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FOR a country that has been looking upon Saudi Arabia as an ATM, Pakistan should be sad that oil prices, the kingdom’s life blood, have plunged so precipitously. But the social network tells another story.
Doubly ironic is the fact that the United States, our standby ATM, is suffering equally from a fall in oil prices. Clearly, the Covid-19 virus isn’t all bad. Cheap oil for poor countries is surely good news.
Who could have imagined that prices would enter negative territory and some sellers would have to pay hard cash to get rid of the black gold that has fuelled the world for nearly a century?
In one of the vignettes in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the protagonist proclaimed (if memory serves) that he would dance with joy when the Saudis ran out of oil. This is a sentiment I share. Before I am accused of ingratitude, let me explain: since prices exploded following the oil embargo of 1973, the Saudis have been strutting across the globe, throwing their weight around, and using their unearned wealth to accumulate global clout.
By agreeing to ramp up production to lower prices when they went up, the Saudis helped Western economies. And by buying hundreds of billions worth of American, British, French and German weaponry, Riyadh allowed the armament industry to flourish and new weapons systems to be developed at lower costs.
These arms were only used to attack weak neighbours like Yemen, never strong ones like Iran. For its own defence, the kingdom depended on the US while its shiny new toys rusted in the desert sand.
Internally, it used its muscle and Western silence to commit the worst human rights violations imaginable.
It is hard to sympathise with the kingdom.
So when Riyadh recently announced that it would cease public flogging, it was hardly initiating a revolution. In fact, it has yet to halt beheadings or ordering stoning to death. Women, despite their recent hard-won right to drive, remain second-class citizens.
The foreign workers who have built the gleaming buildings in Riyadh and Jeddah with their sweat and blood are even worse off. Their passports are taken from them on arrival and they are forced to stay until their employers permit them to leave. There have been women workers from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Philippines who have alleged rape.
Naturally, opposition is non-existent, and jails are full of dissidents who have been locked up after farcical trials. Women who have crossed the line are subjected to horrors that we wouldn’t even wish to think about.
In the Islamic world, Riyadh’s role has been toxic. In a long article in the Guardian recently, Krithika Varagur wrote: “… Saudi dawa typically ends up supporting not Saudi Wahabism, but Salafism, a linked but discrete 20th-revivalist movement … The most notorious effect has been the spread of Salafi-jihadism, which has found a base in some of the communities supported by Saudi dawa….”
These communities are spread from Indonesia to Iraq. Billions of Saudi riyals have paid for entire arsenals that end up in the hands of terrorists who have unleashed horrors on innocent men, women and children across the globe. We in Pakistan have suffered for decades from the extreme thinking the Saudis have been exporting. Tens of thousands have been killed.
Despite this murder and mayhem, the Saudis have the open-ended support of Washington, London and Paris. Years of slaughter in Yemen have not persuaded Riyadh’s Western allies to rein in the Saudis and stop their lethal arms supplies and intelligence support.
Given all this, it is hard to sympathise with the kingdom as it suffers through the sharpest drop in oil prices in decades. Currently, given its massive spending, it needs to sell oil at $80 per barrel to balance its budget. There is no way this price will be reached in the near future as its current level is around $20. Even its massive cash reserve of around $500 billion will not last forever.
The US, too, is suffering: its fracking industry is in freefall because of high extraction costs and heavy bank loans. At one point, Donald Trump had boasted of “oil supremacy”, but all that is in the pre-pandemic past. Now those operating and owning the rigs are begging banks to extend their loans.
Perhaps now Prince Mohammed bin Salman will discover that even his power has limits, and think twice before allegedly sending hit squads abroad to knock off his opponents. We can only hope.
If Riyadh’s decline in power results in a fall in its arrogance, and an improvement in its human rights record, we would welcome its entry into the community of civilised nations. For an invisible virus to bring Riyadh to its knees is a prospect worth savouring. Let me do a little jig to rejoice…
Published in Dawn, May 2nd, 2020
