UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 573-iii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

 

foreign policy aspects of the war against terrorism

 

 

WEDNesday 2 NOVEMber 2005

 

MR FRANK GARDNER, OBE

DR MAI YAMANI

Evidence heard in Public Questions 142 - 186

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 2 November 2005

Members present

Mike Gapes, in the Chair

Mr John Horam

Mr Eric Illsley

Mr Paul Keetch

Mr Andrew Mackay

Andrew Mackinlay

Mr John Maples

Sandra Osborne

Mr Greg Pope

Mr Ken Purchase

Sir John Stanley

Ms Gisela Stuart

________________

Witness: Mr Frank Gardner, OBE, Security Correspondent, BBC, examined.

Q142 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to this session of the Select Committee. We are delighted, Mr Gardner, that you have been able to join us today to give us your expertise and knowledge. Can I begin by asking you a general question because you have been closely following the issue of terrorism for some time. We had evidence given to this Committee a few weeks ago from Professor Paul Wilkinson and Mr Peter Taylor about changes in the nature of the terrorist threat that we confront. I would be interested to know your perspective on the current position with regard to developments and changes over recent years, since 9/11, and the kind of threats that we face.

Mr Gardner: How many days have you got? It is a very valid question. The major change of course to the al‑Qaeda threat came in the wake of 9/11. Osama Bin Laden and his followers knew that there would be retribution for 9/11 even if it was not able to be pinned on them, so their logistical basis became scattered, and it became a much harder target for counter-terrorism forces to engage. The threat, as I see it, to western Europe and Western interests internationally is just as real as it was three years ago. I remember being accused by some commentator in a newspaper of being the BBC's "insecurity" correspondent because I said, "The threat is real and this is not just governments trying to stir up support; it had nothing to do with Iraq; the threat has been there for a very long time." I am going to stick my neck out here and say that certainly for the foreseeable future the threat of terrorism to the West has been raised dramatically by events in Iraq. That is my personal view, not necessarily a BBC view. You have just got to look at the statistics. I think that a mistake which our friends across the water in Washington make is to think of terrorism or the al‑Qaeda phenomenon as a supply-driven phenomenon: it is not; it is demand-driven. The idea that, "oh, it is great to have a conflict in Iraq because you draw out all the bad forces, and we can then engage them and eliminate them there", which is how I have heard one American official putting it, is absolute nonsense. Iraq has breathed new life into the al‑Qaeda phenomenon. The old al‑Qaeda is no longer; it is very much scattered and diffused. They are hiding out in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and there is not much left of the original network. However the idea that Bin Laden and Zawahiri generated that wake-up call to Muslims, saying, "you have got to wake up and defend your lands, our lands, from invasion" is an idea that is very much alive and kicking, and has been regenerated by what has happened in Iraq.

Q143 Chairman: How strong is al‑Qaeda and its associated network in Saudi Arabia, and how reliable is Saudi Arabia as a partner for us in combating it?

Mr Gardner: The al‑Qaeda phenomenon in Saudi Arabia is relatively new. It only put its head above the parapet, as it were, in May 2003, when they carried out a triple suicide bombing on Western housing compounds in Riyadh. It took them several months to plan that. The organisation that did it calls itself the al‑Qaeda organisation in the Arabian Peninsula. It is relatively small. They have very grand ideas. They have an online magazine, Al-Batar, where they have issued advice and instructions to their followers on how to ambush princes and kidnap people. They are a small but extremely bloodthirsty organisation. They are heavily depleted; they have taken huge losses in the last couple of years, particularly in the last ten months. Their leadership is very fragmented. A lot of the main leaders have been killed in the last two years; for the record, men like Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, Salah al-alfi, Yusuf aleyhri and Turkinas aldandani. All these men have been killed in the last two years, so a lot of the brains at the top of this organisation are no longer there. However, there are still recruits coming into it. To a limited degree there is a kind of wellspring of anger, be it directed against the Americans because of what is going on in Iraq, or be it directed against the al-Saud in some cases. The numbers are hard to put a figure on. There is no shortage of weapons. In Saudi Arabia it is very easy for insurgents to get hold of weapons across the border from Yemen, or from Iraq. But the Saudi authorities have had great success in trying to combat this. They have run a very effective hearts-and-minds operation, as well as physically combating terrorism through building up their counter-terrorist forces. How reliable a partner is Saudi Arabia? At the moment it is reliable. The co‑operation between Saudi Arabia, Britain and the US is intense in the CT field in Saudi Arabia. It has not always been that way, and remember that this is often quite difficult for the Saudis to manage because there will be people at middle and low level who cannot stand the Americans and who do not think that we are much better because we are, in their eyes, crusading, occupying forces, who have gone in to try and re-colonise Iraq. That can potentially lead to divided loyalties. So far, to my knowledge, there have not been any cases of anybody infiltrating high up on the inside of the security forces and betraying people.

Q144 Sir John Stanley: Mr Gardner, would we be right to conclude from what you have said that the government's counter-terrorist forces are winning against terrorism in Saudi Arabia; or would that be a misconstruction of what you said?

Mr Gardner: I think that would be accurate. There will be more attacks. Everybody I have spoken to - and I have followed this subject professionally anyhow because I am still the BBC's security correspondent, but also from personal interest - and the inquest into the attack on us is still going on and will draw to a conclusion fairly shortly, so I have followed this fairly closely - thinks that there will be more attacks. However, the ability of al‑Qaeda's adherents in Saudi Arabia to launch big spectacular raids, such as they did in al‑Khobar in June last year, is probably limited. Remember that even though they were able to strike in Eastern Province, where the oil facilities are concentrated, they have not so far dealt any kind of a blow to the oil industry per se. They have also failed to assassinate any members of the al-Saud ruling family. They will probably have a go. Amidst all of this good news - you are probably going to ask me about this, but I should say straight away that there is a very ominous dark cloud on the horizon, and that is what the CIA refer to s "bleed-back", the return of militants who have gone to fight in Iraq who have come back to Saudi Arabia; and there is an organisation for this, a pipeline to bring them back. The latest estimate I saw for the number of Saudi Mujahideen, as they call themselves, who have gone to fight the coalition and the Iraqi Government in Iraq, is about 350. I suspect that that is probably an underestimate and that the numbers are probably bigger than that. Obviously, some of these people do not come back. They think they are going to Paradise, and blow themselves up. However, there are those who are coming back, and there are indications that a recent shoot-out in Dammam in Eastern Province involved some Saudi militants who had come back from Iraq. Remember that these are people who are going to come back utterly brutalised, with all sense of humanity, as we would know it, dissipated. These are people who have watched beheadings first-hand, and possibly have even done them themselves. The normal restraints of human behaviour and decency that you get in the vast majority of Saudi society - and I want to put in a plug for Saudi Arabia because it gets a bad press, but most Saudis are very decent, honest, kind and charitable people, and they are not by nature violent people. We are only talking here about a tiny minority, but they are a dangerous minority, and they are starting to filter back. It is something that the Saudi, British and American Governments are very concerned about.

Q145 Sir John Stanley: Would you say that the political objective of the terrorists in Saudi Arabia is still to remove the ruling family, and does that objective any longer have any credibility in their organisation, given the lack of success so far, as they would see it?

Mr Gardner: They have a number of objectives. They seem to slightly move the goalposts. Originally, when Osama Bin Laden was setting up in Afghanistan, his big beef was with the presence of US uniformed forces in Saudi Arabia, in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques. He objected to the presence of 5,000 US Airforce men and women at Prince Sultan Air Base; and they were there from 1990 right the way through to late 2003. They have gone, so that particular aim is no longer there. There are those who support al‑Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, who consider that their entire peninsula needs to be cleansed of non-believers, of Kafir, as they see it. I think that that was certainly the aim of the people who attacked us. Here was a chance to have a pop at some Westerners, scare others into leaving the country, and embarrass the Saudi Government. Ultimately they want to turn the Saudi Kingdom into something that is much more approaching a theocratic Islamist state. They do want to get rid of the al-Sauds. They have different reasons for this. In some cases, it is economic frustration; in some cases it is political frustration. As Prince Turki once joked, "We have a very democratic system in Saudi Arabia; all political parties are banned; we treat them equally." That is still the case, although as Dr Mai Yamani will tell you afterwards, there are signs of movement on the political and democratisation front.

Q146 Sir John Stanley: Would you say that the nexus, such as it exists, between al‑Qaeda- leaning terrorists and Saudi Arabia and Osama Bin Laden and what remains of his group, is stronger with those of Saudi Arabia than elsewhere, or are they now as detached as all the other very detached al‑Qaeda-leaning organisations in sixty odd countries where they are operating? Is it just the same in Saudi Arabia, and the degree of detachment there?

Mr Gardner: The nexus is weaker than it was. There was an intercept by Western intelligence collectively. I do not know whether it was the NSA or GCHQ, but there was an intercept in January 2003 - this is public knowledge - of a communication from the hills of Waziristan in Pakistan, where some of al‑Qaeda's fugitive leadership were hiding out and still are, and their followers in Saudi Arabia. That communication said: "It is time to start the insurgency." The Saudi would-be insurgents said, "Hang on, we are not ready yet; we are not organised yet; we can get the weapons, but we are not ready." They said: "No, this is an order; you have got to start." Four months later they drove three suicide truck bombs into the compounds in Riyadh and killed 35 people, so it began. Until that moment - and I am going back here to an earlier question - I do not think that the Saudi authorities had taken al‑Qaeda seriously. Only a few weeks before that, Prince Naif, the Interior Minister, had boasted and said: "We do not have any al‑Qaeda sleeper cells here; if we did, we would have woken them up long ago." There was an element of "head in the sand"; al‑Qaeda was somebody else's problem. They disapproved of it, but this was not something which was going to happen in Saudi Arabia. It was a massive shock to everybody. The Saudi's say, "This was our 9/11." On the technical side, in terms of communication, there has been quite close co‑operation between the Americans and the Saudis in terms of trying to trap the terrorists. I do not know if any of you have seen the film that I submitted to the Committee in advance, but if you look at it you will see that two years ago I managed to get access officially into their DNA labs in the counter-terrorism centre they had in Riyadh. They had quite a sophisticated operation; they were able to do DNA-mapping. If, for example, they know that a certain terror suspect spent the night in this house in Riyadh, and they are able to raid it afterwards and take fibre analysis; then they know that three days later he moved to Jeddah, and this is where he passed through - they are able to plot where somebody has been. They are also able to track and trap people through the use of mobile phones. That has made it very difficult for al‑Qaeda to communicate. They tend to communicate either by messages passed by hand or through the Internet. That is still the preferred means of communication. When I was Middle East Correspondent I covered the story about how they were trying to control ordinary Saudis' access to the Internet through a node, through a thing called the King Abdul Aziz Centre for Science and Technology. They have not been able to control it. People are able to circumvent controls, and al‑Qaeda is able to publish online various claims and biographies of heroes, as they see it; and that is, their main means of communication.

Q147 Mr Keetch: Mr Gardner, you said that Iraq had breathed new life into al‑Qaeda, and you mentioned the bleed-back. CSIS in Washington say that that bleed-back is in the early thousands, not just hundreds. Is there any sense that there is a bleed-back also from insurgents being - not trained, but gaining combat experience in Iraq - not just going back to Saudi Arabia but also going into other parts of the world, maybe even back into Europe?

Mr Gardner: Are you talking about Saudis coming out of Iraq?

Q148 Mr Keetch: Saudis or others.

Mr Gardner: This is a question which I have been very interested in myself. I have been asking a lot of people this. There is evidence that Europe-based jihadis have started to filter back from Iraq. We are talking here mainly about people of ethnic North African origin, usually Algerians but also some Moroccans and Tunisians, who were based in Europe, often with European Community passports but who had gone down the pipeline - and there has been quite an efficient pipeline to channel people from European countries, usually through Syria, and then feed them into the insurgency, whether through al‑Qaem in the north-west of Iraq, or other parts. I am not seeing Saudis doing that, other than coming back to Saudi Arabia itself. There is no evidence that I have seen that there are large numbers doing this. The Saudi authorities, who have become much more organised in the last two years in counter-terrorism, were quite surprised and shocked to find that at a big shoot-out they had at a place called al-Ras in April this year, they found that they had killed in the shoot-out somebody called Abdul Karim Majati, who was a Moroccan. They did not even know he was in the country. He was instrumental in the Casablanca bombings of May 2003 in Morocco, and is thought to quite possibly have had a hand in the Madrid bombings, through connections to Moroccan extremists. They did not even know he was in the country, so he was hiding out in a safe house north of Riyadh. I have been there, and it is an area known as Qasim, and it is a bastion of support for radical Wahhabism - I think that is probably the right way to put it. It is a pretty hard-core part of Saudi Arabia, and it is making them wonder how many other international jihadis might have come back to Saudi Arabia and be hiding out there. It is interesting that on the latest list of 36 most wanted people that has been published in the Saudi Kingdom, that includes people who are not Saudis and include Sahalian North Africans, Chadians, and people like that.

Q149 Mr Keetch: You have answered my second question. Although Saudis are not directly involved, there is a linkage and clear pipeline of communications between international al‑Qaeda people using Iraq, and also Saudi Arabia. There is a bleed-through both ways in a sense.

Mr Gardner: Yes, but Saudi Arabia is not an ideal base for al‑Qaeda because even before May 2003 the Mubahav, the Saudi secret police, for want of a better word, were pretty efficient at interrogating people and finding things out. Saudis have always resented the term "police state" but it is quite an authoritarian country, so it is not a natural base, whereas Iraq, in its present state, is a natural base for al‑Qaeda and very much the locus of al‑Qaeda has shifted from Afghanistan three or four years ago to Iraq now. It is sufficiently chaotic in Iraq that al‑Qaeda cells are able to go there, train, undertake martyrdom operations, suicidal bombings, and make connections.

Q150 Mr Keetch: We have been told in recent weeks by your colleague Peter Taylor, for example, and by Paul Wilkinson from St Andrew's, that the Iraq situation is being used as a recruiting ground, using videos on the Internet, to recruit people - we need to be careful what we say about them in the UK - here and throughout Europe. Again, you have seen evidence of that and you would agree with that.

Mr Gardner: Yes. In fact Peter Taylor's film made it very clear. I know why we have to be careful about it, but the idea of using jihadi videos for recruitment dates back to Algeria in the early nineties, when this first started to be done. The GSPC and the GIA, the two main insurgency organisations in Algeria in the nineties, would film some of their ambushes and attacks on Algerian conscripts, on Algerian Army convoys, and they were horrific. They would take the camera - it would be very shaky - and film themselves slitting people's throats. I have personally seen films from Chechnya that have been circulating underground in Birmingham, that have been very well-produced technically. Al‑Qaeda is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its use of the Internet and technology for recruiting and for propaganda. These types of videos have been around for quite a while. Certainly they are being put on to the Net extremely quickly in Iraq. The standard thing is that out of vision you hear voices in Arabic saying, "here we go, here we go; just wait, just wait", and you will see in the distance a Humvee usually, a US convoy, approaching a bridge, and then "bang" goes the improvised explosive device, and they all shout "Allahu Akbar" - "God is the greatest" and then there is a big flash, and up it goes. This sort of thing is very successful in recruiting people to take part in the insurgency in Iraq, although in relatively small numbers still. The big difference now between Iraq and Afghanistan is that there were al‑Qaeda camps all over Afghanistan in the late nineties, and it is estimated that somewhere around 15,000 recruits pass through these camps. Hundreds went from Britain, but it was relatively harmless. They went there and got to fire a few rounds of Kalashnikov and maybe and RPG; they attended a few sermons and made a lot of contacts and connections, and then they came back. In most cases, people did nothing with it. Some people, like Hambali, went on to then become the main link between al‑Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah in south-east Asia; but most people did not do anything with their experience: they grew up, passed into their thirties, got married, settled down and had jobs. Iraq is a very different situation. This is not a training camp; this is a real war, and anybody who does go to Iraq should realise that they are quite possibly not going to come back.

Q151 Mr Horam: You stressed how strong the Saudi reaction had been to their own problem in 2003 and how effective their counter-terrorism measures had been. Is this because they have been able to deploy all the powers of a strongly authoritarian state - you said a police state? Second, do you think they are now on top and going to stay on top of it?

Mr Gardner: The Saudis have been successful so far in their counter-terrorism efforts because they have employed a number of methods. They have not just used physical force. When I went there soon after the May 2003 bombings, they were starting a programme of moderating some of the more outspoken imams. They needed to change the mindset of a lot of people. One of the problems in Saudi Arabia is that the education system has been very much geared towards bringing up young Saudi children to thinking that all non-Muslims are bad people. That has changed, or is changing, and they have gone to some efforts to do that. They have also removed a lot of the most anti-Western preachers, imams.

Q152 Mr Horam: How has this gone down with the Wahhabi leaders?

Mr Gardner: Not too bad. The more extreme ones would see it as co-operating or doing the bidding of the Americans, which is not popular. Generally, the Saudi population is very anti-terrorism, and the Saudi authorities have been able to reach out to them. They have employed some quite controversial methods. They have talked to the families of militants, and in some cases pulled the families in for questioning, and said: "You put pressure on young Abdullah; bring him back in and talk to him." You could see that as a subtle way of applying pressure or as essentially holding the family to ransom, in a way.

Q153 Mr Horam: They are pretty ruthless about killing some people too.

Mr Gardner: They have not taken that many prisoners, it has to be said. In fact, the man who is in charge of the counter-terrorism effort in Saudi Arabia is Prince Muhammed bin Naif, one of the sons of the Interior Minister. He is very highly rated by both Saudis and Western diplomats. He views it that physical measures are less than half the battle. They have got to win over the hearts and minds. In a way, the insurgents have scored quite a lot of own goals. I do not know if you remember in 2003 the triple bombings in Riyadh in May, but then in November al‑Qaeda went and hit what was called a Mohaya complex and they killed a load of Arabs, mainly non-Saudi Arabs, but Lebanese and Syrians. These were expatriate Arabs, living and working in Saudi Arabia. That cost them a lot; it was a complete blunder. In April 2004 they hit a police headquarters, blew it up and killed five people. A lot of Saudi policemen are dying at the hands of these insurgents, and these people have got brothers and families, and the tentacles from those spread deep into Saudi society. This is not something that Saudis approve of at all.

Q154 Mr Horam: What is al‑Qaeda's reaction to this? They seem to be losing the battle.

Mr Gardner: They are. I think what we will see is a switching of targets. Who knows! They could try to aim for more senior figures in the al-Saud ruling family. They could try to concentrate entirely on Westerners.

Q155 Mr Horam: What about oil? Is that a target?

Mr Gardner: I have been several times to the oil facilities and they are very well guarded. They would need a light aircraft or something like that, and even then they have got anti-aircraft defences. Last year, to get to Rastanura, which is the main loading terminal for Saudi's oil exports to bring them out to the Gulf, I had to pass through six checkpoints, where we were checked very thoroughly. However, where there is a will, there is a way, and it is always possible. One thing we should be careful of is that there may well be more attacks in the oil-producing area of Saudi around Al-Khobar. That does not mean to say that they have hit the oil industry. When they raided the Oasis compound and killed Michael Hamilton of Apicorp in Dhahran, that was not a direct attack on the oil industry per se. The oil industry is very spread out and they would have to do a lot of co-ordinated simultaneous attacks and have to have a lot of help on the inside for it to be effective.

Q156 Mr Horam: Turning to Saudi funding of terrorism, Professor Wilkinson said to us that there is more to be done in suppressing the financial assistance that comes from wealthy Saudi supporters of al‑Qaeda. Would you agree with him?

Mr Gardner: Yes, I would agree with that. Saudis are generally very generous people - they have not been generous enough to pay any compensation with me yet, but maybe it will come. The way it often works is that somebody will literally sign pretty much a blank cheque for what he thinks is a charitable cause - an orphanage in Bosnia, a madrassa in Pakistan, a blind charity somewhere - and the problem has been that in giving this charity Saudis have not been nearly strict enough with themselves in asking questions as to where it is going. A lot of the funds that people thought were going to genuine charitable causes were ending up in the hands of al‑Qaeda - in Afghanistan in the past. There are also signs that people, not just in Saudi Arabia but in other Gulf States have even unwittingly funded al‑Qaeda people in positions of authority.

Q157 Mr Horam: What is the government doing about that?

Mr Gardner: One of the measures they have done is to try and control things through Saba, the Saudi Arabian monetary agency, which is the equivalent of a central bank. I am fairly certain that any foreign donations above a certain size have to be approved by the foreign ministry inside Arabia. The trouble is that you cannot control it completely, and terrorism is cheap - 9/11 cost half a million dollars; Madrid cost $50,000. This is nothing; it is peanuts; this is pocket money to some of the people who come to Bayswater in the summer. This is not a lot of money. Personally, I think that the financial war against terrorism is a bit of a red herring. I have attended one of the plenary sessions of the Financial Action Task Force, which is a 33-nation task force that meets all over the world and has these sessions in trying to choke off funding, and in terms of combating al‑Qaeda's funding straight after 9/11 they were initially quite successful. They seized about £125 million in the first few weeks; and then two years later it was still only up to £133 million - talking globally - and this is tiny money really. I personally do not spend a lot of time worrying about the financial side of it because it will always be relatively easy for them to get hold of funds to do conventional style attacks. Nuclear or weapons of mass destruction are different and would take a lot more money. The media estimates of Osama Bin Laden's own wealth, I should say, were vastly overstated. Many people said he had $300 million, but it is closer to thirty.

Q158 Chairman: Can I ask you about the relationships between Wahhabism within the Saudi regime and the al‑Qaeda element of Wahhabism? You mentioned Wahhabism as an element, but could you clarify? Is it Wahhabism per se that is the problem, or is it a perverted form of Wahhabism or particular strand of Wahhabism?

Mr Gardner: This is certainly one I recommend you ask Dr Mai Yamani, who probably knows more about it than I do. Wahhabism comes from a marriage of convenience, as it were, in the eighteenth century between a Saudi cleric, Mohammed Abdel Wahhab and the al-Saud family. That alliance has survived into this century. Wahhabism, as I am sure you know, is a very aesthetic, rather puritan view of Islam. A lot of the adherents of Wahhabism bitterly opposed the introduction of television in Saudi Arabia, and King Faisal in the sixties had a lot of difficulty in persuading and bringing people around to this idea that women should be educated as well. You can see that there was a natural alliance there with the Taliban, and there were close links between Saudi Arabia and the Taliban until relatively recently. Not all Saudis follow Wahhabism, but the area of Saudi Arabia where you get the most concentration of very devout, very fundamentalist adherents of Wahhabism, tends to be Qasim Province, north-west of Riyadh, places like Buraidah for example. These are people who dress as people dressed at the time of the Prophet Mohammed, fourteen centuries ago. They wear slightly shorter clothes. They do not wear the black camalray argal which goes round there because they pray so often they often have a brown zabib, what the Egyptians rather irreverently call "a raisin" - the brown spot here, from touching their head to the floor in prayer so often. Of course, they have wispy, unkempt beards. These people, but not all by any means, are often quite isolated in the sense that they do not have a lot of contact with Westerners, and they tend to believe that by default most Westerners are bad news. That is not all Wahhabis. I do recommend that you ask Dr Mai Yamani about that as well.

Q159 Ms Stuart: We are getting a pretty clear picture as to what the problem is, but I am trying to grapple with where the solutions are, given the history. You said that there was a recognition particularly within Saudi Arabia that this is as much a battle of hearts as it is a physical battle. Is there something more which we could do, that is the liberal democracies of the West telling their story, because I get a sense that there is no dialogue here; that there is only one story. What would your view be therefore on the World Service proposed introduction of an Arabic television channel? Would that be helpful not as a propaganda tool but simply in terms of having a dialogue and an alternative story? The second thing is that when we went to Morocco we thought the use of liberal imams to be a positive development. They tell their own alternative story. How successful do you think that might be in Saudi Arabia?

Mr Gardner: To some extent they are doing this already. There are a number of projects underway in Saudi Arabia to try and take the sting out of jihadism to try and make people less suspicious and distrustful of Westerners. I have to say that the state itself has a lot to answer for here, having fostered and allowed an education system for decades that bred this hatred of non-believers, as they call it, particularly of Jews. I have been to every Arab country and have spent much of the last 25 years in the Arab and Islamic world, and it is really only in Saudi Arabia that I have encountered this xenophobia. I have met very devout Egyptians, for example, who have said: "You are a Westerner; you are at this party; if you want a beer, that is not a problem." One thing that the Yemenis that have done, which the Saudis are also doing, is to use Saudi scholars, Saudi experts, people who know the Islamic scriptures inside out, to try and persuade deviants, as they put it - militants - to renounce violence and to turn their back on it and of course to betray some of the people in their organisation. This has had some success. I went down to Yemen just under two years ago and interviewed somebody called Judge Hamoud Al-Hattar, who the Foreign Office invited over here - so you have probably met him. He introduced me to some of the people who he had recently got to repent and turn their backs on violence in prison. I have no means of knowing if they were genuine or not. They had had to sign certain pledges. They certainly did not like me very much, as a Westerner and a journalist; they were not exactly saying, "now I am repented I am fine with you being in the room"! They were still pretty hostile to the West. It is a result of Western policies. I have said this many times, that Arabs have grown quite cynical over the last hundred years because, to be perfectly honest, we, the West, had messed around in their part of the world for a long time. The big mistake which the US administration makes - and I have often heard President Bush say this - is to say, "they don't like us because they don't like our way of life". That is absolute nonsense. Al‑Qaeda could not give a stuff what Americans do in America; they really could not care less. What they object to is Western military ventures in their heartland, as they put in, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq or whatever. It is a slightly flawed argument because the Taliban would not hand over Bin Laden, and so therefore there was an invasion, but on February 11, 2003, Aljazeera broadcast an audio statement by Osama Bin Laden, in which he appealed to all Muslims all over the world, saying: "Wake up. You have got to come and defend the Holy Land of Mesopotamia. See to the former abass and calipate. It really does not matter if those usurpers, i.e., the Baathists - survive or not. That is not the point. You have got to go and defend this land because these neo-crusaders and Zionists will simply go and occupy it, and then they will not leave." You can dress it up any way you like, but the bottom line is that we are still there in Iraq, and that allows Bin Laden's supporters and sympathisers to say, "look, the Sheikh al-Abdullah was right; he knew what he was talking about and his words have come true." For most of the nineties Bin Laden and Zawahiri's ideology was way out on a limb, but a lot of things that they have been saying have proved to be correct. That has allowed al‑Qaeda to recruit more people. Unfortunately, Iraq is going to continue to be a problem there.

Q160 Ms Stuart: Would you like to say what you think of the World Service's decision to launch an Arabic television station, and whether that is helpful?

Mr Gardner: I think they are going to have a job competing with the rather more glamorous channels that are out there - the satellite channels. It is a pity they could not have got this right ten years ago, when they got into bed with Orbit, who then pulled the plug. If you remember, World Service Arabic television was a joint venture between the BBC and Orbit, which is owned by the King's cousin in Saudi Arabia; so up popped Muhammed Al-Masari, slagging off the Saudi Government; and the Saudi's simply pulled the plug and said, "we are not funding this; we are not paying for somebody to slag us off" - forgive the vernacular. In those intervening years, there was definitely a vacuum. The only television that Arabs could watch was the very turgid state television, which was dreadful. However, up popped Aljazeera, who said, "thanks very much; we will have all the journalists laid off by the BBC". A lot of people said, "Qatar - where?" Qatar has proved everybody wrong; it is a major force in international affairs, Aljazeera. The joke in the Gulf is that Aljazeera is the capital of Qatar. It is a very powerful and influential satellite network, and others have tried to copy it - Abu Dhabi Television, Al-Arabia. BBC Arabic Television has really got its work cut out for it; it is coming late to the party. It will be interesting to see if it works. What I would say, in a very clear answer to "what more should we be doing?" - the British Government needs to get more Arabic-speaking people, be they Muslim or Christian, on to the Arabic channels. You had a thing called the Islamic Media Unit; you had a very good spokesman - Gerald somebody - and then he was laid off or moved, and it has more or less collapsed. While we are sitting here, there are people on air, live, criticising Britain and criticising Western policy; and there is hardly ever anybody to defend it. It needs to be somebody with good Arabic, who has spent time there, who understands the Middle East - and you need lots of these people. This is something that should have been done long ago, but I am astounded that, four years after 9/11, it has not been done. It is a real failure of government policy. You need to get more people out there, in their language, speaking in the way that they know. The Israelis are brilliant at it. Look at Netanyahu: on the first anniversary of 9/11 I was up on the rooftop above Ground Zero, and there was Netanyahu going from one channel to another, speaking the language that Americans like. He has got their dialect and vernacular. It was very easy for Americans to say, "I can understand what he is saying." In many ways, the Arab world and the rest are so far apart on this - they understand us much better than we understand them, so there needs to be more understanding there, I think.

Q161 Mr Purchase: I want to touch on this Aljazeera phenomenon. As I understand it, it is the only programme that is widely believed in the Middle East and Gulf regions, and BBC and CNN are just not on the agenda any more. When you say that it will be interesting to see how the BBC copes with that, I think you could have found another form of words which would equally have been in the vernacular. Putting that to one side, you interestingly suggest that perhaps we should be trying to get Arabic speakers, with a message - however it is put across - into the Aljazeera networks, in order to make an impact on people who have come to believe that only Aljazeera can tell them the truth. But would Aljazeera be prepared to hear that message?

Mr Gardner: I think so. They are quite broad-minded. Even though, if you were to do a straw poll of every producer and correspondent in Aljazeera, they would all be very hostile or anti the invasion or occupation of Iraq, a lot of them, even before that, were relatively anti Western policy, because of the Israeli/Palestinian question. A lot of them are Palestinians. Remember that Aljazeera was one of the networks that were broadcasting those dreadful pictures of Mohammed Al-Dura, the ten-year old Palestinian boy who was shot in that crossfire in Gaza. To some extent, the news they are putting out is playing to the gallery, both in terms of the people who are putting it out and the people who are watching it; and ultimately it is events on the ground that will make a difference. The withdrawal from Gaza was something that meant a lot to people in the Arab world because they are so sick of promises and talking. I spent years covering all the negotiations at Sharm El-Sheikh over the Arab/Israeli peace thing, and there is a lot of talking but not a great deal of action. I am not pointing fingers of blame here, but I am just saying that Arabs are rather tired of hearing talking. Having said that, there is this vacuum with very few people to defend Western policy. Aljazeera does interview Israeli ministers. A lot of their audience think they should not, and complain. They say: "Why are you talking to the enemy?" But Aljazeera say, "No, we have got to do this. If we are going to air something from Bin Laden, let us hear from the other side of the spectrum."

Q162 Mr Purchase: Do you feel sufficiently strongly about that, that we ought to be making some kind of recommendation in our report about getting people on to Aljazeera?

Mr Gardner: Not just Aljazeera, but you need to be making people available for the Arab media per se - not just Aljazeera but the print media, the online media, radio. There should not be just Frances Guy and her Islamic World Awareness thing in the Foreign Office; there should be a room this big. Take the media seriously. I am not saying that because I am in the media; I am saying it because I have seen the effect of it. A classic example is that I used to go down to these summits in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2000/2001, and there would be King Abdullah there and Clinton and whoever - Arafat and all the various leaders - and the Israelis would bring with them a whole panel of people, all usually retired generals with perfect English. They would come to us and say, "we have General so-and-so here; would you like to have him available for interview?" In the media you often have very little time, particularly in broadcasting, and you are on air in 17 minutes - "great, we need a clip from this guy - quick, get somebody in". Could we ever get the Palestinians? We would be lucky to doorstep somebody in his language, not in ours, as he got in and out of his limousine. They are still hopelessly disorganised in terms of media. It gave the Israeli delegations a great advantage in terms of getting their message across, and that in a way is what is happening with the West. We often interview Arabs who speak very good English, but there are very, very few English, British people who can speak good enough Arabic to be on these things; so you need to have people available to try and explain what government policy is.

Q163 Sir John Stanley: Have you any firm evidence, as opposed to speculation, that has appeared in the press that the US has used Saudi Arabia as a place where torture under interrogation is carried out under the US extraordinary rendition procedures?

Mr Gardner: No, I have seen no evidence of that, nor have I heard that. I have heard unconfirmed reports that that goes on in Egypt, Jordan and Syria, but not in Saudi Arabia.

Q164 Sandra Osborne: Can you tell us something about the security situation in the United Arab Emirates and where that country fits into the international war against terrorism?

Mr Gardner: Yes. We lived in the UAE from September 1997 to January 2000. Since we left nearly six years ago, Dubai has changed exponentially. Every time people think that it cannot build another skyscraper, you blink and it has built another ten. That place is changing very fast. Security has not been a big issue there. The internal security situation used to be an issue in the past, in that there was a bit of friction between the Al-Makhtoums, the ruling family of Dubai, and the Al-Nahyans, the ruling family of Abu Dhabi; but they have long ago resolved any differences, and it is this federation of seven United Arab Emirates, what used to be the Trucial States under British protection. Dubai particularly is an international conduit for both good and bad things. It was long a centre for smuggling gold into India. It has often been used as a place for money-laundering, particularly by Russians who were coming out of the CIS states with just wads of cash, and buying up electronics and going back. Nobody ever asked where the money came from. I used to live in Bahrain as well, and Bahrain had a very tight financial system because they had close links with the Bank of England, so the monetary agency worked very closely and was very strict on money-laundering. Dubai did not have those tight, stricter controls. When I used to be a banker, we were always rather wary of doing business in Dubai because we could not be sure of where the money came from. It is very much a home of Hawalla transactions, which are paperless, record-less transactions, all done over the phone. I will explain how this works. I have a sum of money, and I go to you, a money dealer, in a back street in Dubai, and I say: "I want to send this money to my brother in Pakistan." I hand you over the money, say $20,000, and he makes a phone call. At the other end of the phone is his mate, another money dealer, who hands over $20,000 to my brother in Pakistan. There are no auditable records of this; it is all done on trust. It is done very much on trust. It is an ancient system and it allows people to evade strict financial controls. There has been a lot of concern that this has helped terrorists to get funding. It is known for a fact that some of the funding for the 9/11 attacks did pass through a bank in Dubai, not through the Hawallah system, but through an actual bank. It has surprised a lot of people that Dubai has not yet been hit by a terrorist attack, but Dubai is a huge melting pot. If al‑Qaeda hit Dubai, it would be an own goal. There is evidence that the UAE authorities have acted against al‑Qaeda-linked terrorism there. Somebody was arrested at Dubai Airport after a tip-off by Western intelligence services. He was a North African and was brought back to France. It has not been a problem until now. I am quite certain that al‑Qaeda has supporters, possibly even operatives there, but there have been no signs so far that they have chosen to make any big attacks. It would be disastrous for everybody but also for the Makhtoums. A lot of the UAE ruling families are merchant families, who used to love going hunting in Afghanistan and Pakistan - falconing. They would take their birds with them and fly off to Belushistan or to Afghanistan. Some of them even used to go hunting with Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s, so there are links there, simply in terms of friendship links, rather than financial.

Q165 Sandra Osborne: Are you aware of the government taking any measures to tighten up the financial situation?

Mr Gardner: They have, but I have not studied them in detail. They have made some attempts. If you talk to the Foreign Office you will find that there are a number of people in Customs & Excise who, every now and then, are stationed in the British Embassy in Dubai. It is the only country that I know of where Britain has two embassies. There is an embassy in Abu Dhabi and another actual embassy, not a consulate, in Dubai, so as not to upset the Makhtoums. That is how it works.

Q166 Chairman: Given the geographical location of UAE between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and concerns about Wahhabism on one side and the Iranian Hezbollah link on the other side, from your perspective is there a threat of terrorism coming through from the Iranian side as well as the Saudi side?

Mr Gardner: If there was, I do not think it would come through UAE; it would more likely come through Bahrain, which has a Shi'ite majority. Roughly 65 per cent of Bahrainis are Shi'ites. There was a problem with Iran; Iran used to claim Bahrain as its own, and there was a big problem there in the nineties when about 33 policemen died altogether in a low-level insurgency there. The UAE is essentially non-political. I have never met any emirate who is interested in politics: he wants his plot of land, his villa, his four-wheel drive, and his holidays twice a year to Orlando or Paris. They are not interested in politics there.

Chairman: It sounds like a good life, if you can get it! Thank you very much, Mr Gardner, for coming along and answering our questions. We look forward to seeing you again at some future time.

Witness: Dr Mai Yamani, Associate Fellow of the Middle East Programme, Chatham House, examined.

Chairman: Thank you for joining us, Dr Mai Yamani.

Q167 Mr Maples: I wonder if you could talk to us a bit about Saudi reform and what is and is not happening or what might happen. We have seen some developments; there are very limited elections to municipal councils, but with no women being allowed to participate in those. Some of I think hoped that when the old King died that we would see some changes. We have not yet. One keeps hearing that there is a younger generation in the Royal Family that understands what needs to be done. We all feel that those sorts of developments are likely to help Saudi Arabia to develop. On the other hand, the alternatives now, all over the Middle East, to the ruling despotic families or regimes seem to be religious extremists. One wonders whether, if there were free democratic elections in Saudi Arabia tomorrow, the people who would get elected would be the people Frank Gardner has just been talking about, the religious extremists. We have seen this vacuum in Iraq by religious extremism, and in Iran. What is happening, and what kind of reforms is it sensible to expect, or indeed for the West to promote or help on their way?

Dr Yamani: The reforms that have taken place until now in Saudi Arabia are inadequate, too little for the demands of the people. They have had partial municipal elections that we saw in February to April, which were not inclusive. About one-quarter of the male population participated. The members were appointed, and the whole female population was excluded. To jump to the final part of your question, the results showed at the time that the Islamists had won. That was a victory tailor-made to warn the West, especially the United States, that if we have elections, the Islamists will win. This is all over the Middle East. I think the fact that they have excluded so many people, especially women and the liberal educated people - and many were in gaol at the time - they have concentrated on the neo Salafi, Wahhabi group, which I will explain later. They gave us those results. There were the partial municipal elections.

Q168 Mr Maples: Are you saying it suited the Saudi Government to have this result?

Dr Yamani: Originally, yes, because when Crown Prince Abdullah at the time, now King Abdullah, arrived in May to visit President Bush, he said: "You see, we have had the elections. We had the Islamists, but we are controlling and managing the situation. That was very good for the whole talk about reform and democracy in the Middle East. What we see now as a result of this particular attempt at reform, or partial elections, is that those who were supposed to have been appointed have not been named yet. Those who were elected have not met yet. There are very small details, such as the fact that they are going to have cinema twice a week for women and children - cartoons. There are small attempts so that perhaps woman will be able to vote in the future. I will talk about the economic reforms separately because that seems to be much easier, especially with the high price of oil. The second important part of reform has been the national dialogue that King Abdullah has initiated. They saw that in Iraq and in the region in general, this whole idea of pluralism and a pluralist society, where you have to recognise diversity. They had a national dialogue where they brought these different people together, whether Wahhabi, Salafi, or those from the Hijaz, or the Shi'a - people who never talked to each other before; they had them in one room and they talked. That was a good step. But nothing has been legitimised subsequently by the religious establishment, so nothing really changed. The same goes for the consultative council, Majlis Ash-Shura. They increased the number of male members of the council from 120 to 150, but they cannot be elected; they cannot legislate; they cannot decide on the budget; they cannot even look at the expenses of the Princes. In Saudi Arabia we have made some limited, careful steps towards reform, but if you talk about competitive elections, freedom of expression, of assembly, of organisation, reforms of the educational system or the judiciary, they are more serious - and the policy of discrimination, on the basis of religious sect or tribe is still very much visible in the country.

Q169 Mr Maples: Are we seeing any reforms at a slightly different level, in institutions or government? Some people would argue that democratic voting is the last piece to put in place; that before that you need a transparent and incorrupt government, the rule of law, and institutions that have some kind of authority, whether universities or professional bodies. Are we seeing any of those kinds of developments?

Dr Yamani: There are important economic reforms opening up investments - the Chamber of Commerce. This, as we all know, is a very good time for Saudi Arabia in terms of oil prices and revenues. We have seen the opening up of economics, and that is always much easier for them. What I have been looking at for the last few days in order to come and talk to you, and asking people in Saudi Arabia about the reforms, everyone said that King Abdullah has to look first at reform within the Royal Family, the largest royal family in the world; there are between 20-22,000 of them. He needs to look at, first, general house-cleaning. They have divisions. There are schisms, and the distribution of power among the younger generations and the power that has been concentrated on the branch of Al-Fahd, the brothers of the late King Fahd, known here also as the Suderi Seven. King Abdullah has been seen as the reformer who wanted to look especially to the West and internationally, the champion of reform in Saudi Arabia. He is no longer the de facto ruler, but he is the King and for him the biggest challenge is to face the religious establishment, the Wahhabi religious establishment, and then the more conservative and powerful princes in the country; the distribution of jobs and the end of corruption within the Royal Family. That is an important first step, and then obviously freedom of assembly or organisations and civil society. They have established a human rights committee, which is governmental. They have made so many attempts, but it is always through the Royal Family and the important older princes in this absolute monarchy.

Q170 Mr Purchase: You rightly say that the ruling elite, the Royal Family in Saudi ,consistently say that should there be anything resembling free and fair elections, that the Islamicists would win. They are right, are they not? If they did not, despite the awfulness of the present regime, in democratic terms, would it not be even worse with the Islamicists in control?

Dr Yamani: The ruling family of Saudi Arabia have allied themselves with the Wahhabi religious establishment. It is in many ways a coalition government, and the Wahhabis are co‑de facto rulers and control the most important levers of power: the judiciary, the ministries and the educational system. They did have a very good relationship. There were tensions, but there was a sharing of power. Today we have a problem that some of the new generation - and I am talking about the fifties and sixties because Saudi Arabia is a country where sixty is very, very young for power - this new wave of neo Wahhabis, neo Salafi, who are still important in the country and are on the payroll, are a challenge. They want to be the state, and they propagate their ideas that are more political through the Internet. They are also in contact with the underground, violent jihadi, in order to control them. This is the situation of the religious relationship with the political situation. But you tell me that Saudi Arabia then would be, or the majority, an Islamist country. That is not true. The Wahhabis are a minority in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is a country of minorities. The Shi'a in the Eastern Province are a minority. They are only 15 per cent of the population; they are 75 per cent of the population of the oil-rich province. To the east you have Shi'a; in the centre you have the Wahhabis in Al-Jazim and that area of Nejd, where the Royal Family come from. In Mecca and Medina, previously the Kingdom of Hijaz there are not really many Wahhabis; they are of the different Sunni sects of Islam, with movements like Sufis and a different expression of Islam. It is more liberal, more open, than the inlanders in the Nejd. Then you have the various Ismailis and the tribes - Giran, Gisan, Borden and Gearman. This is a country of minorities. Al-Saroud in the centre of Nejd have successfully balanced and controlled Islam, oil - and have kept the thing together. Recent developments, internal, regional and international, and this war on terrorism, has made this very difficult to manage, and there are new challenges. If you have free elections tomorrow in Saudi Arabia, competitive free elections, would it be a country of Islamists? No.

Q171 Mr Purchase: They are wrong.

Dr Yamani: I do not think that that is the case.

Q172 Mr Purchase: The Royal Family are wrong, then. This is what they say!

Dr Yamani: The Royal Family themselves have a range of - if you are a family of five, you are going to have differences in your family, with different people. Can you imagine a family that large? You have people who are more liberal and educated; you have those who are very conservative; you have those who are radical - you have a range of expression. Even among the brothers, the top people now, the question for the Royal Family and the new King, and for us as the international community and within Saudi Arabia, is who is going to be appointed after the King and the Crown Prince? What direction are we going in - a younger, more liberal, educated prince, with less authority and interference by the religious establishment, especially the new wave? There are so many questions that are imminent now to ask. At the moment I do not think that if you have a vote you are going to have just the Islamists.

 

The Committee suspended from 3.41 pm to 4.33 pm for divisions in the House

Q173 Chairman: In regard to the economic reform programme in Saudi Arabia, will the economic problems and growing unemployment lead to greater radicalism and extremism?

Dr Yamani: The economic situation is the best news for Saudi Arabia at the moment. Oil prices are high. Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producer in the world with the biggest spare capacity, producing 10 million barrels. It has spare capacity, and many believe that they can maintain that. The problem here is that, as we know, oil prices go up and then they go down; and to rely only on oil revenues in the long term is problematic. The second thing is that in the absence of inclusive reform, reform in the educational system, you need people to have jobs and join the global economy. Despite all the wealth that has come in, you still have corruption in the bureaucracy and there are policies of discrimination. Having said that, at the moment unemployment is decreasing. King Abdullah, when he became King, increased the salaries of all public employees. There are 10,000 students who have been sent to the United States to study. More jobs have been created and they are paying debts, so there is more foreign investment; and people from the outside look at the prosperity of Saudi Arabia and putting money into Saudi Arabia. Oil revenues is the good news, and the economic side of things is good at the moment.

Q174 Chairman: What about the fact that historically the Saudi economy has been dependent upon expatriate workers, or people who have come to live in the Kingdom, who have no say in the way the society is run, but they are there to work, whether they come from Pakistan or elsewhere in the Arab world or from any other part of the world? Is there a potential for tension on those questions as well?

Dr Yamani: We know that in Saudi Arabia, like the other five Gulf countries, GCC countries: Qatar, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait, the percentage of expatriates to the native population is very high. We know that each one of these countries - and we are talking about Saudi Arabia now, that has a policy of Saudi-isation, and that is replacing the expatriate workers by the indigenous population. That has not succeeded very much. According to every five-year plan nothing much has changed, and that has been blamed on the ethics of the profession, or education and the fact that the foreigners come to work and need less salaries. There has been no policy of homogenisation. The expatriates' children have to go to schools that are separate. There are separate compounds. Unlike the other GCC countries, where they are allowed facilities like cinemas, in Saudi Arabia, because of the very strict Wahhabi religious system that is imposed on all of the population, for expatriates it is very difficult. You have members of the committee for the ordering of the good and the forbidding of the evil known as the Mapauha, who make checks to see that expatriate women and men have the right dress and follow all the rules. It is obviously a matter of choice, but now they have a problem because of the fear of terrorist attacks. Also there are gradings of foreigners. An Egyptian doctor will get less than an English doctor, and the English will get less than the American. There are categorisations other than Muslim versus non-Muslim. They still need foreign expertise and technology, and I do not think that that is a big problem for Saudi Arabia at the moment in terms of security or their economy.

Q175 Mr Purchase: I want to return to a theme that you were partly offering to us earlier about reform and the ability of the family to push through reform now that King Abdullah is there, de facto. Is he in any position within the family to push forward the reforms which he was reputed to be in favour of?

Dr Yamani: Abdullah still does not have full authority. He is King; he took steps when he became King at the beginning of August. First, he freed some of the liberal educated reformists who were in gaol, which his brother, the Minister of the Interior, had put in gaol; so that was a good sign. He still did not force his own appointments. One of the signs we see is that he cannot really decide on who is going to be the second deputy, who is the person right after the Crown Prince - and that is very important to see the future direction. There are some positions that are alarmingly vacant such as the Minister of Defence or Head of the National Guard. He is still waiting and playing for time. But Abdullah has tried to push his own agenda for reform. His problem is that he is not on very good terms with the head of the judiciary, which is part of the religious establishment, or some of the members of the Wahhabi religious establishment. The other camp, headed by Prince Naif, the Minister of the Interior, and some of the Al-Fahd brothers, are obstructing some of Abdullah's attempts. At the moment the schism is more obvious, the divisions between the main two camps in the Royal Family. People in the country know now that Abdullah's group are so-and-so among the Princes. As we said before, the first test would be the reorganisation and distribution of jobs within the Royal Family itself; minimising the expenditures of the young generation of Princes - their princely salaries and their expectations of privileges. During his days as Crown Prince, Abdullah made efforts in that area, but this is a struggle that is going on between the hardliners and those who are more inclined towards reform. We see it in everyday messages that are happening in the debate.

Q176 Mr Purchase: Are these divisions, differences or arguments between two sides, and maybe more, in your opinion, likely to prevent reform or not?

Dr Yamani: I think that they are preventing some of the important reforms. The Royal Family agree on one thing: they agree on fighting terrorism, because they are targeting them. They also agree that the Al-Saud should remain in power. There are very obvious decisions that are seen, examples of reforms. There are those who even talk about constitutional monarchy, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Saud Al-Faisal, and people like Prince Bandar bin Abdulaziz. However, when the petitioners, university professors, wrote about it and all the other signed, they were put in gaol for saying that. The Royal Family perceive the threat to their rule and to Saudi Arabia as jihadis, violent jihadis on one side, and liberal reforms on the other. At the moment we are still seeing that they are more afraid of the liberal reformers. They have been able to quieten them, silence them, even gaol them; while the websites of these neo-Islamist or neo-Salafis that I mentioned - those with fatwas about legitimising jihad in Iraq - there are so many fatwas that are online, but the websites are still operating and they have a problem of silencing those guys. The real task for the King is to bring this balance of allowing more of the educated liberal men and women in the country to participate so that there is a balance between the Islamists and the more moderate Islamists and more liberal.

Q177 Mr Purchase: You mentioned constitutional monarchy: whilst the threat of terror is clearly real in that region and obvious, is there also a danger that in trying to press ahead with reforms, even mimicking the very brave attempts of the Bahraini population off the coast who have moved towards a constitutional monarchy with two houses, it offers an opportunity for the growth of terrorist activities whilst the Royal Family and others are distracted by the need to move forward for reform?

Dr Yamani: If you compare Saudi Arabia to small Bahrain or some of those other countries that have moved ahead with their token democracies, it has a much more complicated task because of the diversity of their population. They only became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, united under the Al-Saud Family, and gave their name to the population in 1932. To control the tribes and the different sects, at a time now when this national identity is very vulnerable - being Saudi is becoming very vulnerable and fragile, in the sense that people are tribal - "I am a Shihiri ..." The Shahmra Tribe, for example, who are in the same territory of Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia, believe that they are Shahmras - it does not matter which passport they hold. These are the problems that they are facing, and also in terms of fighting the war on terrorism. Unfortunately, they have focused first on the fight for the war on terrorism, especially with the powerful Minister of the Interior, Naif, and dealt with the reforms later. That is where they have to come in. In fact the war on terrorism and the security concerns have delayed reform. The money coming in made them also - and it is easier for King Abdullah now because the system of patrimony, that is paying the tribes and the people with oil money so that there is no taxation no representation - you have all this - slows down the pace of reform. At the moment things are fine. Economically the war on terror, as we heard from Frank Gardner, is making progress. I think that people are not as sure of the competence of the security forces or the state's ability to fight terrorism, because we have seen clashes where there are a few men sitting in a villa in Dammam and hundreds of security forces, helicopters and police are sitting for six days trying to get rid of these few, determined, violent Salafis. Frank Gardner also said that they are mostly from the same families and tribes. Take Al-Rhamadi - one of them was September 11 - some of them were caught in Iraq. There are about 6,000 Al-Rhamadi. There are about a thousand Muhammed Rhamadi of the same name, all cousins. Some work in the Ministry of the Interior and some have become jihadis. You have the war on terrorism and some progress that has been made, but you also have these questions about inclusion of people in Saudi Arabia. The most important thing is what is happening in the neighbourhood. There is the situation of violence in Iraq, and 61 per cent out of foreign insurgents in Iraq are apparently Saudi. There is a very big threat of them coming back.

Q178 Mr Purchase: Can I leave that point there? I am getting the message that you feel that some reforms could be achieved, without losing sight of the anti-terrorist measures, but that it would be difficult. Can I finally ask about the future of the Consultative Council, the Ash-Shura Council. Does it have a future worth talking about in terms of the democratic development of Saudi?

Dr Yamani: The religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, co-de facto rulers, do not believe in the word "democracy"; they do not believe that democracy is compatible with Islam. That is peculiar to the other, because there are many Muslim scholars that believe that Islam is compatible with democracy. In the first place you have the religious establishment. They do not acknowledge democracy, and some of the Princes, who do not believe that you can have the vote or that the Majlis Ash-Shura, the Consultative Council members, should be elected. They are appointed and not much has changed in their role. In this very young parliament what rights would they have in the future? We have not seen much progress in that and it is not clear, except for the fact that their numbers have increased. The reforms basically - I think it is really inclusive, and I think they need to have more space for the educated, liberal sections of society and population of Saudi Arabia.

Q179 Mr Purchase: That would move it forward.

Dr Yamani: I think that will help. Many Saudis know what they want and would be capable, and they still want to see unity and stability of the country.

Q180 Sir John Stanley: Dr Yamani, of the obviously very small minority of Saudis that have been drawn into, and have become actively involved in terrorism - you gave the figure that 61 per cent of the jihadis from outside Iraq come from Saudi Arabia - in your view does that group have any common denominators? Do they come from a particular region or town? There was a suggestion you made that a certain family might be producing more than a large quota of terrorists. Do they come from particular economic groups? What are the common denominators, if any, that lie behind those who have been drawn into terrorism from Saudi Arabia?

Dr Yamani: Initially, on 9/11, the fifteen out of nineteen hijackers who were Saudi, five came from Hijaz, and ten from Azeer. That is where Osama Bin Laden comes from, and he refers to himself as a Hijazi with Yemeni origin. That whole region is very connected to Yemen as well. At the beginning of the jihad initiative in the eighties the majority who went for jihad in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet infidels were from that region. Interestingly, this has become more spread out and many of the tribes in the north have joined. The thing has grown, like some cancer that went into the country. At the moment, they are from most regions and classes, except the Shi'a. A Shi'a told me last year, when I was doing some research: "Prince Naif, the Minister of the Interior, brought his Salafi Wahhabis to guard the oil region and Dammam and other oil cities because he did not trust us, and got us out." You know about the tensions between the Salafi and the Wahhabi and that the Shi'a were considered apostate and heretical. They have remained outside this jihadi movement. In fact, it is interesting that since 9/11 terrorism internationally - and look at Iraq - has become a Sunni enterprise; and the Shi'a, who used to be the more violent among Muslims - and this is very important for Saudi Arabia - in fact as a threat to the regime - the balance of power between the Shi'a and the Sunni in the Muslim world, but in that region and especially in relation to oil - people are worried about the Shi'a presence. This balance of power has changed for good since the war on Iraq. This is a challenge for the Saudi regime, which is very strongly, militantly Sunni/Salafi. I could not say who. Was it a problem of a sense of discrimination? How many people felt, or perceived themselves to be marginalised politically or economically? Certainly the group who went on 9/11 were not poor; none of them were. But the people who are joining see themselves as deprived, and the motives are very strange. Two weeks ago in the Herald Tribune there was an article about the fatwas online and how this particular fatwa on a Saudi website forbid the playing of football by the rules. To give the details of why they should not play like the infidels, a young athlete, football player, who was 21 years old, ended up in Iraq. He has gone for jihad. The educational system has gone through some reforms and they did cut out some of those defensive parts from it; but there are still a lot of websites and a lot of fatwas, and the whole atmosphere is still conducive to this type of mentality and they need to cross the border to find their brothers; and then they come back with more anger. That is why I keep thinking of more inclusive, more serious reforms.

Q181 Mr Maples: If one steps back and looks at the strategic picture in the Gulf at the moment, it seems to be shifting, interestingly, as you said, in favour of the Shi'a; but secondly in a quite dangerous way from the point of view of the West and oil supplies and that sort of thing where you have what seems to me to be a very radical government in Iran at the moment, which has taken steps backwards from where they were two or three years ago. It looks as though they are going to end up controlling southern Iraq, or have a proxy government in southern Iraq. It looks as though the Iranians will have a proxy, or very friendly government at least in southern Iraq, where most of the oil is. You have Iran apparently developing nuclear weapons, although we do not know for sure. We therefore end up with a very strong Iran, developing nuclear weapons, being extremely unfriendly to the West; a fragmented and weak Iraq, with its oil supplies in a region where the Iranians have a huge amount of influence, if not control it; and our one remaining friend in the region is Saudi Arabia. I have for a long time been an advocate of pursuing reform in Saudi Arabia, but are we not running a danger - the Americans, the French, the West - of having all three major countries in the Gulf region, the three major oil suppliers as well, in extremely unfriendly hands?

Dr Yamani: Saudi Arabia has - you could use the word "benefited in terms of oil, from the problems in Iraq. When it comes to oil, if there was an attempt to minimise dependency on Saudi oil by freeing Iraq, this has been delayed because we know that Iraq has not even been back to the pre-war quota, or is not making any difference in the market because of the violence. Saudi Arabia remains the biggest oil producer of the world, and the ruling family are fulfilling their role in increasing capacity and answering all the demands, especially from the United States. The ruling family know that the Bush administration - even if it was Democrats - will do everything to protect the Saudi regime. The only problem is that this security umbrella is leaking. The most important thing is that the Saudis themselves have to deal with their security problems. When it comes to the influence of Iran, for the first time after all the silence about the war in Iraq, Prince Saud Al-Faisal, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, three weeks ago talked about the danger of the Iranian interference and influence in southern Iraq. That is real, and it does threaten the Saudi hegemony as the leading Sunni state; but also in the long term, in terms of the oil producers, they do not want to be marginalised. When you are looking at the region, it is certainly Saudi Arabia that is the country that has stability, and the oil supply. The oil installations in Saudi Arabia are said to be secure. Most people say that they are very heavily guarded. Despite the fact that Osama Bin Laden in 2004 called for attacks on oil installations in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and Al‑Zawahiri has reiterated the same thing. That seems to be secure. For the next five years, Saudi Arabia - you have the bad, evil Iran; you have an evil Syria - you have the axis of evil and you have the axis of oil. The axis of oil is treated very carefully. Do not push them. It is an Islamic country. It is all right if there are some abusers because you do not want to push them; and the axis of evil is treated differently.

Q182 Mr Maples: Two members of the axis of oil, Iraq and Iran, are now also members of the axis of evil, and this seems to me to be a large part of our problem. We are left with Saudi Arabia, which presumably will start to feel quite threatened by Iran.

Dr Yamani: You have in your axis of oil - you have copper and gas in Qatar, and United Arab Emirates are still important, and Kuwait. You still have Bahrain, less so; but you still have a good group there of the axis of oil. But they are moving forward; they are protecting themselves - the copperies are, despite Aljazeera.

Q183 Mr Purchase: The ones you have mentioned are reforming.

Dr Yamani: They are reforming. The problem is that Saudi Arabia is, in a way, still stuck. The more the United States or Britain or the EU turn a blind eye to the very slow pace of reform, or this cosmetic reform, or what is going on inside the country, or the insurgents - we hear about Syria and its borders but we do not hear very much about Saudi Arabia. We do not hear very much about the role of Saudi Arabia in continuing to feed - they turned a blind eye for a very long time to the Islamists in their midst and the radical Islamists. But we, in the West, also turned a blind eye to the fact that they were producing them. The problem is, if you are looking at the Saudi Royal Family, that you have the old guys sitting there, sitting with their Wahhabis, and they cannot divorce from the Wahhabis. This has been the contract from the beginning that underpinned the foundation of the country in 1932.

Q184 Sandra Osborne: We are getting the clear idea that you are in favour of more serious reforms, but you have also discussed the concern for unity and stability. How fragile is the situation? Is there a danger that the push for reforms could completely destabilise the country?

Dr Yamani: On the contrary. First, I have to say that I do not think there is a problem of stability at the moment. If you look at the next five years at least, you will see the Al-Saud rulers. The foundation is weak. There are still problems. I do not think that terrorism or the violence within the country at the moment poses any serious threats. Despite this outlining some of the dangers and the splits, and the breaking up of the country - we cannot see it now, but that would be really Shi'a demanding their own state. However, it depends on what happens in Iraq and the region. There are people in Mecca and Medina and that whole area that are very different. The reforms in the country would still be like a coalition of the different groups, new educated middle class, getting together in support of the Royal Family, as long as the Royal Family want to be sharing power, and being prepared to listen to their people and giving them better citizenship rights. Talks of constitutional monarchy, or areas where they should allow people to have more freedom of expression of assembly, of organisation, of more economic and political space in the country, in the long term would be the only solution. Repression rather than integration will not work in the long term, in the absence of high oil prices.

Q185 Sandra Osborne: Can I follow that up by asking you what the prospects are for reform as far as the place of women in the society is concerned? Is there a push for reform in that direction, and how does it compare with other more liberal countries in the area?

Dr Yamani: In Saudi Arabia they blame everything on Islam because they have Mecca and Medina; so it is the only country in the world where women are not legally allowed to drive cars or travel between one city and another without permission of their guardian. Obviously, it is the only country where women are not allowed to vote. Women voted in Iraq and in Egypt, and the Palestinian women. The whole region had the vote, because this was somehow the year of the election; everybody had elections and women voted. This is not about Islam, because even at the beginning of the 20^th century - and in Mecca, where I come from, the women did not have to go into black veils, and it was much more open and liberal. The fact is that they are imposing a more strict segregation of the genders, which we can see in the educational system; and they are imposing this on the women. Unemployment for women remains at 95 per cent. There is some progress though; King Abdullah is planning to have more jobs created for women, but it is very gender segregated and still has to comply to the definition by the Wahhabi clerics of the nature of women.

Q186 Chairman: When King Abdullah was Crown Prince in 2002 he launched an initiative in the Middle East that was stalled because of other developments. Do you think that Saudi Arabia has a potential role at this moment, following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, in moving to a position of playing a key role in a comprehensive settlement, including the road map and changing the politics in the region, for a two-state solution?

Dr Yamani: There is talk that they want to be pioneers and go ahead with King Abdullah and his peace initiative. How is he going to manage it? Three years ago, when it was announced in Beirut, and Thomas Friedman wrote about it in the Herald Tribune and talked about normalisation, King Abdullah, Crown Prince at the time, had very big problems with this whole idea of normalisation with Israel. It is very important for the Al-Saud for Saudi Arabia to play a bigger role, regionally and internationally, in the peace initiative with Israel. How they are going to do it with this population is difficult to see. Paying money for the reconstruction of Gaza is easier. Economic reforms and paying money is always easier. The Palestinian problem has been used constantly by Saudi Arabia to delay reforms. "We cannot have reforms because of the Palestinian problem." King Abdullah of Jordan, when he spoke in Davos three years ago, said, "We have to wait until we have solved the Palestinian problems". All the members of the Arab league meet in Sharma Sheikh or somewhere, and they all get together in their robes and talk to you about the Palestinian problems; and they all leave. They do not talk about internal reforms in their own countries, but about the Palestinian problems, and they did nothing to help the Palestinians.

Chairman: We appreciate your time. Thank you. Our Committee members will be visiting Saudi Arabia in a few weeks' time. Others of us will be going to meet with the Israelis and Palestinians. We are very grateful to you for coming along.