After the journalist's disappearance, we focus on the dark and intimidating side of the young prince

Last October, at the brilliant world conference on investments in Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had the world at hand. Thousands of investors, business leaders and government leaders flocked to the kingdom to hear the young charismatic heir to the Saudi throne expose his plans for the modernization of the reclusive realm, and to be invited to participate in the hiking and profits.

"Only dreamers are welcome," Mohammed told his audience.

In the run-up to the second conference to be held this month in Riyadh, Mohammed, 33, seems much less courageous. Over the past week, many who planned to attend the meeting have suddenly canceled their bookings, striving to distance themselves from what they now see as a fugitive train heading for a disaster.

Their distress stems from the still-ongoing story of Jamal Khashoggi, the exiled Saudi journalist reportedly killed and terribly dismembered by Saudi agents at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, after daring to publicly criticize the prince. heir and his government.

For some of Mohammed's alien admirers, it is still inconceivable that the spirited and charming prince, widely known under the MBS initials, could be responsible for this barbarism. The White House Trump insisted that she had not reached conclusions about what had happened.

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Some believe that if the journalist died at the hands of the Saudis (no body was found and Saudi Arabia denies having knowledge of his disappearance), he must act d & # 39; an abduction that went wrong or a dishonest operation. Mohammed, they say, has done too much to woo the West, and is far too clever and aware of the potential repercussions for ordering the killing of Khashoggi.

Still others, many of whom have spent time with the prince, say that they would be shocked but not surprised. They describe the dark and intimidating side of a young man in a hurry, who has absolute power and does not tolerate dissent.

"It would never have happened without the approval of MBS. Never, never, never, "said a former American diplomat with long experience of the kingdom through several administrations.

Muhammad and the people who know him say that his Western admirers have always misinterpreted his intentions, projecting their own hopes of transforming Saudi Arabia into a prince unlike the cautious and old rulers who ruled the kingdom for decades. impetuous enough to carry out its modernization plans.

"He does not hide the fact that he is authoritarian. He is not embarrassed, "said a relative of the royal court who, like most people interviewed for this article, spoke only on condition of anonymity to be able to offer a candid assessment. "He sees himself definitely in Messianic terms, as a man of history," said this person, adding that Mohammed "cared deeply about the country".

While supporters of Mohammed in the West see him as a future Lee Kuan Yew, prime minister of modernist Singapore, MBS is itself renowned for making China, with its authoritarian leadership and booming economy, a better model for Saudi Arabia. He blamed the criticism of his record on human rights, complaining that he had received more attention from Westerners than Russian President Vladimir Putin or Turkish President Recep. Tayyip Erdogan.

"I did not call myself a reformer," said the Crown Prince in an interview with Bloomberg News this month.

Maintaining silence

If Khashoggi's disappearance shocked Westerners, they simply did not care about the events in the kingdom and the efforts the crown prince was willing to make to nullify dissent, say Saudi defenders of human rights. experienced man.

After a brief wave of executions after Mohammed's brutal installation as immediate heir to his father, King Salman, followed by waves of arrests last year, he pitilessly claimed power. The Saudi authorities have sown fear by arresting billionaires and grassroots activists, showing that no one is untouchable. And they worked to ensure that the arrests were not discussed, threatening relatives of those arrested, forcing them to sign announcements of silence and holding secret trials, according to human rights defenders.

This style of governance has sometimes led to strange performances. A few months ago, when a prominent women 's rights activist was arrested at home, the authorities surrounded her with so many klieg and armed men that residents thought that she was not safe. It was a shoot, according to Yahya Assiri, a Saudi human rights officer based in London. activist. When people moved to see what was happening, they were gathered together and said never to talk about what they had seen, he said.

Maintaining silence is perhaps one of the greatest successes of the Crown Prince. Assiri said his network of activists on the ground in Saudi Arabia had faded, with more and more people denouncing rights violations and arrests leaving secure chat rooms where they shared information.

"A lot of people are in jail. Some are afraid. Some have completely disappeared and we do not know, "he said in an interview in his London office a few days before Khashoggi's disappearance.

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It is not only the dissidents who are silent. In the hyper-nationalist environment that the Crown Prince has nurtured, there is no benefit in standing up, whatever the subject is. "Everyone wants to prove that he is patriotic," said a well-known political analyst in Saudi Arabia. "There is no tolerance."

The analyst did not reach this conclusion and praised Muhammad's most important reforms, including his decision to remove power from religious police who had applied moral codes. "Mohammed bin Salman has had every chance," said the analyst.

But "when you are surrounded by people who show no dissent, then you stop listening," added the analyst.

Mentor the prince

Mohammed bin Salman is one of the countless cousins ​​of the descent of the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz ibn Saud. He is the eldest son of his mother, herself the third wife of Abdulaziz's son, Salman.

Governor of Riyadh province, Mohammed's father has been known to be a peacemaker in his often-fractional group of brothers, many of whom have gone before him as king. While many royal men are educated abroad and board the Saudi army, or both, Mohammed attends King Saud University home and quickly becomes a senior political assistant to his father.

When Salman ascended the throne in 2015, after the death of his brother Abdullah, he appointed MBS, already state minister, to the post of defense minister. It was at this time that Mohammed drew the attention of the senior echelons of the Obama administration.

"Our theory of MBS was that it was to some extent a fatality, especially after it became apparent that it was contesting the second or third place" for succession under the king, a said a diplomat Obama.

The then Secretary of State, John F. Kerry, attempted to build what he saw as a mentoring relationship with the young prince, then aged about 20 years old. ; years. "He knew that he was a young man and that he would make mistakes," the diplomat said of Mohammed. "He said that he wanted to be informed when we disagreed."

Mohammed "was a policymaker and we had real policy problems," including the war he declared in Yemen in 2015, apparently without informing other Saudi security officials or the White House. There were also differences over aid to rebel forces in Syria and Obama's efforts, despite Saudi's objections, to conclude a nuclear deal with Iran.

Mohammed knew that if no meaningful job was found for the young and highly educated population of Saudi Arabia, and if the oil-dominated economy was not diversified, "they were doomed," said the former diplomat.

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Salman had entrusted Mohammed with the control of a new economic development council and entrusted him with the control of Aramco, the big Saudi oil company. In April 2016, Mohammed presented a plan to restructure the country's economy over the next 15 years. This project, called Vision 2030, describes diversification in relation to oil, privatization projects, technological reforms and sustainable development. The plan has been widely endorsed by the international community.

Kerry tried to meet him "every time we went to Saudi Arabia and every time he came to the United States," although stopping English in English made it difficult for Mohammed to communicate. On one occasion, at the end of a working dinner at Kerry's home in Washington, MBS surprised the departing guests by sitting on the piano and playing Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata".

The familiar diplomat with the Saudis across several US administrations thought that "Kerry was more positive than the rest of us" about MBS. The young prince, always at the side of his father, tended to lecture and jumped at Obama, criticizing American foreign policy for a long time at a meeting with Salman.

The CIA, in particular, was suspicious of MBS and preferred to deal with the prince just above him in a hierarchical order, the Interior Minister and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef.

In June 2017, however, Nayef was out and his father, in a ruthless and rapid change that shocked other members of the extended royal family tied to tradition, had installed MBS as Crown Prince.

The dark side

Even before reaching the White House, the new Trump government saw MBS as the gateway through which it would establish a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia, using its power in the region to underpin its own political plans – reversing the Opening of Obama to Iran, forging an Israeli position. – Palestinian peace agreement that provided for a crackdown on terrorism, control of the oil market and an increase in US arms in one of the few countries in the world to pay the price.

While President Trump was courting the aging king, the future dynamic king was building a relationship that was soon building a relationship with Trump's son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner. During his visit to Washington in early 2017, Mohammed dined at Kushner's and had lunch with Trump, but was widely discarded even as he and Kushner planned the president's first trip abroad, starting by a great fanfare in the kingdom. There was little or no talk of human rights.

At the inaugural Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh in October 2017, MBS announced ambitious plans to attract foreign investment to the kingdom, including the development of a large economic zone on the Red Sea coast and a luxury tourist destination.

At the same time as it restructured the Saudi economy, MBS undertook in 2017 to liberalize parts of the extremely conservative social code of Saudi Arabia. The powers were withdrawn from the religious police, who applied restrictive dress codes for women and sex segregation in public spaces. The government, lifting restrictions, promoting music concerts and sporting events, announced that cinemas would open for the first time in decades.

Mohammed frequently asserted that the kingdom's social restrictions were not indigenous to Saudi Arabia, but rather a consequence of the country's shift to conservatism from 1979, when Sunni extremists mobilized to counter the Islamic revolution in the Middle East. Shiite Iran neighbor – a theory according to which scholars have said that it was at best a selective reading of history.

While Mohammed was gradually working to open the company, the government announced that as of June 2018, women would be allowed to drive into the kingdom for the first time in decades.

MBS attributed his ability to carry out social reforms with little disruption to his negotiating skills with conservative clerics and his own deep knowledge of Islam. But he made it clear that he was not trying to establish democracy in Saudi Arabia. there remained an absolute monarchy in which he quickly approached absolute power. Clerics who refused to queue or were perceived as too independent were thrown into jail.

"When you address political reforms, it is as reactionary as the Wahhabi political establishment," said David Ottaway, a fellow at the Wilson Center for the Middle East, who has studied Saudi Arabia and who has a lot written about it. "While the country was formerly run by consensus by the oldest princes, there remains only one guy, with a little contribution from his father."

Others, however, say that King Salman still exerts considerable influence, sometimes repressing his son and pushing him to thwart Iran's influence in the region, a priority for the leader.

In November, Mohammed ordered the arrest of hundreds of members of the royal family and the elite business people, imprisoning them in the sumptuous Ritz-Carlton hotel. Many would later allege physical abuse and the death of at least one person under torture. The palace said that they were corrupt and that most were finally released after giving up a substantial part of their fortune.

A prominent American with long experience in the kingdom and with his earlier, more courteous leaders expressed concern after several meetings with Mohammed. "He was not interested in listening," he said, describing the prince as a "tyrant" who lectured continuously.

Last spring, as the world waited for Saudi women to get into their cars as drivers, famous women who had been campaigning for years to get the right to drive were arrested and jailed without noise.

"We find out what this" new king "is, and it becomes worrying," Ottaway said. "The dark side gets darker."

A warm welcome

During a tour of the United States last March, MBS was hailed by the White House as an enlightened and powerful leader. From the east coast cities he visited to the industrial center, to high tech and entertainment centers on the west coast, Mohammed – who is now fluent in English – is fascinating his American hosts.

Although many members of Congress have protested the civilian deaths caused by Saudi air strikes in Yemen and questioned national arrests, many lawmakers have come together to talk to him. According to him, these matters were part of his country's domestic policy and did not diminish the value of the kingdom as a powerful ally of the United States for security. Neither have they changed Mohammed's emphasis on his most urgent priority: to reform an economy heavily dependent on oil.

His warm welcome to the United States was hardly a surprise. Before and after the visit, Saudi leaders went through several potentially embarrassing episodes in the previous year, with little reaction at the international level, including the apparent detention of the Lebanese Prime Minister and the near-end of diplomatic relations with the country. Canada after the protest of the Canadians arrest by the kingdom of a defender of women's rights.

Some of the highest echelons of the kingdom were puzzled that so many Americans seemed to care about the story of Khashoggi who had gone missing during a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the 2 October, according to the person close to the royal court. The treatment of Saudi citizens by Saudi Arabia, though very harsh, was considered a kingdom affair and had nothing to do with foreign relations.

But the disappearance, not to mention the possible murder, of "a dissident living in the West has something to do with them," said this person. "Even if they do it for domestic politics, they have to be able to read the effect in the rest of the world," he said, referring to Saudi leaders.

Although Mohammed's possible commitment "comes against all his efforts to improve his relations" with the West, "he was also very inexperienced, and I do not think he has any deep understanding … of what the reaction would be. "