TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924010.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.5 KB | 136 lines

                                                                                THE GULF, Page 45

COVER STORIES

An Exquisite Balancing Act


Onetime playboy King Fahd tries to mingle modernity and
feudalism


    One was a sybarite who virtually abandoned his desert
kingdom for a career of overseas carousing. He drank Scotch
freely, ordered caviar by the pound, attended the raunchy shows
in the nightclubs of Beirut so frequently that he knew all the
leading belly dancers by name, engaged in myriad liaisons with
women (he is said to have paid the wife of a Lebanese
businessman $100,000 a year to make herself available) and, if
old stories are to be believed, gambled away $1 million in the
casinos of Monte Carlo during a single weekend.

    The other is a King known for caution bordering on
indecision and endless consultations before taking any action.
His fiscal prudence is so extreme that he once became tearful
on television while confessing that he could not balance his
country's budget. He has for years conducted an exquisite
balancing act among factions in his royal family, between the
West and the Arab world, between the tug toward high-tech
modernization and the impulse to preserve the semifeudal
culture of his kingdom.

    They are, strangely, the same person: Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz,
King of Saudi Arabia and Custodian (of the holy places of Mecca
and Medina), a form of address he prefers to Your Majesty. And
the difference between the profligate prince and the cautious
King reflects something more than the aging of the young hell
raiser into a 69-year-old monarch whose 275-lb. bulk has so
weakened his knees that he has trouble walking. Some 37 years
ago, Fahd went through a conversion that, though forced on him,
has had a lasting effect.

    In 1953 the ascetic Crown Prince (later King) Faisal
summoned his younger half-brother Fahd and told him he was
disgracing himself and the kingdom. It was time, said Faisal,
for Fahd to come home and devote himself to serious matters of
state. Implicit in the rebuke was a warning that Fahd was
endangering his chances of succeeding to the crown. As one of
seven sons borne by the favorite wife of the legendary Abdul
Aziz (generally known as Ibn Saud), who created Saudi Arabia,
Fahd was among those in line someday to be King. But there was,
and is, nothing automatic about the succession; like almost
every other major decision in Saudi Arabia, it reflects a
consensus of the royal family.

    Spurred by shame and ambition, Fahd tamed his playboy ways
and became Minister of Education just as the oil money was
beginning to pour in. Though his formal education had been
confined to a few years at a kuttab (Koranic school), Fahd
built schools by the hundreds and several universities. He
later served as Interior Minister, and in 1975, when King
Faisal was assassinated and succeeded by another brother,
Khalid, Fahd became Crown Prince. Khalid, troubled by a weak
heart, paid little attention to affairs of state; Fahd in effect
ran the country for years before he succeeded to the throne
on Khalid's death in 1982.

    The oil money by 1975 had reached flood tide -- around $100
billion a year -- and Fahd led Saudi Arabia into headlong
modernization. He built hospitals, schools, superhighways,
sports arenas. Many Saudis went in a single generation from mud
huts to trim low-cost housing, free education for their
children through the university level, and free medical care
in modern hospitals. Fahd managed affairs with Bedouin
shrewdness. He insisted that as soon as a project was approved,
money for it had to be set aside. The practice horrified
financial advisers who thought the cash should be invested to
earn interest, but when oil prices broke and the kingdom's oil
income plunged to $20 billion annually or less, Fahd, then
King, did not have to cancel any projects.

    Fahd's personal wealth, built on a fee levied on every
barrel of oil extracted from Saudi land before 1980, is
estimated at $18 billion, second only to the wealth of the
Sultan of Brunei ($25 billion). He boasts at least 12 royal
palaces, ranging from the $2.5 billion Al-Yamamah Palace
complex in Riyadh to a "cottage" four times the size of the
White House in Marbella, Spain. He owns several jets and
yachts, all with gold bathroom faucets; his main yacht, a $60
million craft, is escorted by a vessel that carries Stinger
antiaircraft missiles. His fleet of air-conditioned
Rolls-Royces, Cadillacs and Mercedes would clog Rodeo Drive.

    Though Fahd's views are tinged with superstition -- he
follows the advice of astrologers -- he keeps the Koran at his
bedside. He suffers from diabetes, back trouble, a weakness of
the heart and shortness of breath, but still chain-smokes
Marlboros. He has tried repeatedly, with varying success, to
lose weight by methods ranging from diets to occasional visits
to a Swiss fat farm.

    Fahd's work habits are erratic. He will disappear for
several weeks to relax at one of his houses abroad or on one
of his yachts, then return to plow through all the work that
has piled up in his absence. He sleeps during the day and often
starts work at 11 p.m., then receives top officials and foreign
envoys until 6 a.m. Some he keeps waiting for hours while he
chats or watches a videotape -- the result not of discourtesy
but of a lack of any sense of time pressure. Though his
attentions are confined to his wives (he reportedly has three,
and six sons), he still has an eye for women. Fahd was so
smitten with Britain's Margaret Thatcher when he met her in
1975 that he is said to have ordered his court poet to compose
an ode to her. An excerpt, as printed in a London tabloid: "Her
figure is more attractive than the figure of any cherished
wife/ or coveted concubine."

    Fahd's admiration for the U.S. goes back to 1945, when he
attended the San Francisco convention that founded the United
Nations and became so fascinated by the country that he wanted
to stay. He sent all his sons to American colleges, and he
stays tuned to CNN on TV sets scattered through his palaces.
Nonetheless, the presence of American troops cannot help
intensifying the pressures on the kingdom to come further out
of its isolation and into the modern world. Whether that can
be done while maintaining the system of semifeudal family rule
that Fahd has so far adroitly preserved is probably the biggest
question still confronting Fahd -- or his successor.


By George J. Church. Reported by David Aikman/Dhahran and
William Mader/London.