DAVOS, 28 January — Having kept a low profile at the World Economic Forum for the past four or five years the Saudi Arabia has made a dramatic comeback at Davos both at private business and government levels.
The list of participants published by the organizers shows that at least 30 Saudi businessmen and officials will be present in this year's event. They include Oil Minister Ali Al-Naimi. Minister for Finance and National Economy Ibrahim Al-Assaf and Governor of the General Investment Authority Prince Abdullah ibn Faisal ibn Turki.
To mark their return to Davos, the Saudis agreed to host the first major dinner party of the forum. The party was open to all and was estimated to have been attended by over a thousand guests.
Party-going, however, is not the chief objective of the Davos forum. Government officials and businessmen travel to Davos in the hope of establishing contacts and, whenever possible, clinching deals.
The Saudis are clearly in the market for new partners in a wide variety of fields. While in Davos they will introduce their strategy for economic reform that includes the opening of the Kingdom to "a wide spectrum of investment opportunities," according to Davos sources.
The forum will provide world business leaders an opportunity to tell Saudi officials what measures are needed to be taken before the Kingdom can become a major importer, rather than exporter, of capital.
In the past few years the Kingdom has carried out a program of liberalization. It has set up a high council of economics and prepared legislative texts to facilitate foreign investments. An important signal that Saudi Arabia was prepared to further open itself came in the form of lifting visas for citizens of several nations wishing to visit the Kingdom.
The recent rise in oil prices has increased the Kingdom's attraction to foreign investors. To be sure the Kingdom can finance most of the major oil projects it envisages through its own capital resources. But the global oil market is becoming increasingly competitive and the Kingdom needs to fight hard to maintain its share, especially in such key regions as North America and the Far East.
One way to protect the Kingdom's market share is by attracting foreign capital. Whether or not this would include upstream projects is one of the subjects that many businessmen here hope to raise with Saudi officials during the forum.
The high-level Saudi presence has encouraged the holding of a special session on the future of global energy markets. This will cover a wide range of topics including the many pipeline projects in the Caspian Basin and the political prospects of major oil producing nations in Central Asia, the Gulf and South America.
The Saudi high profile, however, is in contrast with the fading of the Middle East at the forum. The forum has managed to attract a few big names from the region. Jordan's King Abdallah is slated to make an appearance, although even that is not certain. The emir of Qatar and the crown princes of Bahrain and Dubai will also be present along with Egypt's Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.
All in all, however, the Middle Eastern presence appears to be at its lowest for a decade. Contrary to previous years few Israelis are in evidence in this year's forum.
The Iranians who had been sending big high-level delegations since President Muhammad Khatami's election in 1997, are almost totally absent this year. Even Morocco, one of the oldest partners of the forum in the Muslim world, has trimmed down in presence this year.
For nearly a decade, Davos acted as a forum for discussing various aspects of peace in the Middle East, both in open sessions and behind the scenes. Davos organizers played the key role in organizing the Middle East-North Africa conferences as a compendium to peacemaking efforts in the region by the United States.
The first conference, in Morocco, attracted over 1,000 participants, including many business leaders. The second, and so far the last one, in Doha, Qatar, gathered almost as many people, but were boycotted by most Arab states. The exercise did not recover from the boycott and no new conference has been held in the past four years.
Will another MENA conference be held? Klaus Schwab, the forum president, still optimistic, says yes. The Qataris have repeated their invitation to host another conference, but half in jest. The Tunisians, too, have made some noises on the issue, but indicate that they would need vast sums of money to build a new conference center for the occasion.
No one, however, believes that the idea of a Middle East-North Africa common market could have a serious chance as long as there is a state of actual war between Israel and the Palestinians.
Until last year Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres were among the chief attractions at Davos, receiving star treatment from the organizers. In 1998 Peres sounded so sure of "a final and comprehensive peace" with Israel's neighbors that he was trying to upgrade his own role and become the world's chief "peacemaker." He even launched a scheme under which the 1,000 corporations that attend Davos, would give his foundation something like $4 billion with which to go around the world and create peace wherever it was needed.
The Davos organizers are ideologically close to people like Peres and Ehud Barak than to Ariel Sharon who is likely to become Israel's prime minister in a couple of weeks' time.
This year's forum has allocated a session to the discussion of the peace process in the Middle East. But so uncertain is the whole exercise that the organizers cannot announce the names of the participants or even confirm that the session will actually be held.
Unable to project the future, the forum is reviving part of the past in the shape of a session on "Desert Storm," the operation that led to the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi occupation 10 years ago. Interestingly, there are no Arabs present on the panel.
