Critics Say Saudi Antiterror Effort Nets Activists

Human-Rights Groups Charge That Some Detained Suspects Aren’t Militants but Members of a Growing Civil-Rights Movement

By MARGARET COKER

AUGUST 30, 2010 

JEDDAH—Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on alleged Islamic militants has resulted in recent years in thousands of arrests and scores of convictions, drawing praise from Washington for the kingdom’s commitment to battling terrorism.

But critics contend the government is using its security forces to silence a growing group of Saudi political activists seeking liberal reform inside the authoritarian kingdom. Saudis who simply hold political views different from those of their rulers have been arrested and detained as security suspects under the counter-terror efforts, according to human-rights advocates, family of the detained and U.S. officials. They say as many as 50 reformers have been arrested since 2005.
“Using the antiterror campaign has been the conspicuous Saudi policy to arrest and harass political reformists and human-rights activists,” says Mohammed al-Qahtani, co-founder of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, which has become the most public face of a maturing national civil-rights movement. “It is a serious threat to those dedicated to nonviolent change in the nation.”
Mr. Qahtani represents one controversial detainee: Suliman al-Reshoudi, a 73-year-old former judge turned activist, known for his criticism of the security forces, his calls for democracy in Saudi Arabia and his criticism of America’s Mideast policy.
On Feb. 2, 2007, Mr. Reshoudi and a handful of other activists met in Jeddah to discuss advocating for a constitutional monarchy and political parties, lawyers for the men say. The group also discussed a class-action lawsuit planned against the Ministry of Interior, the lawyers say, on behalf of those believed wrongfully detained.

That night, security forces, firing stun grenades, stormed the house, according to an account by Mr. Reshoudi in a 2009 letter smuggled from prison to his lawyers. Later, officials accused them of financing terrorism, membership in an illegal organization and illegal contacts with foreign powers, according to one of Mr. Reshoudi’s attorneys. The arrests sparked the first nationwide hunger strike in the kingdom the following year, fueled by activists writing on the Internet.
Now, 3½ years after the arrest, Mr. Reshoudi and his colleagues are still held without trial, according to lawyers. Mr. Reshoudi’s legal team says it has been denied a clarification—or even a written account—of the charges.
In an unusual case of legal activism, lawyers last year sued the interior ministry, run by the king’s brother, for the arbitrary arrest and false imprisonment of Mr. Reshoudi. They argue his detention was intended to silence a meddlesome political dissident, not to battle a militant.
On Saturday, a judge threw out their case against the ministry, citing lack of jurisdiction, despite his court’s mandate to handle complaints against government institutions, according to Mr. Reshoudi’s lawyers. The judge gave no public explanation.
The case opens a window onto the secretive practices of Saudi’s antiterror forces and justice system. “In Saudi, the rule of law is arbitrary,” Mr. Qahtani said earlier. “Forget a written law. If someone powerful doesn’t like you, they can put you away. How is that the basis for a just government?”
The U.S. State Department named Mr. Reshoudi in its 2009 human-rights report for Saudi Arabia. “We find the Reshoudi case troubling,” said one U.S. official. The official said Washington wouldn’t have included Mr. Reshoudi in its report if it had any evidence he had terrorist links.
Saudi interior-ministry officials declined to comment or to answer questions emailed by The Wall Street Journal about their counterterrorism campaign or Mr. Reshoudi. “We do not comment on ongoing legal cases,” a spokesman said.
The oil-rich country remains an absolute monarchy that prohibits demonstrations, political parties and nongovernmental organizations, despite a new openness ushered in by King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud when he took power in 2005. The changes included judicial standards for arrest and detention, and looser media controls that allowed some public discussion of social issues, such as child brides and abuses by Saudi morality police.
The king also beefed-up security forces, demolishing al Qaeda cells responsible for deadly attacks in the kingdom. The Saudi Ministry of Interior, the agency responsible for counter-terrorism, says more than 9,000 security suspects were detained between 2003 and 2007. Last year, the government completed the trials of 331 of 991 men charged with joining or supporting radical Islamist groups.
At least 3,000 suspects, however, are still held without charge, according to human-rights groups.
The civil-rights movement in Saudi Arabia began after the first Gulf War in 1991. A national debate arose about the role religious and government leaders might play in fostering extremism. It heated up a decade later, fueled by outrage over two events: a 2002 fire in which 15 students in a girls’ school died when religious police kept rescuers from pulling them out because they weren’t in proper Islamic attire; and the 2003 killing of 35 people by al Qaeda bombs in the capital, Riyadh.
The face of activism now includes students blogging on social restrictions, housewives publishing antigovernment poetry and religious scholars arguing that Koranic teaching has gone awry. Bloggers such as Fuad Farhan and scholar Mikhlif Al-Shammari have been arrested numerous times, friends say, for controversial political views.
Mr. Reshoudi represents the older generation of activists. He has been in and out of trouble with the government since the 1990s, when he and a handful of other intellectuals were jailed for forming what is regarded as the nation’s first human-rights organization, now defunct. He had become an activist, according to a profile compiled through documents and numerous interviews, after working for two decades as a judge in Riyadh.
Walid Abu-Alkheir, a colleague of Mr. Reshoudi, says he applauds the Saudi regime’s efforts to fight al Qaeda. But he says police have lumped together religious militants and activists as common threats. “We stand for nonviolent reform,” he says. “Our efforts are all about working with government for reform.”