SAUDI ARABIA: Decay in the Desert

In the wake of Khrushchev and Bulganin, another spectacular but distinctly different visitor made his triumphal way across India last week. He was moose-tall (6 ft. 6 in.) King Saud of Arabia, 53, ruler over Islam’s holiest places and the world’s richest oil lands. His party of 234, including nine royal princes and a dozen sheiks, was seven times as large as that which accompanied Bulganin and Khrushchev. When some of India’s 40 million Moslems tried to garland the King’s head with flowers, strapping bodyguards, slung with pistols, gold-hilted scimitars and jeweled daggers, stepped in to intercept them.

As one of the last absolute monarchs on earth, King Saud prefers to give, rather than receive, on his travels. Visiting Iran earlier this year, he presented the Queen with diamond jewelry worth $900,000. After attending the 1953 coronation of King Feisal, he presented the Iraqis who looked after him with a fabulous tip: $80,000 in cash, two Cadillacs and a Chevrolet. Last week he presented Prime Minister Nehru’s daughter Indira with a golden headband and a diamond-studded wristwatch.

At Simla he gave $400 for one cup of tea, and when his car flattened a farmer’s chicken on the road, the owner received $40 in kingly recompense. At Benares, after getting an honorary degree, His Majesty donated $10,000 to a university students’ union; at Aligarh he gave $600 to his car drivers. During a few days in New Delhi, his party spent $100,000 in gift shops for gold-threaded cloth, sandalwood and ivory bric-a-brac for the wives back home.

The Missing Billion. King Saud’s largesse is the talk of the Eastern world. But because the son of the late great Ibn Saud has never deigned to publish a statement of his revenues and expenditures, nobody knows precisely what use he has made of the underground wealth that Allah bestowed on him. In The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers, published last week in Manhattan (Praeger; $7), Dr.

Benjamin Shwadran, editor of the scholarly magazine Middle Eastern Affairs, offers the best documented analysis to date of how the government’s 50-50 share of oil profits has been lavished on a Saudi Arabian Nights.

Last year, 20 years after old Ibn Saud brought in U.S. oilmen and the golden flood began to spout out of the Arabian American Oil Co.’s wells, the government received an income in royalties and taxes of about $200 million—and managed to spend it all and $50 million besides. Since World War II, according to Shwadran’s calculations, the King of Saudi Arabia has run through $1.4 billion paid him by the oil companies.

Where has it all gone? Certainly not much of it to better the lot of the country’s estimated 5,000,000 citizens. Says Shwadran: “Life expectancy in Saudi Arabia is 33 years; tuberculosis is prevalent; 70% of the population have trachoma, and at least 40% suffer from syphilis.

In 1950 it was estimated that the per capita income was only $45.” London’s Anti-Slavery Society calculates that as many as a quarter of a million Saudi Arabians may actually be living still in slavery. Yet, taking some sketchy budget figures published a few years ago, Shwadran notes that royal household affairs were allotted $27.9 million, compared with $10.7 million for public health, education and social services combined. The estimates also listed $36 million for defense, $27 million to pay debts, and $44 million for “General Development “without, says Shwadran, providing any “clue as to whether it was for wealth-producing projects or some capricious projects of the King’s.” Shwadran believes that the actual sums dispensed in gifts to princelings and subsidies to sheiks vastly exceed these airy estimates.

The Price of a Throne. No such commanding warrior as his warrior father, King Saud has had to buy allegiance.

Some Middle East specialists estimate that he pays out more than $50 million a year to keep desert tribes loyal. Ibn Saud had a father’s control over his 40-odd sons. Saud has only the stature of eldest brother, and the power of his purse. There is inevitable rivalry with his brother, Crown Prince Feisal, though the old King, when death was near, made the two swear on the Koran never to oppose each other.

In all, 322 princes of the royal blood get $32,000 a year apiece plus expenses (upkeep of palaces, cars, travel allowances); and those who hold office (four of ten Cabinet members are royal princes) get $320,000 each a year plus expenses.

At sun-baked Riyadh, where old Ibn Saud lived for decades in conspicuous austerity, his offspring spread out over the desert in a $50 million complex of government buildings, palaces, fountains, swimming pools and gardens. Three new air-conditioned palaces now under construction in Jidda, Riyadh and Taif will bring the King’s personal total of palaces to 24. Though the country boasts only 200 miles of surfaced roads, it continues to rate as the best Cadillac market east of Suez (250 sold this year). In a country which must import half its food, the most noteworthy farm-development project is operated on 1,800 irrigated acres at Al Kharj oasis, near Riyadh—primarily for the benefit of the royal family tables.

Probably the world’s top Saudi Arabia authority is H. St. John Philby, the British Orientalist who served for years as King Ibn Saud’s adviser. Recently in the London Sunday Times Philby delivered a harsh judgment on what he called “the Scandal of Saudi Arabia.” A few roads, waterworks at Riyadh, Mecca and other places, some hospitals, a few public buildings, and the 350-mile railway that Arabian American Oil Co. built to connect Saud’s capital with the Persian Gulf are about the only constructive achievements that he can find to list to the regime’s credit. All the rest of the oil wealth, a billion dollars or more, has gone down the drain, he says, in “vast private fortunes accumulated and invested safely beyond the borders . . . vast expenditures by princes and officials on the lighter side of life . . .” The Police State. As the profligacy of King Saud’s household has increased, says Philby, his tyranny has tightened. Whenever his subjects, usually students and other sons of traders enriched by his extravagance, have shown signs of political restiveness, the King has invoked his father’s stern Moslem laws to repress them. To Philby, who saw Ibn Saud’s tribesmen sweep the deserts in their puritanical Wahhabi zeal and fury, this is the surest sign of the regime’s decay and advancing doom. Says he: “The fountain of Arab chivalry has been fouled with oil; and the mouths of the preachers and the prophets have been stopped with gold . . . Where virtue reigned on a scale which some may have thought exaggerated, wealth has become the only criterion of merit . . . The common thief still forfeits his hand, the common adulterer his head, but the higher spheres of society, where speculation and vice are practiced on an impressive scale, live their lives in their own way with complete immunity from censure or sanctions. In a recent case, indeed, a respectable member of the [Moslem] Virtue Committee was consigned to prison for daring to criticize the laxity of the regime. Laymen have suffered similarly for the same offense, and foreigners banished. Almost imperceptibly a police state has usurped the functions of the sovereign Islamic law.”