the way of business, so I insisted we leave immediately. The crew agreed without a murmur.

  The afternoon came almost as a reward. In the desert outside Riyadh lie the Al-Thumama dunes, a rolling, rippling outdoor playground of natural sand, a place where some of the capital’s youth comes to let off steam at weekends. It was decided that I should try to interview them while driving myself round on a rented quadbike. As I transferred from my wheelchair on to the quad, I could see posses of young Saudi men racing each other up the sides of dunes, their long white thaub robes fluttering in the wind and their chequered shamaagh headscarves wrapped tight around their faces against the blowing sand. Others were in four-wheel-drive jeeps, wild music blaring from the stereos, and they gave whoops and shouts as they roared past, flashing us a thumbs-up or yelling ‘Cheers!’. Our Saudi fixer felt an irresistible urge to join them, then got over-ambitious on a dune and neatly flipped his vehicle upside down, scrambling out of the way to avoid being crushed. Since my part-paralysed legs would never be able to save me from that sort of mess, I didn’t really fancy following suit, so I kept the throttle down and played it safe. Yet it was still both exhilarating and liberating, that fantastic feeling of independence and empowerment that probably only someone who spends most of their waking day perched on a wheelchair can truly appreciate. I feel like driving up that dune over there, I thought, so off I went, bumping and jolting over the rutted sand, controlling my speed and direction with both hands firmly gripping the handlebars, while my feeble thighs tried their best to keep me clamped in place on the cushioned saddle.

  Some frantic waving from Adam brought me back to reality. Lost in my own thoughts at being back in Saudi Arabia, I kept forgetting that he had a sixty-minute film to produce. I delivered a piece-to-camera on the move, addressing the tiny Go-Pro digital camera taped on to the front of the quadbike as I tried to encapsulate the basics of this country’s generous welfare state. ‘Saudis pay no taxes, water and electricity are heavily subsidized, they get free education, free healthcare and free university tuition. When they want to get married, they can apply for an interest-free loan. So for a lot of people living here, it is something of a sheltered, pampered society.’ This did not, of course, address the glaring iniquities of a country where so much wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of an unelected few and their extended family of thousands of royal princes from the country’s premier tribe, the Al-Sa’ud. To gauge some opinions, I drove up to two young Saudis out for a burn in their new Toyota. Dressed in jeans and designer T-shirts, one was still at university, but their views were staunchly patriotic. No, thank you to the Arab Spring they said, we don’t need that here, we love our king. This was becoming a familiar refrain here in the conservative heartland.

  ‘What would you think if you had to pay taxes here in the kingdom?’ I continued.

  ‘Some people don’t know anything about tax,’ they replied. ‘Maybe they don’t even know it exists!’ One more reason, I thought, why the streets of Saudi Arabia have not seen an outpouring of Arab Spring protests.

  Prompted by Adam, I then asked an uncomfortable question. ‘What about girls? Do you ever get to meet them?’ I said to Abdulkarim, who was studying IT at a Riyadh university.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘I have no chance to meet them. Only my family,’ he replied.

  Our filming finished for the day, it was time to head south, to the wild, mountainous border region next to Yemen where we had negotiated helicopter access through the all-powerful Ministry of Interior, whose well-armed troops guard the borders as well as policing internal security. We wanted to see how Saudi Arabia was coping with the constant flood of drug-smugglers, gun-runners, potential terrorists and illegal immigrants all trying to sneak across the border from Yemen.

  Despite the problems on the border, this far southwestern corner was always my favourite part of the country, a region where the scenic Asir mountains rise up from the coastal plain to 3,000 metres, a land dotted with crenellated and storm-battered stone watchtowers, fortress-like villages, plunging ravines, lush juniper forests and precipitous escarpments where wild Hamadryas baboons scavenged and fought each other with snarling teeth. Back in 1991, when I first started going there, many of the local tribesmen were still wearing black, wraparound skirts and cartridge belts, and had herbal plants and flowers woven into their hair in an ancient tradition. Only a few decades previously this whole region had belonged to Yemen, before it was absorbed into the newly founded Saudi Kingdom in the 1930s. Much of that traditional dress had disappeared by 2000 as Asir Province not just modernized but turned into a popular domestic tourist destination for Saudis seeking respite from their searing summer temperatures. Down at lower altitudes, between the mountains and the Red Sea, lay the humid coastal plain called the Tihama, with its rather shabby provincial capital, Jizan. It was to here that we now flew to begin our ‘embed’ with the border force.

  The plane carrying us from Riyadh banked low over the shoal banks and reefs of the southern Red Sea; squat, square houses were dimly visible through the muggy haze. When the door opened, the tropical heat reached into the plane to greet us, damp and oppressive even though this was supposed to be winter. Jizan airport has always had a certain charm – I once stepped outside to see a fully grown baboon tethered to the roof of a farmer’s pick-up truck – and today, despite plans to turn it into an international hub for passengers arriving from Africa, the arrivals hall was dominated by a full-size mock-up of a bayt khassaf: the traditional rope-roofed round huts that dot the countryside here.

  We drove in a police convoy to the base, and it occurred to me how strange it was to be driving right into the heart of Saudi security here in Jizan, when on all my previous trips I had given it as wide a berth as possible. The coastguard/border guard HQ occupied a prime patch of land between an old Ottoman Turkish fort up on the hill and the glittering harbour. Black Kites kites wheeled in the torpid air and heavy pelicans flapped past, as if defying gravity. We had originally planned to stay in the local hotel, but when we read the FCO travel advice, with its warnings about criminals, terrorists and smugglers, we opted for the coastguard’s guest house, where every room, I noticed, had its own can of mosquito spray. A few years ago there was a deadly outbreak of Rift Valley Fever here that came across the border from Yemen. Hundreds of Saudis and Yemenis died and at the time it was declared a national emergency.

  Inside the base we were shown a large wall map of the whole troubled border with Yemen, with small black Kalashnikov emblems marking the gun souks on the Yemeni side, dangerously close to the Saudi patrol bases. ‘They do not have the same level of security on the Yemeni side of the border,’ the Interior Ministry spokesman had complained to me back in Riyadh. ‘There is not much organization on the Yemeni side, they expect us to do everything.’ Already this year, he said, the Saudis had had five police officers killed in the remoter regions, one just this morning. ‘The economic migrants are not so serious,’ he said. ‘It is the drug-smugglers bringing in hashish who tend to be more determined and they shoot at our forces.’

  We were beckoned to
a feast next door in the officers’ dining room, the first of many, with hunks of greasy lamb served up on beds of fragrant yellow rice sprinkled with cardamom and sultanas. Hosted by the general in charge of the base, I found there was usually little conversation at these events, most of it taking place before and after the meal in orderly rows of stiff-backed ‘conversation chairs’, leaving people free to concentrate on stuffing themselves in peace.

  At six a.m. we were all up and ready for our early-morning flight along the border in a Blackhawk helicopter. Dawn was barely creeping over the hills to the east and the nocturnal cicadas were still chirping as we knocked back tiny glasses of bitter Arabic coffee in the half-light. Stew was not in good spirits. ‘I’ve been absolutely troughed by mozzies,’ he grumbled, displaying an arm punctured with countless pink welts. He must have acted as the tethered goat, drawing the mosquitoes’ attention away from me, as I didn’t have a single bite. ‘Here I go again,’ he sighed, ‘taking one for the team.’

  Traffic was just coming to life in the centre of Jizan as we made our way to the airfield, where we nearly collided with a pick-up truck driven by a child of eleven at the most. ‘Maybe he is ten,’ shrugged one of the police officers. The boy scowled at us from behind the wheel, then revved his engine and roared off. He had probably been driving on the roads since he was six. Above us, perched atop the lamp posts, pelicans watched all this impassively, holding out their giant wings to catch the first of the sun’s rays. Jizan’s traffic was of little interest to them.