Alwaght- Despite demagogic claims by the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that he is driving the country to reforms and Westernization, the West-backed Al Saud remains a despotic regime oppressing and discriminating against the citizens especially the large minority of Shiites Muslims.
The Al Saud, which spares no chances to move against the Shiites, has once again launched its detention campaign against the Shiite citizens. The Saudi security forces arrested the prominent Shiite cleric in Medina Sheikh Kadhem al-Omari for the second time in a year recently, media sources reported. Since start of the year, two of his sons were detained by the Saudi regime and are now in prison.
Sheikh al-Omari was detained as in April he was released from prison. He is the son of prominent cleric Ayatollah Mohammed al-Omari and the representative of the grand Shiite cleric Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Sistani in Medina. Al-Omari has been detained while the Saudi regime has stepped up crackdown on the civil activists in the shadow of Ukraine war and the West’s desperate need for the Saudi oil. The crackdown is also targeting some clerics, particularly those with more popularity and acceptance among the public.
Reports suggest that since al-Omari has no political activities and his work is purely religious, it becomes clear that the Saudi motivation for his detention is his religious position among the Shiites.
Saudi authorities do not tolerate the social acceptance and popularity of Shiite leaders, and even those of them with no political activities in their records are not safe to the Al Saud’s repressive measures. Al-Omari's arrest is just one example of the Saudis' inhumane actions against Shiite leaders, and in the past years, many clerics have been arrested and imprisoned for a long time under various pretexts, and even some of them were sentenced to death without any acceptable charges. Two weeks ago, two top Shiite clerics who have had no political activity were arrested. The Saudi Criminal Court recently sentenced the Shiite cleric Sayyed Hashem al-Shakhs to 30 years in prison without any legal justification. The court did not announce his charges during the trial, which shows that the security forces have no reason to arrest him. However, they fabricated charges against him by orders from the Al Saud rulers to eliminate the opposition figures. Sheikh Mohammad Al-Abad was another Shiite cleric who was arrested again by the security forces at the end of November, and there is no information about his condition until now. Many concerns have been raised about his fate.
On January 2, 2016, the distinguished Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqer al-Nimr, who served three years in prison, was executed along with 47 others. His execution caused outrage especially among the Shiites of the region.
The Saudi Human Rights Committee, a foreign-based rights monitoring group, has repeatedly condemned such crimes. According to the committee, the arrest of Shiite leaders and the violation of their rights shows authoritarianism and non-commitment to reforms and restricting the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution and human rights, and this issue gives away the false claims of bin Salman about the implementation of reforms in the absolute monarchy. According to reports of human rights advocacy groups, Saudi Arabia has the record of executions in the world along with Egypt, and these organizations have repeatedly expressed concern about this issue, only to find Saudi leaders continuing to commit crimes against the opposition regardless of international warnings.
Al Qatif in Medina and Al-Ahsa in Mecca are predominantly-Shiite cities. The Saudi authorities watch them so closely to block any activism by the Shiites. After the start of the Arab awakening represented by the Arab uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia, like other dictatorial countries in the region, felt strongly threatened by the rising protests and from the very beginning tried to strictly control the Shiite areas. These areas also witnessed peaceful protests, with the protesters demanding reforms and justice. The security forces faced the protesters with an iron fist and shortly later they receded.
Shiites’ grave conditions under bin Salman
Although oppression against the Shiites has always existed, since Prince Mohammed’s assumption of power in 2017 as crown prince, the Shiites were severely repressed.
Targeting the prominent clerics, Al Saudi is quelling possible religion-driven revolutions and motivations of the youths.
The Saudi rulers are to some extent relieved by the Sunnis who pose no threat to the throne. But things are different when it comes to the Shiites. They are, for years lived under discrimination and crackdown, like a powder leg that can shake the Al Saud rule any time. That is why bin Salman, who awaits the throne, tries to remove the potential opposition, especially from the Shiites.
Due to their influential positions in society, Shiite clerics are often leaders of political and popular mobilization movements against the government. Condemning decades of discrimination under the auspices of the Saudi government, they are evoking international human rights principles and advocating political equality. The Saudi regime, which is intolerant of dissenting voices, harasses and arrests Shiite clerics to silence them.
The religious nature of the Saudi crackdown violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights for freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. Actually, the Al Saud openly announces it is not committed to any human rights principles and if its rule is endangered by smallest factors, it would eliminate it.
All Shiites under Saudi tyranny
In addition to the clerics, other Shiites are not immune to the Saudi repressive actions and their fate is similar to that of their leaders. An example is the sentencing to death of a number of Shiite youths below 18 on false pretenses in recent weeks. Even a 10-year-old child is among the convicts, showing that Al Saud is even afraid of the Shiite children.
The Saudi Shiites for decades have complained about lasting discrimination in the country, where the government leaves free-handed the Takfiri ideological interpretations of the Wahhabis who find Shiite fate a heresy and spread hate against the Shiites as part of systemic government policy. The social position of Shiites in Saudi Arabia is even lower than that of Muslim expats living in the kingdom despite their ancestral roots. Actually, they are considered third-class citizens and so are deprived of many basic rights. Although much of the country's oil reserves are located in the east of Saudi Arabia and the Shiite-majority areas, especially Qatif province, the Shiites do enjoy any benefits and are in the worst economic conditions. They are even denied government posts and offices and are employed in lowest-rate jobs.
Since the diplomatic crisis between Iran and Saudi Arabia that led to severance of relations, brutal crackdown on the Shiites increased considerably, with the Saudis always trying to paint the Shiites as Iran's agents seeking to destabilize the Arab countries, and this claim provides Riyadh rulers with justification for crimes against the Shiite citizens.
