WASHINGTON (ABP) — The State Department finally acceded Sept. 15 to years of requests from human-rights agencies, lawmakers and a government commission by naming Saudi Arabia one of the world's most egregious violators of religious liberty.
Secretary of State Colin Powell announced to reporters that the oil-rich kingdom was among the nations that he had designated “Countries of Particular Concern,” or CPCs, under the terms of the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act. The classification means that the United States may impose sanctions on the Saudi government if religious-freedom conditions do not improve.
Powell's announcement came at a press conference accompanying the release of the department's 2004 report on international religious freedom. The report's full text is available at www.state.gov, the department's website.
“Freedom of religion does not exist,” in Saudi Arabia, the report said. “It is not recognized or protected under the country's laws, and basic religious freedoms are denied to all but those who adhere to the state-sanctioned version of Sunni Islam.”
Saudi officials ban all public religious activity by non-Muslim groups and severely repress the practice of Muslims other than those who adhere to a fundamentalist school of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism.
The government funds Wahhabist mosques, clerics and schools both in the country and across the world.
“Non-Wahhabi…Sunni Muslims, as well as Shia and Sufi Muslims, face discrimination and sometimes severe restrictions on the practice of their faith,” John Hanford, the department's ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, told reporters. “A number of leaders from these traditions have been arrested and imprisoned.”
Hanford also noted: “There were frequent instances in which mosque preachers, whose salaries are paid for by the government, used violent language against non-Sunni Muslims and other religions in their sermons.”
The CPC designation for Saudi Arabia came five years after the independent U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom first recommended it. Several members of Congress as well as human-rights organizations have also long supported designating Saudi Arabia a CPC.
The USCIRF “has been recommending that Saudi Arabia be designated a CPC since the commission was formed in 1999,” said Preeta Bansal, the commission's chairperson, in statement. “This has been based not only on the Saudi government's violations of religious freedom within its own borders, but also based on reports of its propagation andexport of an ideology of religious hate and intolerance throughout the world.”
Bansal continued: “All individuals, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are denied freedom of conscience and belief in Saudi Arabia. This, together with the Saudi government's funding and global propagation of a particular brand of Islam, impedes the development of voices of toleration and debate within the Islamic tradition.”
When asked why the State Department waited until now to make the designation, Hanford said, “CPC consideration is an ongoing process, and since I have come here, it's been a matter of traveling to Saudi Arabia — both myself and my staff — spending quite a bit of time on the ground there meeting with government officials, with religious leaders, trying to understand the situation as best we can. And we felt that the time had finally come to make that designation.”
Despite the fact that it is not a democracy, the Saudi government has had close ties to the United States for several decades. It is one of America's largest sources of oil. The kingdom gained unwanted attention after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when investigators discovered that 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried the attacks out were Saudi citizens.
Nonetheless, the nation has since been cooperative in fighting the war on terrorism, according to U.S. officials.
“These designations are ones that we make with a certain degree of sorrow, because these are valued relationships — particularly in a case such as Saudi Arabia,” Hanford said. “But the U.S. Congress has laid out for us a standard that we feel we must follow and we want to be fair and speak truthfully about that standard. And so, that's why we find ourselves where we are.”
Officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington have declined comment on the designations, as well as past State Department reports criticizing human rights in the kingdom.
However, prominent Saudis quoted in a Sept. 16 Reuters story on the State Department's action expressed skepticism about both the designation itself and the motivations behind it.
“I can't say Saudi Arabia is the freest country. But it is the cradle of Islam. Are they proposing to have churches or synagogues or Buddhist temples here?” said Abdulaziz al-Fayez, a member of a government consulting council. “All Saudis are Muslims, and this is a Muslim state.”
President Bush has come under heavy criticism in the past for being too soft on the Saudis — a natural result, his accusers have said, of his energy policy's heavy reliance on fossil fuels and of his family's long-standing close relationships with Saudi government officials and oil magnates.
Saudi political experts quoted in the Reuters story said the timing of the CPC designation made it seem like a ploy to blunt criticism of Bush's handling of the issue. “Saudi Arabia is becoming an election issue. In the Cold War you would hear about the Soviet Union and China. Now, after 9/11, it's Saudi Arabia,” said Khalid Dakhil, a political sociology professor at King Saud University in Riyadh.
The State Department also recommended two other countries be newly named to the CPC list: Vietnam and Eritrea. In addition, it kept Burma, China, Iran, North Korea and Sudan on the list, and removed Iraq.
“Iraq had been designated in the past due to the Saddam Hussein regime's repression of religious belief and practice, particularly his vicious persecution of Shia Muslims,” Hanford said. “Now that he has been removed from power and the new transitional government is working to protect religious freedom, Iraq is no longer a CPC.”
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