Why a king's ransom is not enough for Saudi Arabia's protesters

No kingdom is an island, particularly when it sits in a sea of revolution. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, watching the assault on Libya's strong man Muammar Gaddafi with his monarchy's usual complacency, thinks he can buy off protests with the promise of gifts.

Of course, the scale of the bribes the king offered last week to his country's alienated young generation – £22bn – is something only an oil-rich monarch could deliver. The Saudi king speaks as a father to the youthful population – after all, this is the only royal family to give its name to its people – and he expects them to obey the name al-Saud as they would their own father.

But the king has compromised his authority by combining it with the role of "sugar daddy". Nowhere else are subjects promised such largesse to not rock the boat.
Throughout the Arab awakening that began in Tunisia, the 86-year-old monarch and several of his elderly royal brothers have watched the turmoil across the Arab world convinced that the traditional pillars of their political control would see them through: oil revenues, US protection and custodianship of the holy places.
But Abdullah's kingdom is surrounded by waves of revolutionary rage lapping at the fortress: Yemen in the south, Bahrain in the east, Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in the west. Even the usually docile kingdom of Jordan is racked by the spectre of change. Saudi Arabia's royals have no doubt been shaken to their core by these disturbances and feel threatened by the successive, swift revolutions that have put paid to their cronies in Cairo and Tunis. How is it possible, they ask, for a few hundred shahids [martyrs], in just two to three weeks, to bring down their fellow autocrats so quickly?
The Saudi royals want to both resist and buy off these demands for political change. But the problem is that they do not grasp what their people are demanding. The internet, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter are all strangers to men raised in an age when the telephone was a novelty. That some 70% of the kingdom's population is under 30 compounds the problem.Read More