By John Ballard
Timely weekend reading.
?Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz dies in New York
The heir to the Saudi throne, Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz, died Saturday in the U.S. after an illness. He was 85. The death of the crown prince � who was the half brother of the ailing Saudi King Abdullah � opens questions about succession.
NBC News reported that Sultan died at a hospital in New York City. He is expected to be buried Tuesday in Riyadh. 'A strong leader' Sultan, who was the oil-rich kingdom's deputy prime minister, had been defense minister and minister of aviation for about four decades.
?Saudi Arabia's Oil Policy Vacancies (This is from January)
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who turns eighty-eight this year and is also prime minister and main decisionmaker, has been in the United States since late November for medical reasons. He has had two back operations and, although now convalescing at the New York Plaza Hotel, is not expected to return to the kingdom for several weeks. He has not been seen in public since leaving the hospital on December 22, walking stiffly. When Vice President Joe Biden visited the hospital a week earlier, he was reported to have met the king's family rather than the king himself, although President Obama spoke by telephone to the king on December 26. (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is due to meet him in New York on January 7, before setting off on a trip to the Gulf.) When Abdullah leaves the United States, he is likely first to take vacation time at his palace in Morocco.
In the king's absence, weekly meetings of the Council of Ministers have been chaired by Crown Prince Sultan, the deputy prime minister, whose own mental and physical health has been increasingly subject to question. Sultan, who will be eighty-seven this year, is believed to be suffering from a form of dementia, possibly Alzheimer's disease. This speculation was bolstered by a March 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, published recently by WikiLeaks, noting cryptically that Sultan was "for all intents and purposes incapacitated."
Effective power in Saudi Arabia is presently judged to be in the hands of the second deputy prime minister and interior minister, Prince Nayef, although he is careful at Council of Ministers meetings and in public not to appear to be usurping his elder brother Sultan's role. Nayef has also represented the kingdom at meetings of Arab interior ministers in Egypt and at the annual summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council, held in December in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Although, at seventy-seven, he is significantly younger than the king and crown prince, Nayef himself is reported to have unspecified health problems. During a news conference in Mecca in November, journalists observed that he depended on aides to help him answer questions.
?When kings and princes grow old
Brother follows brother as Saudi Arabia�s absolute monarch. And so it may well continue, but watch for the tensions within that very large royal family
IMAGINE that the United Kingdom was an absolute monarchy known as Windsor Britain. Imagine that Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, had dozens of brothers, scores of sons and hundreds of cousins, and that the broader House of Windsor numbered thousands of lesser princes and princesses. Imagine further that all these royals pocketed fat state stipends, with many holding lifelong fiefs as government ministers, department heads, regimental commanders or provincial governors, with no parliament to hold them in check. Now imagine how sporting these princely chaps would be when the throne fell vacant, if the only written rule was a vague stipulation that the next in line should be the �best qualified� among all the Windsor princes.
This is roughly how things look in Saudi Arabia, a family enterprise run the old-fashioned way. Here the king is not only prime minister. He also appoints the members of parliament and designates a successor to the throne. Yet the actual workings of this system are not so simple. The size of the ruling al-Saud family (at least 5,000 hold princely rank), and the accumulated privileges of its leading princes are such that kings must take care to balance rival interests. They must also accommodate Wahhabist clerics who expect rewards for sanctioning absolute monarchy, technocrats who actually manage the country and even, sometimes, those of their subjects who grow restive, and demand a voice beyond presenting personal petitions at royal receptions.
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Prince Nayef, one of Sultan�s full brothers, has been seen as the likely next in line to Sultan since the king promoted him last year to the crown-prince-in-waiting post. Nayef is only 77, and fairly spry. But he seldom travels outside the country. As a crustily conservative minister of the interior for the past 35 years he has not endeared himself to Saudi reformers and professionals. Since his appointment last year he has worked to soften his image, but the choice still rankles with the many Saudis, including some senior princes, who would have preferred a more modernising figure.
Most Saudis expect that their ruling family will, as it usually has, reach quiet consensus on whom to crown, assuming that King Abdullah and Prince Sultan depart in reasonably short order. Aside from the 1992 royal decree tipping the �best qualified� prince to rule (a term that in Arabic can mean either the most virtuous or the most capable), there are some established guidelines. Traditions of Muslim kingship suggest that the line should pass through brothers of one generation in order of age, before descending to the next.
Again, more at the link if anyone is really interested, including a family tree chart.
I'm not.
My favorite line about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was in a Twitter message by Tony Karon.
Saudi Arabia gives women the right to vote
- which in Saudi Arabia is the proverbial
toy telephone...
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Here's a thought...
OWS is to NYSE what the Arab Spring is to KSA.
The difference is that oil is a product of nature but finance is an artificial construct.
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