Raed al-Amine
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: Prince Talal bin Abdel-Aziz, half-brother of Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd bin Abdel-Aziz, told the Foreign Press Association in Paris earlier this week that he welcomed the embryonic reform process getting underway in his country, but is worried that recent devastating bomb attacks there were intended to bring down the monarchy.
Prince Talal, president of the Arab Gulf Program for United Nations Development Organizations, expressed his relief that reforms have started to take effect in Saudi Arabia, saying such measures are necessary across most of the Arab region.
“I am one of several persons who have been demanding reforms for many years. Therefore, I believe that the hopes and demands of those who have been seeking reforms are now being realized. This is a good thing. Reforms are not required only in Saudi Arabia … we are in need of democracy and human rights in most of the Arab countries,” he said.
But while welcoming reform, the prince expressed a fear widely held among the Saudi rulers that terror organizations are now directly targeting their hold on power.
“Unfortunately, the terrorist operations that have afflicted Saudi Arabia are intended to destabilize the regime,” he said Tuesday.
Prince Talal called for those who incite violence to be put on trial, including radical clerics who he named as leading instigators of terror.
“One of their theoreticians is a senior sheikh called Sheikh Ali bin Khodeir al-Khodeir, and there is another who goes by the name of Sheikh Nassir ibn Hamad al-Fahd. They had been preaching to these individuals and encouraging them to become terrorists by issuing fatwas (religious rulings) and authoring books to this effect.
“A few days ago, we were surprised to see these two men retreating from their fatwas. Is the fatwa a game? Does this mean that you can issue a fatwa to shed the blood of people? How many victims fell after they issued these fatwas? How many men, women and children died because of these fatwas? They must stand trial,” he said.
The prince also said the Saudis will turn into human shields to defend their country against any US attempt to partition it. Prince Talal claimed Saudi Arabia has come to know through senior US officials that there were plans to partition the region.
Asked whether such reports were mere rumors, Prince Talal replied that US President George W. Bush had said the US should reconsider its relations with countries that do not have democratic government. US Secretary of State Colin Powell has also alluded to a possible reconsideration of the Middle East map, explained the prince.
On the Iraqi issue, he said that what is happening on the ground today could be described as “resistance.”
“It is quite right to say that this resistance’s nature is still unknown, but, no doubt it is mostly an Iraqi one, despite some intruders here and there, penetrating the borders. On the other hand, we refuse to describe it as resistance when it attacks Iraqi institutions and interests,” he said.
Moving on to other regional issues, Prince Talal had some reflections on Lebanon. He hoped that sectarianism in the troubled state “would disappear some day and a unified national spirit takes its place, where differences between Christians and Muslims would vanish.”
He saw Lebanon as the “lung of the Arab world,” a “bridge between the East and the West,” and an “arena of democracy, freedom and tolerance.”
He also mentioned the Palestinian cause, saying “it is a flammable issue, and there are a lot of peace plans being put on the table, but their fate is doomed because we believe … that the US’ desired solution to the Palestine-Israeli conflict is the disastrous Sharonite solution (referring to Israeli PM Ariel Sharon).”
He said Palestinian resistance fighters shouldn’t be branded “terrorists” because that would mean George Washington and Charles de Gaulle were also terrorists.