Dynamist Blog

TEST CASE

The WaPost editorializes on a good test of how serious the administration is about spreading liberal democracy in the Mideast. Does the case for freedom include our good friends the Saudis?

The Saudi crackdown began Monday with the arrest of at least five prominent intellectuals, including professors Abdullah Hamed, Matrouk Faleh and Mohammed Said Tayeb; by yesterday the number of detained was reported to be as high as 10, though several were said to have been released. Those arrested include several leading political liberals as well as moderate Islamists. Most signed a petition in December calling on Crown Prince Abdullah to lay out a timetable for making Saudi Arabia a constitutional monarchy -- a demand that sounds far-fetched now but sets a reasonable goal for the long run.

That, it seems, was not their offense. What prompted the arrests, Saudi sources say, was a plan by the reformers to establish an independent human rights organization. The professors first asked permission to set up the group, only to be told that the government planned to establish its own human rights organization. Predictably, the official group rolled out last week excluded the dissidents as well as other notable government critics. So the reformers revived their plan for an independent organization -- only to be dragged from their classrooms by Interior Ministry officials, purportedly for "questioning." The point was obvious: to stifle what would have been a genuinely independent movement to advocate for political freedom, women's rights and other reforms.

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