Posted on 05/15/2003 1:52:41 PM PDT by Brian S
— By Alistair Lyon, Middle East Diplomatic Correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - A leading Saudi dissident said Thursday that Osama bin Laden had gained broad support in his native Saudi Arabia, where his followers are chief suspects in this week's suicide bombings that killed 34 people.
"They can survive any crackdown," Saad al-Fagih, head of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, told Reuters in an interview at his modest family home in north London.
Fagih, whose group launched a satellite television channel aimed at Saudi viewers this week, dismissed as naive the idea that the Saudi royal family was "soft" on Islamist militants.
But he said Saudi rulers were fractious, aging and out of touch with their people. Obsessed with secrecy, their instincts were to conceal problems from the outside world.
Fagih, who advocates peaceful political change, said al Qaeda had certainly suffered losses in personnel and logistics since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. cities.
But bin Laden's followers had made compensatory gains in Saudi Arabia, where they now have a "supportive, sheltering environment where hostility to the United States is immense."
Fagih said the Iraq war had fueled anti-American sentiment in the kingdom, where the U.S. capture of the ancient Islamic capital of Baghdad stung as the greatest humiliation Muslims had suffered since Israel seized East Jerusalem in the 1967 war.
The 44-year-old British-trained surgeon said there were signs that bin Laden was ready to countenance attacks on the royal family and people seen as protecting U.S. interests.
"Previously he had banned attacks on the Saudi establishment because perceptions in society are against targeting any Muslim even if he is corrupt, immoral or a member of the royal family," he said.
REBUKE FROM U.S. ALLY
Monday's bombings have drawn stark U.S. criticism of Saudi security lapses and a White House demand that the kingdom "deal with the fact that it has terrorists inside its own country."
U.S.-Saudi ties have been under strain since the Sept. 11 attacks, in which 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers were Saudis.
Saudi Arabia publicly opposed the war on Iraq, but offered quiet cooperation to U.S. forces, now due to leave the kingdom in a move that tacitly meets a key bin Laden demand.
Soft-spoken, bearded and wearing a simple brown robe, Fagih said much of the American pressure exerted on Saudi Arabia since Sept. 11 was misguided or inappropriate.
Loud insistence on tighter Saudi security measures was unlikely to produce results because policing was already pervasive and had failed to prevent radical Islamist groups from proliferating and extending their popular support, he said.
Nor did Fagih see any merit in U.S. demands for a weakening of fundamentalist religious influence in Saudi Arabia, arguing that its dominant Wahhabi creed was stronger in earlier decades when there was little anti-American feeling in the country.
However, he endorsed what he said was a third, and so far the least influential, U.S. school of thought.
"Apart from the pan-Islamic hostility to America over Palestine, Iraq and what is seen as the looting of Muslim resources, it sees a problem specific to Saudi Arabia.
"This is the decadent, oppressive, secretive regime, which is driving the country to chaos by its corruption and absolute dictatorship. The Americans should push for accountability and transparency, not interfere in Islamic affairs," he said.
Openness could help defuse social and economic discontent among frustrated young Saudis, said Fagih.
His group, formed in 1994, has used fax, Internet and radio, as well as its new Islah TV channel, to circumvent official controls on information and free speech in Saudi Arabia.
Ok. Let's take that at face value. Either way, the Saudi Royal Family is still part of the problem.
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