Two senior Saudi princes held an unusual town hall meeting on Sunday with representatives of the kingdom's foreign population to discuss security fears after two months of terror attacks that killed about 30 foreigners.
Participants later said that the meeting of about 50 diplomats and executives of foreign companies and Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Prince Muhammad al-Nayef, the top anti-terrorism official at the Interior Ministry, was marked more by cordial diplomacy than a hard-headed look at the threat.
"I think it was a wonderful first step," said Georgene Wade, a senior administrator at the American International School of Jidda, "but the audience glossed over the severity of the problem."
She noted that several senior American executives did not tell the princes that their companies had ordered the families of their employees out of the country.
At a brief news conference after the session, which lasted two hours, US Ambassador James Oberwetter said the topics included a need for better training and equipment for Saudi security forces, better security at some com-pounds, more information from the Interior Ministry about threats and attacks, and some means for foreigners to contact Saudi security forces directly in an emergency.
"Many expatriates are going to stay and want to stay, but they are concerned about their security, and they are concerned about their quality of life," Oberwetter said.
But others said that the corporate chiefs, presented with a rare opportunity to air their grievances to two such senior royal figures, used the meeting to focus on lesser problems like the bureaucratic hurdles required to obtain employment visas.
One subject touched on, but not delved into, was whether there should be armed guards inside the gated residential compounds where most Westerners live, and which terrorists have chosen as their targets. Although the perimeters are often guarded by the National Guard, security inside is usually provided by unarmed foreign civilians.
Last week the interior minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz, suggested that people from other countries would be allowed to apply for gun permits. But Saud made it clear that any armed guards would have to be Saudi.
Foreign workers are often skeptical of how committed Saudi guards will be to protecting a Western lifestyle in compounds where, for example, women often ride bicycles in shorts, unlike the Saudi women who are normally enveloped in a black shroud.
Several executives stressed that the kingdom risks losing its foreign workers if it does not maintain this kind of life while fighting terrorism. They said Saud acknowledged the problem by saying the Saudi government had yet to find the fine line between making sure Westerners felt secure and curtailing any of their freedoms.
Saud, speaking at the news conference, said he took from the meeting a strong sense that foreigners want to remain.
"It is poignant to know that all of the questions that were asked by the expatriate community were questions dealing with how they can stay, not what reasons they have to leave," he said.
It is difficult to gauge the size of the exodus that might follow the recent attacks, given that many foreigners leave the country each year to escape the Saudi summer. But one indication that many foreign workers will not be coming back is the booming business at moving companies in cities like Khobar, where 22 people, most of them foreigners, were killed in a terrorist attack on two businesses and a residential compound on May 29.
Badrudeen Mousa, the manager at Four Winds Saudi Arabia Ltd in nearby Dammam said that last year at this time his company was moving five or six families a week. Now the company is moving 28 families a week, the most it can handle.
Most of the families are relocating to nearby Bahrain. Some families are so eager to get out that they are not even waiting around for the packers, just tossing the movers the keys and asking them to handle everything.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema