JEDDAH, 25 November 2004 — A veteran writer from one of Jeddah’s two Arabic dailies has been stopped from writing her weekly column because in her last article she revealed the corruption found in one of Saudi Arabia’s major financial institutions and criticized a top general manager.
Although she did not name that institution or the general manager, he immediately contacted the newspaper and threatened to pull out the institution’s ads if action wasn’t taken against the writer.
The editor in chief panicked, and the next day he informed the writer through an assistant that her articles would not be published until further notice.
“I was shocked by the financial institution for threatening the paper unless action was taken against me and more shocked by the paper for buckling under to this kind of extortion,” she told Arab News.
The article was published over a month ago, and she has since tried to contact the editor in chief and wrote a letter of objection defending her accusations, but he has not replied to her.
“For now I’m trying to resolve this matter quietly before I make official complaints to the proper authorities, but I will not return to writing for this paper until the editor in chief calls me himself,” she said.
“If the information I presented was inaccurate, then why didn’t the institution present a clarification? My shock with the paper’s reaction is that it accepted the institution’s objections without proof. I’d be willing to write a public apology to the institution and the general manager if I was proven wrong, and I wrote that in my article,” she said.
In her article, she relays information she received from various sources at the financial institution on the offensive behavior and mismanagement of a particular general manager.
According to her sources, the manager’s brother has an employment agency abroad, which hires expatriates to be employed at the institution and takes a 15 percent commission on their excessive salaries that sometimes reach $100,000 a month. The manager himself, sources said, owns a flower shop, which he insists on using for all bank functions, occasions and interior decorations.
This same general manager allegedly hires and promotes relatives who are not qualified and verbally abuses some of his staff publicly, and many can account for that as she claims in her article.
Furthermore, she states that some Saudi employees find themselves unemployed without actually being fired through a clever way of eliminating jobs, thus abdicating the institution’s responsibility to the employees and the Saudization process.
“This was not meant as a personal attack on this manager, but the complaints I received were mainly concerning this manager. If the information I received is inaccurate or was given for malicious reasons, then I’m willing to retract it, and I mentioned this in my article. My goal was to reveal the corruption and abuse of authority, which is my duty as a writer,” she said.
She doesn’t have any documents backing the accusations she made, but she verified the information through many sources at different levels of the institution.
“I refuse to disclose my sources, but I do hope that the authorities will investigate the matter to find out the truth. I wrote the article out of a sense of patriotism and humanitarianism. No one should be above the law or above criticism. We criticize even ministers and high officials, and they don’t take this kind of action against a writer,” she said.
She is angry and disappointed at the attempt to silence and punish a writer for simply trying to reveal facts.
Arab News tried to contact the editor in chief and other administrators at the newspaper but was unable to reach them. As for the Saudi Journalist Association, they have not received a complaint from the writer and have no other information on the matter so they can’t intervene or make a statement.
However, a source at the association said its role in such matters is mainly to conciliate between the disputing parties and assist the journalist in reaching the appropriate authorities and making a stand on the side of the unjustly treated employee.
“There are official organizations and ministries that handle labor disputes to which the writers can go, and we can support their cases once we have all the facts,” he told Arab News. He also pointed out that there is a difference in policy between writers who write in more than one paper and full-time reporters who earn their living through this job.
