Saudi Arabia: A new Emir for the restlessness province
The unrest province in the East Saudi Arabia, Qatif, has been a new Emir since yesterday. Whether Prince Saud is Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz the demands of the SCHIST, which provide the population majority in the Eastern Province, lends larger obedience. Observers recognize in a change of conduct rather a manobever in the chess game around the throne sequence as a reformic signal.
Although the dismissal of Muhammad is fahd as a provincial sire a demand of the protest in Qatif, but it does not look like the successor Prince Saud Bin Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz was initiating key steps for reforms, certainly no institutional reforms Political co-talking rooms became. "The protests in the eastern province are very perceived by the safety glasses, so it will be reacted hard in the future", Forecast an author of US Magazine Foreign Policy.
Saud am Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz is the son of the early Minister of the Interior and Safe Chief Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz and brother of the new Minister of the Interior Muhammed Bin Nayef, who emphasized yesterday in the sowing house with US Prasident Obama the narrow partnership between the two countries emphasized. The father, who died as a crown prince last year, was considered a hardliner. The son did not fell so far by that he ride another line. Its positioning as head in Qatif is interpreted in connection with the succession. The different family branches are possible in any good positions to improve the prospects of their branch.
From protests Saud was allowed to be Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz no advantage in the successor promise, reforms that a power of power could go down in the ruling tradition of the suits are not on the plan. The guided leads, what Qatif is concerned, well with the conflict as a Sunnis against Shiites, which always gives the opportunity to refer to foreign, ie Iranian, conspiracy and to deserve the demands of the demonstrators (in the Middle East Propagandamaschinery in full swing).
An opposition that used for more democratic institutions, more burger rights, for example freedom of expression, including criticism of the ruling house, more participation or better rights for the foreign workers, has barely a prospect in Saudi Arabia. How well the suds have managed to atomize protests and criticism in order to immunize the ruling house against any swelling uprising, shows the example of the arrest of the writer Turki al-Hamad.
Sit-ins and creative protests
His arrest at the end of December 2011 can be taken as Pars Pro Toto for a whole series of arrests of critics and dissidents for many years. The prison sentences are juicy, 30 years of freedom not infrequently.
Turki al-Hamad was brought into the prison for a Twitter criticism of Islamists. That the access of the regime can be done on every smallest critical exercise somewhere in the network, that is one. The other is that a new type of resistance showed. On the noteworthy Saudi website Riyadhbureau.COM is the speech of unpredicted, new protest forms that resulted from the arrests: "Sit-ins and creative protests".
However, on the basis of the case of the arrested writer, it turns out that these protests were mostly limited only to the relief of the respective arrested, which always only had a special case and not the demand for generally more freedoms. That the writer was arrested because his exercises ("atheist hareatician"If there were not a religious point of view, even for well find: "No Freedom for the Enemies of Freedom". This can be read on how successful the Saudi strategy is to disassemble the political resistance in individual trap and immunize in terms of fundamental criticism in the roughness with aid of fearson religion.