<font color=red>Saudi government harbors kidnappers, condones and legitimizes kidnapping:
wsj.com
The Wall Street Journal
December 21, 2001
Review & Outlook Taste
Saudi Christmas
If you're a politician or diplomat who has anything to do with Saudi Arabia, Pat Roush can be a pain in the keister. But if your two daughters were stuck in Saudi Arabia -- where you'd seen them only once in the past 16 years -- you might figure that the only chance they have is a mother's love so strong that it refuses to take no for an answer. This Christmas Eve, as the rest of America goes to bed with dreams of sugar plums, the only visions dancing in Patricia Roush's head will be of her daughters Alia and Aisha clad from head to toe in the black abaya.
When Khalid al-Gheshayan kidnapped his daughters from a Chicago suburb in 1986 in defiance of a U.S. court order, the girls looked much like they do in this picture; Alia was seven years old and Aisha three. Today they are grown women. There is a frightful symmetry here, for at a time that we rightly celebrate the liberation of Afghan women from the Taliban yoke, two adult U.S. citizens remain trapped in a country where they could leave if they were men but as women require the written permission of a husband or father.
Already Alia, now 23, has been married off to a man Ms. Roush says is a cousin of her ex-husband. Aisha, now 19, may be next. Years back, in a circular titled "Marriage to Saudis," the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh spelled out the life for a girl raised in Saudi Arabia, where she is "a statutory second class citizen . . . whose word is worth only half of a man's."
Pat Roush and her daughters, Alia and Aisha, in 1984.
The State Department bristles at any suggestion that it does not care. But the parameters within which it works are defined by Saudi law. As one unclassified cable puts it, the embassy was directed to remain "impartial." Ray Mabus, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1994 to 1996, says that he doesn't want to criticize State but adds that diplomats have a tendency to feel they should be working on the "big stuff." "I just think that looking out for the freedom of U.S. citizens is big stuff too," says Mr. Mabus, who got the Saudis' attention when he put a freeze on U.S. visas for anyone with the same surname as Ms. Roush's fugitive ex, Mr. al-Gheshayan.
So what does Pat Roush want? She wants our embassy to issue passports for her daughters; she wants the Saudis to issue exit visas; and she wants her daughters to come to America, where they can decide where they want to live without the proverbial gun to their heads. Now, there is an argument that this is something that ought to be deferred until after the war. But given past Saudi actions and the preponderance of Saudis among the Sept. 11 hijackers, surely this Christmas, with these women, offers the perfect moment and occasion to demonstrate that things have changed.
Among Islamic extremists, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden have become folk heroes for their defiance of American ideals and might. In his own way, Khalid al-Gheshayan has done the same. Only it's his daughters -- American citizens both -- who are paying the price. |
