Tuesday 5th March, 9pm
Reporting from one of the world’s most secretive and oppressive states, Deborah Davies goes undercover in Saudi Arabia to expose the internal tensions that threaten to tear the country apart and investigate whether the homeland of Osama Bin Laden has become a breeding ground for anti-Western terrorism.
Long regarded as a friend by the West, the ‘war on terror’ has revealed that Saudi citizens do not necessarily share their rulers’ views. As well as Bin Laden himself, fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11 and two thirds of the detainees held by the US in Cuba are Saudi. Aware that the kingdom’s reputation is a risk, the ruling royal family have spent £5 million promoting the country abroad but it is the unreported tensions at home that present the House of Saud with it’s greatest threat.
Dispatches reveals that behind the PR spin lies one of the most oppressive regimes on earth. A place where the virulently anti-Christian and Jewish language of Bin Laden is not that of an extreme minority but rather the official language of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Foreigners from Britain and America as well as guest workers from the Philippines, Africa and India are singled out for brutal treatment and men, women and children are imprisoned and tortured for the ‘crime’ of owning a Bible and saying prayers. In Jeddah, Deborah makes contact with relatives of Nigerian and Filipino Christians who have been imprisoned for their faith and learns that Saudi prisons are full of people violently opposed to the regime.
In an attempt to diffuse that opposition, the Saudis have blamed a recent bombing campaign on outsiders, most of them British. Members of the ex-pat community talk of beatings and imprisonment designed to get them to confess to a wave of anti-Western terror they claim to know nothing about. Six men, including five Britons, are still being held for the bomb attacks. Deborah speaks to Filipino and Nigerian prisoners via a smuggled telephone and discovers that the conditions in Saudi jails are almost unimaginably brutal. However, prison is preferable to the public floggings and executions that are commonplace.
The film also reveals that, far from our perception in the West, Saudi is home to scenes of shocking poverty – providing the impetus for popular dissent against a monarchy that enjoys enormous wealth not to mention the alcohol for which others are imprisoned.
http://www.channel4.com/news/microsites/D/Dispatches/secrets_of_the_saudi_state/index.html