While the U.S. continues a war in Iraq for dubious reasons, our Arabian allies continue their war of oppression against women. A 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia's religious police for the "crime" of sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh. Yara (who did not furnish her last name to the press, out of fear of retribution) was bruised and crying when she was freed from prison after she was strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the Kingdom's Mutaween police.
The Mutaween, comprise of 3,500 officers and thousands more volunteers, are tasked with enforcing Sharia throughout Saudi Arabia. They have the power to arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, any one engaged in homosexual behavior or prostitution; to enforce Islamic dress-codes, and store closures during the prayer time. They ensure that alcoholic beverages and pork are not sold or consumed in public, as well as seize banned consumer products and media regarded as un-Islamic (such as CD's/DVD's of various Western musical groups, television shows and film). The most widely criticized incident attributed to the Mutaween occurred in 2002, when they prevented schoolgirls from escaping a burning school in Mecca, because the girls were not wearing headscarves and abayas (black robes). Fifteen girls died and 50 were injured as a result.
Yara's recent ordeal began with a routine visit to the Riyadh offices of her finance company, where she is a managing partner. After power went out in the building, she and her colleagues (all men) went next door to the Starbucks to use its wireless internet. She sat in a curtained booth with her business partner in the café's “family” area, the only seats where men and women are allowed to mix.
In Saudi Arabia, public contact between unrelated men and women is strictly prohibited-- and after a while, men approached the two asking why they were sitting together. "They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” recalled Yara, who wears an abaya and headscarf, like most Saudi women. Unfortunately for Yara, the men were from the Mutaween.
After taking her cell phone, the men pushed her into a cab and drove her to Malaz prison in Riyadh. She was interrogated, strip-searched and forced to sign and fingerprint a series of confessions pleading guilty to her “crime”. “They took me into a filthy bathroom, full of water and dirt. They made me take off my clothes and squat and they threw my clothes in this slush and made me put them back on,” she said. Eventually she was taken before a judge, who told her she was "sinful . . . and [was] going to burn in hell."
Yara's husband used his political contacts in Jeddah to track her whereabouts, and eventually was able to secure her release. “I was lucky. I met other women in that prison who don't have the connections I did,” she said. Her story has received rare coverage in Saudi Arabia, where the press has been sharply critical of the police.
You would think that mistreatment of a U.S. citizen such as this would be taken seriously-- well, you would be wrong. A (Bush administration) embassy official said that the arrest was being treated as “an internal Saudi matter” and refused to comment on her case.
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