61,000
leaked cables give rare insight into kingdom’s habit of buying influence and
monitoring dissidents
The Guardian, Ian Black Middle East editor, Sunday 21 June 2015
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| Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who died in January. Photograph: Hassan Ammar/AP |
Saudi Arabia has warned its citizens to ignore thousands of its diplomatic documents
leaked by the transparency site WikiLeaks, which give a rare insight into the
kingdom’s habit of buying influence and monitoring dissidents.
The 61,000 Saudi cables, the first tranche of 500,000 promised by Julian Assange, the
WikiLeaks founder, also show the country’s sharp focus on its strategic rival
Iran and the revolution in Egypt, and support for allies and clients in
Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Nothing yet
published matches embarrassing revelations about the Saudis in WikiLeaks’ 2010
release of US diplomatic documents, which reported King Abdullah calling to
“cut off the head of the [Iranian] snake” as well as drink- and drug-fuelled partying by minor royals in Jeddah.
But routine
secret correspondence from the foreign ministry in Riyadh and embassies abroad,
some from as recently as April this year, catalogues many of the preoccupations
of the conservative monarchy, the world’s biggest oil exporter, especially
during the turbulent period of the Arab spring from early 2011.
According
to one document, Gulf states were prepared to pay $10bn (£6.3bn) to secure the
release of the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, which appears to
support a previous claim about this by a leading Muslim Brotherhood politician.
A 2012
cable reveals concern that Iran was receiving “flirting American messages” that
suggested the US did not oppose a peaceful Iranian nuclear programme so long as
it had guarantees, including from Russia. Others from that period show Saudi
plans for an anti-Iran satellite TV channel to broadcast in Persian from
Bahrain, and plans to disrupt Iranian channels.
The cables
show Riyadh often seems worried about any advantage for Tehran: one document
explains that if an Arab summit conference were held as scheduled in Baghdad in
2012, it would mean “handing Iraq to Iran”. Cables also show efforts to back
opponents of Nouri al-Maliki, the then Shia prime minister of Iraq, who was
close to Iran.
Correspondence
from the embassy in Beirut shows contacts with the Lebanese Forces leader,
Samir Geagea, over cash payments to ease financial problems. Geagea had
publicly defended Saudi Arabia and opposed president Bashar al-Assad of Syria,
and generally shown “readiness to do whatever the kingdom asks of him”, the
cables say.
Al-Akhbar,
the Beirut newspaper that is publishing the documents with WikiLeaks, is a
supporter of Assad and Iran’s Lebanese militia ally Hezbollah. The documents
examined so far do not mention Saudi backing for anti-Assad rebels, most likely
because these are handled by the country’s intelligence service.
Correspondence
from the Saudi embassy in London shows filming of protesters and a discussion
of legal action against the Guardian over an article by Saad al-Faqih, an
Islamist. An appearance by Faqih on Egypt’s ON TV channel brought a proposal to
“find out how to co-opt it”. But the billionaire owner of the station, Naguib
Sawiris, did not want to be “opposed to the kingdom’s policies” and he ordered
that Faqih never be interviewed again.
“The extent
of Egypt’s ruling establishment’s self-prostitution to Saudi money is both
embarrassing and unsurprising,” commented the writer Iyad al-Baghdadi, in one
of many weekend social media reactions since the documents were released. Ala’a
Shehabi, a Bahraini dissident concerned by the Saudi intervention in her
country, called the trove a “rare insight into the most opaque regime in the
world”.
Toby
Matthiesen, a Cambridge University academic, said: “For Saudi experts there is
little surprising so far … but the details will hurt a lot of corrupt people.”
The
documents include several references to “hostile” media. An undated note
describes the influence of journalists sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood on
the Qatar-owned channel al-Jazeera, which has often fallen foul of the Saudis.
The papers also show how in 2010 they purchased hundreds or thousands of
subscriptions to publications in Damascus, Abu Dhabi, Beirut, Kuwait, Jordan
and Mauritania in order to secure favourable coverage.
Influence
and money are recurring themes. Reports from Sana’a state that the proceeds of
the sale of 3m barrels of oil given to Yemen in 2012 never reached the
country’s treasury. Another document accuses Qatar of paying a Yemeni sheikh to
foment rebellion in the army and to prevent the 2012 presidential election of
Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The Sydney
Morning Herald found documents with instructions from the Saudi government to
its Canberra embassy relating to the payment of large subsidies to prominent
Arabic newspapers and media organisations in Australia.
The Sunday
Times reported that a document in the cache showed Saudi Arabia was prepared to
pay the BBC correspondent Frank Gardner £1m in compensation after he was shot
in Riyadh by al-Qaida. Gardner told the newspaper the compensation never
materialised.
On Sunday
the Saudi foreign ministry spokesman Osama Nugali warned citizens not to “allow
enemies of the state to achieve their intentions in regards to exchanging or
publishing any documents,” many of which, he said, had been “fabricated in a
very obvious manner”.
WikiLeaks
did not say where it obtained the documents, but it referred in a press release
to Riyadh’s statement in May that it had suffered a breach of its computer
networks – an attack later claimed by a group calling itself the Yemen Cyber
Army.
The
Guardian has not been able to independently verify the authenticity of the
documents.
Reuters and
the Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Saudi
Arabia executed 87 people in 2014, ranking it third in the world for use
of the
death penalty (AFP Photo/Fayez Nureldine)
|
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