Saudi Arabia’s triumphal week resumes the embrace of the West

NEW YORK

Saudi Arabia appears to be leaving behind the stream of negative coverage the murder of Jamal Khashoggi has garnered since 2018. The kingdom is once again being enthusiastically welcomed into a polite and powerful society, and it is no longer as frowned upon to seek Saudi investments or accept their favour.

Saudi Arabia’s busy week of triumphs included brokering a prisoner swap between Ukraine and Russia, holding a high-level summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, marking the holiday nationwide with pomp and pageantry, welcoming the German Chancellor and discussing energy supplies with top White House officials.

The kingdom is in a position to focus on Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s ambitious rebranding of Saudi Arabia and his goals of building both the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund and moving the kingdom from the G-20 to the more exclusive G-7 nations representing the largest economies.

It’s a mission often qualified as waking a sleeping giant. Except that this is happening even when human rights reforms are still not on the agenda.

As the crown prince embarks on sensitive social and economic reforms, he has simultaneously overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on dissent that his supporters say is needed to ensure stability during this time. Among those detained or banned from leaving the country are women’s rights activists, moderate preachers, conservative clerics, economists and progressive writers. Even Saudi grand princes and billionaires have not been spared. Many have been arrested and detained at the capital’s Ritz-Carlton as part of an alleged anti-corruption campaign that has netted more than $100 billion in assets.

The crackdown, however, drew its strongest international rebuke after the murder of Khashoggi by Saudi agents inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul four years ago.

And just last month, incredibly long prison sentences were handed down to two women for their Twitter and social media activity. A Saudi court sentenced a woman to 45 years in prison in August for allegedly damaging the country through her social media activity. This followed a 34-year prison sentence for another Saudi woman convicted of spreading “rumours” and retweeting dissidents. Both women were given unusually long sentences on appeal.

The Associated Press asked Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Farhan bin Faisal about the convictions. “These cases are still ongoing. They are not yet at the last call,” he said, adding that the cases fall under the judiciary, which he said operates independently. He spoke at the exclusive Yale Club at an event in New York this week. He would not discuss the cases further.

Saudi Arabia’s strength lies not only in its position as the world’s largest oil exporter, but also as the home of Islam’s holiest site and birthplace.

The prince’s efforts to throw off decades of ultra-conservative Wahhabi control over all aspects of life are popular among young Saudis. From movie theaters and concerts to women driving and undermining the authority of morality police, the face of Saudi Arabia is changing. The latest contrasts sharply with protests in cities rivaling Iran this week over the death of a woman in the custody of that country’s vice squad.

At the other end of these changes is a reorientation of Saudi Arabia’s identity from a predominantly religious orientation to one of cultural and national pride.

At a swanky one-day forum this week at one of New York’s premier Upper East Side addresses, the kingdom’s $620 billion wealth fund attracted some of the city’s Who’s Who to mingle and network on the sidelines of the annual gathering of United Nations world leaders. While the kingdom has never stopped attracting investors or forging partnerships in the years since Khashoggi’s death, or amid its ongoing war in Yemen, those ties were less forward looking. among the American elites.

The Public Investment Fund has significant stakes in Uber, Lucid Motors, cruise line Carnival, Live Nation, Nintendo, Microsoft and a range of other companies. The goal of these investments is to develop Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth and use it to establish world-class tourism, entertainment and luxury industries in the country. By doing so, the kingdom is creating a resilient economy as the world moves towards a future powered by green energy rather than fossil fuels.

The biggest venture in the PIF is Neom, a futuristic megaproject along the kingdom’s northwest Red Sea coast that envisions flying cars and a fully enclosed 170-kilometre-long zero-carbon city powered by electricity. ‘artificial intelligence.

The crown prince oversees the PIF, but the man who manages its day-to-day investments is Yasir al-Rumayyan. He spoke at the so-called “Priority Summit” to a wealthy elite that included Jared Kushner, former White House adviser and son-in-law of Donald Trump. Kushner recently secured a $2 billion investment from PIF to launch his new private equity firm.

The fund is key in the 37-year-old prince’s race against time to create at least 1.8 million jobs for young Saudis who are maturing and entering the labor market.

“It’s not just the numbers we’re looking at, but the quality of those jobs, the quality of our offering to our society – and at the same time making money while we’re doing it,” al-Rumayyan said. .

The wealth of the PIF is fueled by the kingdom’s oil revenues. Al-Rumayyan is also chairman of Saudi Aramco. The state-owned oil and gas company posted a record second quarter this year with profits topping $48 billion – more than the combined profits of Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon in the same quarter.

The summit, hosted by the PIF’s Foreign Investment Initiative Institute, which holds “Davos in the Desert” in Riyadh every year, attracted more than people seeking opportunities and a chunk of Saudi Arabia’s offerings. It also attracted intellectuals and artists – the kind of soft power that money can’t always buy.

Despite a change in tone in the West, the shadow of Khashoggi’s murder still hangs.

The Crown Prince was notably absent from Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, which drew royals from around the world to London this month. Sources close to Prince Mohammed said he would not attend the funeral, the optics of which would have been a distraction. But they said he would fly to London to offer his condolences to the new King Charles III. It never happened.

And after the crown prince helped broker a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine, a move that won international praise, the New York Post headline read, “White House Thanks Killer Crown Prince.

Fernando Javier Sulichin, an Argentinian film producer who has collaborated on projects with Oliver Stone, said he was drawn to the PIF event because he wanted to hear new ideas and brainstorm.

“Instead of being cynical and just reading the papers, it’s like, what’s going on in the world?” he said, adding that none of the sessions and discussions “n is edited by an editorial board”. He likened it to the water supply from the river rather than the tap.

No longer pulled by the tide, the kingdom is riding its own wave.

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Dubai-based AP journalist Aya Batrawy is on assignment to cover the United Nations General Assembly. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ayaelb and for more AP coverage of the UN General Assembly, visit https://apnews.com/hub/united-nations-general-assembly

This story was originally published September 24, 2022 6:34 p.m.