King-Size Dilemma for Saudi Royal Family

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Scarcely a day dawns in this desert kingdom that doesn’t deliver pilgrims to Mecca, oil to the world and yet another baby boy to the royal House of Saud.

Another prince among thousands, heir to a six-figure allowance, free phone calls, free kilowatts, free first-class seats worldwide. Another claimant to a penthouse office in government, to rich commissions on contracts, to lucrative business partnerships.

Another reason, in short, why Saudi Arabia’s proliferating princelings may soon become Saudi Arabia’s king-sized problem.

Already the neighbors are talking.

“Because of their undefined position in the power system, Saudi princes could generate uncontrollable crises,” a Tehran newspaper observed from across the Persian Gulf. An Israeli analyst foresees a “doomsday” when King Fahd’s gray band of brothers passes power to the younger generation--hundreds of competing cousins.

Inside this realm of sun, sand and secret police, contrary words about the House of Saud are rarely spoken. But sometimes they’re smuggled out, like the notes for “Princess,” the memoirs of a Saudi royal.

“Sadly, many of the royal cousins were swept away by the sudden rush of riches,” Princess Sultana, a pseudonym, said in the 1992 book. “My mother used to say . . . we would never survive the wealth of the oil fields.”

For now the Sauds survive quite well.

Up and down north Riyadh’s boulevards, their new marble palaces gleam in the stark desert light, behind gates manned by royal guards wearing red berets. Their gardens flourish on water desalinated and pumped 300 miles from the Persian Gulf. Rolls-Royces and Cadillacs cruise the quiet streets. At the nearby airport, private jets stand by for intercontinental shopping sprees.

In Jiddah and other commercial centers, House of Saud princes and close relatives sit, by one count, as chairmen of 520 Saudi corporations.

Here in the capital, princes hold strategic Cabinet posts--Defense, Interior, Intelligence--and others sit as junior ministers. Every provincial governor is a prince or in-law, and family members control key military staffs.

Stalin had his commissars. The House of Saud has its princes.

“The Saudi royal family . . . virtually runs the country as a private fiefdom,” says the American human rights group Freedom House.

Runs it so tightly, in fact, that even basic information about the Sauds themselves can be hard to come by.

No “Debrett’s Peerage” lays out pedigrees for an inquisitive public, as in Britain. No society pages celebrate rich-and-famous lifestyles. Half a dozen media-shy princes declined interview requests from a visiting journalist.

But enough is known to sketch in some details about the planet’s biggest, richest royal family--although just how big is not necessarily one of those details.

A government source told a reporter that there are 2,700 princes and princesses. Other estimates are higher. A U.S. government publication speaks of more than 4,000 princes alone in the early 1990s.

Said Aburish, an Arab American who wrote a critical study of the monarchy, settles for 7,000 princes and princesses, and calculates males are being born at a rate of a few hundred a year.

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The key to an exploding royal household: polygamy. Islam permits a man up to four wives, but rapid-fire divorce multiplies that among the royals.

King Abdel Aziz Al Saud, who founded modern Saudi Arabia in 1932, took at least 16 wives, who bore him 42 sons. Those sons, including King Fahd, have married hundreds of women.

Some of their sons, the middle-aged third generation, have gained international fame: Prince Sultan bin Salman flew on the space shuttle Discovery; Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is a global tycoon and Michael Jackson’s friend; Prince Khaled bin Sultan led America’s Arab allies in the Gulf War.

But thousands of royals--including other lines of the Saud clan that also bear the “emir,” or prince, title--spend their days in the leisurely obscurity of the oil elite.

“They watch movies, go to the country house, go to Europe to shop,” said a young woman who socializes with princesses.

Behind palace walls, some idle twentysomethings also indulge in less healthy pursuits, she said--heavy drinking and drug use, vices that can cost commoners long jail terms, if not their lives, in this land of puritanical Islam.

“They’re into cocaine, but they favor hashish,” this insider said. “They bring it into the country themselves, because princes and princesses don’t get searched.”

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Sex is also furtive. Some princesses inconspicuously take secret lesbian lovers, she said, rather than risk being branded as “loose,” unworthy of a princely marriage, by dating a man.

“Marriages for love are rare,” she said. “Even talking by phone with a man ruins a girl’s reputation.”

One result: Young Saudi royals have deluged a new telephone “chat” line, based abroad, where they talk about sex and personal problems endlessly and anonymously.

They can afford it. Free telephone service is part of the House of Saud birthright, along with free electricity, water and other public services, and free seats on the national airline.

The birthright also includes government cash up front, from an infant’s first day. The minimum stipend is now about $10,000 a month for a baby prince or princess, said a source with access to the accounts.

For a Saudi-sized family, the checks add up. And many adult princes receive huge government salaries on top of that--often for jobs in protocol and other “make-work” areas, diplomats report. In this male-supremacist society, princesses stay home.

Government oil revenues reach the princes more indirectly too.

A generation ago, King Faisal registered state lands in the names of Saud family members. The billions they earned when they sold them back for universities, airports and other projects established the core of many family fortunes.

The fortunes still fatten on government deals today. Princes or their proxies are often found in the middle of lucrative contracts, taking “commissions,” sometimes on deals involving their own ministries.

A former U.S. diplomat here explained: “A British Tornado jet fighter is $25 million on the open market. We estimated the Saudis are paying $65 [million] to $75 million. There are ways that extra money gets distributed throughout the family.”

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The new Saudi finance minister, Ibrahim Al Assaf, is trying to “rationalize” budget spending, outsiders note.

“But it’s not an easy job for a commoner like him, to be bringing these things up,” said Kevin R. Taecker, an executive at Saudi-American Bank.

A Western embassy recently cabled home that up to a third of the government’s revenues never make it to the budget, remaining “the secret business of the Al Saud.”

But when royal nurseries are filling up so fast, even fabled oil wealth may not keep up. That apparently is why the Sauds have discarded a family dictum from King Faisal’s day: Don’t tamper with commoners’ businesses.

More and more, young princes are being imposed on Saudi companies as “silent partners,” pocketing earnings and sometimes bringing little to the business in return.

“The old compact is starting to break down with the growing numbers of princes, and that’s causing friction,” a U.S. official reported.

The royals’ jet-set lives may also be stirring new resentment among the 12 million ordinary Saudis, whose living standards have dipped in a weak oil market over the last decade, while life at the House of Saud seems untouched.

Saudis hear the reports: about the prince who chartered a supersonic Concorde for $236,000 rather than wait two hours for the next flight; about the 55-room getaway home Prince Bandar bin Sultan, ambassador in Washington, built in Colorado; about Riyadh weddings at which everything, from food to entertainment to hairdressers, is flown in expensively from abroad.

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Some old associates see time running out for the princes.

“Forty years ago it was taken for granted that the rulers lived differently from the ruled,” said Fadhil Chalabi, a former OPEC secretary-general who runs an energy “think tank” in London. “But now young people are educated, and such an extravagance is no longer compatible with reality.”

The extravagance, the princely baby boom, the corruption all supply ammunition for an Islamic dissident movement that wants to “purify” this puritanical land even further. Exiled dissident Mohammed Al Masari likens the royal family to a “mafia.”

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But some say family infighting may endanger the ever-expanding House of Saud even more than popular dissent.

“It’s a high-maintenance family,” said an experienced diplomat here. “And it’s showing less cohesion at a critical time.”

Since King Abdel Aziz died in 1953, the throne has passed down through his sons in a murky process of seniority and family consensus. But King Fahd is 75 and ailing, his brothers are not much younger, and the day will come when power must be transferred--to someone--in a teeming generation of ambitious grandsons. A new law empowers the monarch alone to name his heir.

“They’re all scared of that doomsday,” Israeli scholar Alexander Bligh, a longtime student of the Sauds, said in Jerusalem. “They’d like to freeze the status quo as long as possible.”

In “Princess,” American author Jean P. Sasson and collaborator “Sultana” indicted the royal family for its wasteful spending and the limitations it imposes on its women. But Sasson, who forged friendships among the royals while living here in the 1980s, wishes the House of Saud many more years.

“I always say it’s probably the best they could have,” she said in a telephone interview. “If you go to a more religious group, will you be getting into another Iran situation?”

Sultana herself, in “Princess,” didn’t sound hopeful.

“Surely the weakness of our monarchy in Saudi Arabia is bound up in our addiction to extravagance,” she confessed. “I fear it will be our undoing.”