Saudi tribalism lingers for kingdom's settled Bedouin

The gentle clicking of Sheikh Abu Samir's prayer beads as he lounged against a bolster in his camel-hair tent evoked the wilderness of Saudi Arabia's desert, not a dusty camel market beside a Riyadh motorway.

The kingdom's Bedouin might have forsaken a desert lifestyle that brought more hardship than riches, but their tribal identity retains a lingering influence in modern Saudi life and one that some Saudis believe may be enjoying a revival.

"[Tribal feeling] is growing," said Saad al-Sowayan, a Saudi anthropologist who specialises in Bedouin oral history.

While experts debate whether that is true and why, the authorities, whose success in building a modern state was in part dependent on settling the Bedouin and ending centuries of infighting, have shown themselves concerned enough to take steps to curb any resurgence of tribalism.

The government two years ago closed a television station after it broadcast poems glorifying tribal rivalry, according to local media, and in 2008 told police to remove tribal bumper stickers from cars, according to a US diplomatic cable from the time released by WikiLeaks.

"The tribes are still strong," said Abu Samir, a chief in the Otaiba tribe, as he drank tiny thimbles of Arabic coffee with companions in a tent among the pungent animal pens of the camel market. "But the olden days were better."

Tribal affiliation is overall much weaker now than when the kingdom was founded by Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1932. But a revival would likely be seen as potentially disruptive, particularly in view of the civil war in Iraq that involved several major tribes with members in both countries.

That concern may have been behind government intervention to mediate a playground scuffle near the Yemeni border in 2006 for fear it could spread from a pair of schoolboys to their large rival tribes, local media reported at the time.

"You cannot expect tribalism to disappear over one, two or three decades. It takes longer than that," said Khalid al-Dakhil, a political scientist in Riyadh.

"Also, maybe the state itself, although it is anti-tribal, still at the same time as it has always done, uses tribal mechanisms for political ends," he added.

Tribal influence registers in subtle ways, and is often most obviously manifested when tribal members have a problem with the authorities.

Because their positions depend on their level of popular support, tribal chiefs will often work as hard as possible to mediate on behalf of their tribesmen.

"His power comes from showing he has lots of constituents, so he will help people to get into hospital or get a business deal because it will help boost his position with the government," Sowayan said.

Tribal leaders have boasted of their ability to secure more lenient sentences for fellow tribesmen who fall foul of the law, while members of bigger clans have a better chance of escaping the death penalty because there are greater resources to fund blood money payments to victims' families.

"Tribalism plays a key role in modern-day Saudi foreign policy," said a US diplomatic cable sent from Riyadh in March 2008 and released by WikiLeaks, noting examples of how blood ties affected relations with neighbouring Yemen and Iraq.

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