ABU DHABI Ñ Saudi authorities have arrested dissidents and warned
newspapers that the kingdom will not tolerate criticism regarding the death
of 15 schoolgirls and a teacher in a stampede blamed on religious police.
Arab diplomatic sources said the Saudi crackdown has been overseen by
Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdul Aziz. The sources said Nayef has
taken control of the Saudi press.
So far, the sources said, Nayef has ordered the arrest of a dissident
poet and the dismissal of a newspaper editor. The
sources said both the Information and Interior ministries warned Saudi
journalists that they would not tolerate dissent.
The move came in wake of the
publication of a poem in the Riyad-based Al Madina that accused the Islamic
judiciary of being corrupt. The poem by Abdul Mohsen Musalam accused the
judges of serving tyrants.
"Your beards are smeared with blood," the poem read. "You indulge a
thousand tyrants and only the tyrant do you obey."
Al Madina's editor-in-chief Mohammed Mukhtar Al Fal was dismissed by the
Information Ministry, which oversees all publications in the kingdom.
The poem was published on the eve of harsh criticism by Saudi newspapers
of the behavior of religious police during a March 11 fire at a girls
school. The police were said to have prevented the girls, who fled unveiled,
from leaving the building and stopped firefighters who sought to extinguish
the blaze.
Nayef reprimanded the Saudi press for publishing what he termed false
stories of the religious police, regarded as the most powerful force in the
country. The newspaper criticism of the religious police prompted a harsh
backlash from Islamic clerics and their supporters in the kingdom. The
clerics were said to have inundated the royal family with complaints over
the Saudi press attack.
