For Dissident, Just the Fax Causes British-Saudi Rift

Mohammed Masari, a theoretical physicist turned electronic guerrilla, takes his coffee white with four sugars and threats against him with a grain of salt.

“There is just so much money,” he said, sipping cold coffee. “We can pay for security or to send faxes.”

No contest. Masari is trying to overthrow the royal family of his native Saudi Arabia--by fax.

He calls for stricter but more democratic Islamic rule to replace a Saudi monarchy he calls “corrupt, illegitimate and un-Islamic.”

His two-year campaign has infuriated the Saudi government, which he fled, and the British government, which he is asking for asylum.

After trying repeatedly to deport him, Britain agreed under fierce political and civil rights pressure last week to allow Masari to remain--for the time being.

The Masari affair was a blunt confrontation between Britain’s humanitarian and free-speech principles and its quest for commercial advantage with a key Middle Eastern trading partner that controls the world’s largest reserves of oil. Official British vexation is familiar to other Western European countries where dissident exiles also discomfit strategic relationships.

But here the example is particularly stark.

“Britain imports massive amounts of oil from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are probably the single largest buyer of British arms,” said Digby Waller, a defense economist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

The interests at stake are so keen that neither government has bothered to take shelter behind the usual linguistic niceties of international diplomacy. Both have said the same thing: Masari’s fax offensive could cost Britain thousands of jobs and the equivalent of billions in lost exports, particularly weapons.

“Jobs and armaments have never been so blatantly used, without any sort of subterfuge, in an asylum claim before,” said Jan Shaw, a refugee specialist at Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group.

Masari, 49, scion of an affluent, prominent Saudi family, was jailed in Riyadh, the capital, in 1993 for his dissident views, escaped to Yemen and arrived in London from there in 1994.

With his fax campaign a growing embarrassment, the British government first tried to return him to Yemen, and then it tried to ship him to the Caribbean island of Dominica.

British courts short-circuited both attempts, and last week, the government dropped deportation efforts. It did not accept his request for asylum but said he could stay for four more years.

Masari provoked British anger at the highest levels.

Prime Minister John Major has told Parliament that Britain should “not give comfort to those who seek to undermine” the government in Saudi Arabia, which he said “is critical to the stability of the [Persian] Gulf.”

“The U.K. has a long and honorable tradition of protecting those who seek asylum . . . but if people abuse that hospitality, I don’t believe we should ignore it,” Major said.

In smoky coffee shops on the Queensway and along Edgeware Road, the government campaign against Masari has created unsettling ripples.

Splashed across the British press and London’s six daily Arabic-language newspapers, it is an unmistakable warning to Muslim exiles from the Middle East that there are limits to how far they may agitate against governments with which Britain has good relations.

Algerian, Bahraini, Egyptian, Tunisian and Sudanese dissidents of varying nationalistic and Islamic fundamentalist hue all use London as a base for vitriol and intrigue.

“In the Cold War era, it would have been unremarkable for a refugee from Czechoslovakia, say, to propagandize from London against the Communist government in Prague, but in the Arab world today, there are a lot of sensibilities,” said immigration specialist Christopher T. Husbands of the London School of Economics. “The government is nervous about the importation of foreign civil wars [onto] British soil.”

Emigre violence is not as familiar to London as to Rome or Paris, but it happens. A Palestinian cartoonist was slain in 1987, and a Libyan butcher was killed last year, both presumably on orders from back home.

Masari says hired killers stalk him.

The bearded, bespectacled cleric’s son is deep under the skin of two governments because he has harnessed communications technology as the Achilles’ heel of a regime that routinely censors forms of hostile comment that are more easily silenced.

Masari’s Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights in Saudi Arabia fires off as many as 2,000 faxes of two to four pages every week, he said. Many go to students and Islamic centers in Europe and the United States, but 600 to 800 of them go to Saudi Arabia, he added.

“Saudi [Arabia] is very fax-oriented. Once it was chic; now it is almost a religious duty,” Masari said in an interview. “We send to places where we think we might have sympathizers: government offices, courts, hospitals, the social security administration, military bases and big companies. If one secretary makes a copy. . . .”

Faxes scourge repression, corruption and mismanagement that Masari said have undermined the authority and legitimacy of the 6,000-strong Saudi royal family.

One fax arrives at the machine in King Fahd’s bedroom, Masari said.

“He sends it to his security people, saying, ‘Analyze this message from the ‘Son of the Cursed One,’ ” Masari said.

The Masari campaign relies on insider reports from discontented Saudis at home. Here, again, technology triumphs.

Tattling Saudis use special telephone calling cards provided by Masari and good only for tell-all 800 numbers in Washington.

“We want an elected democratic government on the principles of Islam and the principles of accountability,” said Masari, who earned his doctorate in Germany, taught physics at a state university in Riyadh and later served as cultural attache at the Saudi Consulate in Denver, where he has an American wife from whom he is separated.

British officials challenge Masari’s democratic credentials, saying that, in London, he has toned down the Islamic fundamentalist core of his beliefs to be more palatable to Western audiences.

Independent Middle East specialists are also chary: “He’s a fundamentalist as puritanical as any of the Saudi incumbents,” one private analyst said.

Masari said in reply: “Just as the Saudi government is putting great pressure on the British government, so too is there a campaign to discredit me. They say I have terrorist links. Not true. I seek peaceful change for a representative democracy under Islamic principles.”

The Saudi government attacks Masari, says his information is bad and recently even threatened to lift his citizenship.

There is no doubt that the exile’s fax barrage troubles the Saudi monarchy.

In a BBC documentary earlier this month critical of the Riyadh regime’s human rights record, the Saudi ambassador in London warned that his country would scrap a huge arms contract if Masari was not expelled.

“If you are so insistent, I am going to tell you that the continued presence here [of Masari] will harm British relations and trade relations. I am going to tell you that, yes,” Ambassador Ghazi Algosaibi said.

The demand was a legitimate request among friends, the ambassador insisted stoutly.

“No, that’s not blackmail,” he said. “That’s friends discussing a problem that is affecting both of them. . . . We are a sovereign country. We can buy wherever else we want.”

Four days after the documentary, the BBC said its Arabic-language television service for the Middle East, produced for a Saudi partner, Orbit Satellite Television and Radio Network, would shut down with the probable loss of about 250 jobs.

Rome-based Orbit, owned by a cousin of King Fahd, blacked out transmission of BBC news reports on the Masari case in January.

This month’s documentary, which interviewed critics of the regime, including Masari, and showed a prisoner being marched to his public beheading, was denounced as “a sneering and racist attack on Islamic law and culture” by Orbit President Alexander B. Zilo.

The strong Saudi lobby has powerful friends in corporate Britain--and with reason, given a multibillion-dollar export market.

The steady arms sales are only 20% of British exports to Saudi Arabia, and there are more than 100 British-Saudi joint ventures. About 30,000 Britons live in Saudi Arabia.

“British interests as a whole do require his [Masari’s] removal,” Home Office Minister Ann Widdecombe said earlier this year. “We have got enormous export considerations.”

Her office is responsible for asylum cases.

Initial moves to deport Masari appeared to run against deeply rooted tolerance in Britain, which has a proud tradition of defending the underdog.

At great expense and brushing aside all Islamic objections, the government has steadfastly protected author Salman Rushdie, a British citizen under death sentence from Iran for a novel that mullahs there consider offensive to Islam.

“I was surprised when the government appeared to surrender to Saudi blackmail. It never did so in the Rushdie case,” said Abdel Bari Atwan, Palestinian editor of the London daily newspaper Al Quds al Arabi, one of the few Arabic-language publications here that is neither owned nor strongly influenced by Saudi interests.

The Foreign Office, in a statement on relations with Saudi Arabia, observed: “We reject the suggestion that U.K. policy lacks principle. A relationship which promotes regional stability, deters aggression and increases U.K. jobs and prosperity is one to nurture, not to disparage.”