Abacus | Why US$50 oil is at the heart of the Saudi-Qatar conflict
Though Doha’s relations with Iran and Syrian extremists are never appreciated, it’s another Arab spring within its own borders that gives the kingdom real nightmares
There is an old story about the Saudi Arabian monarchy that retired intelligence officers like to tell. It is almost certainly apocryphal. Nonetheless, it helps to illuminate the latest spat between Saudi Arabia, the Middle East’s largest oil producer, and its neighbour Qatar.
When the price of oil collapsed in the mid-1980s, the Saudi government found itself in the unusual situation of having to rein in its spending. To prepare the way, King Fahd, the monarch at the time, summoned a majlis, or council, of the sheikhs of the eastern Nejd tribes that have always provided the bedrock support for the House of Saud’s rule.
Sensing resistance to his proposed belt-tightening among the assembled tribal leaders, Fahd expounded at length on the royal government’s generosity. He described all the schools he had built, the mosques and the clinics, the lavish subsidies he had paid, and everything he had done for the tribes over the years.
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Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, left, with Saudi King Salman in Riyadh. Photo: AP
His words were met with an awkward silence, broken eventually by one elderly sheikh, who staring at the carpet asked, “Ah yes, but what have you done for us this week, O King?”
As I say, the story is surely apocryphal; it is also told about the budget reforms introduced in the mid-1960s by Fahd’s elder half-brother King Faisal. Even so, it illustrates an important point about Saudi rule: the monarchy may be absolute, but it does not rule in a vacuum. Saudi kings depend on the support of their tribal power base, and that support can be withdrawn.
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When Nejd tribal leader Abdulaziz ibn Saud conquered the western Hejaz kingdom in the mid-1920s, he did so with the support of the Ikhwan, a religious organisation that knitted together the Nejd tribes into a force of considerable military prowess. Established as king, ibn Saud promptly turned around and crushed the Ikhwan with the help of the British, who were anxious that the movement should not export trouble to their client states in Transjordan and Iraq.
Fearing shortages, shoppers stock up on supplies in Doha, Qatar, after Saudi Arabia closed its land border and halted exports to the tiny Gulf nation. Photo: AP
Officially, the Ikhwan no longer exists in Saudi Arabia. Its military force was long ago subsumed within the National Guard. But tribal and religious loyalties are not so easily stamped out. It is an open secret that the Ikhwan survives in shadowy form among the Nejd tribes, and that its loyalty to the House of Saud is at best highly conditional, dependent on the continued payment of heavy financial subsidies.
