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    "Just ask people who have been there."..., 2003-10-16 12:12:36 | Main | America's Christian Mujahideen..., 2003-10-17 13:19:51

    addenum:

    to the earlier post: the Saudi government detained 150-300 demonstraters at the country's first human rights conference on Tuesday, proving once again the efficacy of violence. An unnamed European expert described the meeting as a "public relations exercise", which seems to be the monarchy's chosen object of reform, much as the US has soley persued it's poor polling numbers in the Muslim world with shabby exercises in reformed PR. The demonstration was organized by MIRA: there's an interesting interview from 1999 with the head of MIRA, Dr. Saad Al-Fagih, primarily on the topic of the largely forgotten OBL.

    And while it strikes me as a rather round-about way to persue human rights reforms under the condition that "Sharia, the holy law of Islam, must take precedence over the universal declaration of human rights", it probably wouldn't be impossible to get somewhere if there wasn't an absolutist oil baron and his theocratic sidekicks backed by the world's lone superpower instituting reforms that would inevitably threaten their consolidation of power, which usually means the long-repressed public get their necks crushed in the process.

    About the only thing this seems to demonstrate is how little actual pressure is required by the US to induce promises of reform from a highly dependent client state.


:: posted by buermann @ 2003-10-17 01:35:23 CST | link





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