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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 | 3

World

Some Saudi women joked about rushing

to the airport — alone. Others breathed

a sigh of relief that the men in their lives

— whether fathers, brothers or hus-

bands — could no longer dictate their

movements. Social media crackled with

ecstatic posts: memes of women prais-

ing the crown prince and ululating in cel-

ebration.

The jubilation came Friday as Crown

Prince Mohammed bin Salman ex-

tended a passel of new rights to women:

the right to travel without a male rela-

tive’s permission, to receive equal treat-

ment in the workplace and to obtain

family documents from the govern-

ment. Together, they were a significant

blow against a system that has long

treated women as second-class citizens.

“This change means women are in a

way in full control of their legal destiny,”

Muna AbuSulayman, a well-known

Saudi media personality, wrote on Twit-

ter. She said she was so elated that she

could not sleep.

The new regulations were the most

significant weakening yet of Saudi Ara-

bia’s so-called guardianship system, a

longstanding tangle of laws, regulations

and social customs that subjected many

women’s rights to the whims of their

male relatives. Coming after new regu-

lations allowing women to drive and at-

tend entertainment and sporting

events, the changes have the potential

to be a game changer, not only for wom-

en but for Saudi society.

“It is a great breakthrough,” Hoda al-

Helaissi, a member of the kingdom’s ad-

visory Shura Council, said on Friday. “It

was bound to happen, but these changes

are always done at a time when the peo-

ple are more apt to accept the changes,

otherwise they will fail.”

The advances for women are a key

piece of Prince Mohammed’s vision for

reforming the kingdom by diversifying

the economy and loosening social re-

strictions. Since his father ascended the

throne in 2015, Prince Mohammed, the

kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, has won

plaudits for taming the kingdom’s reli-

gious police, allowing movie theaters

and music concerts, and lifting the ban

on driving.

But along with that social opening

have come riskier moves that have

raised questions about his brash leader-

ship style, including his catastrophic

war in Yemen, the jailing of dissidents at

home and the effort to silence them

abroad, including the killing of the jour-

nalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Even as Prince Mohammed opened

new doors for Saudi women, critics

pointed out, some women who had cam-

paigned for those rights remained in jail

or on trial for their activism.

At least some of the changes to the

guardianship laws are to take effect by

the end of the month, the government

said in a statement. But they will most

likely take longer to flow through the

Saudi bureaucracy to individual house-

holds, and some women said they would

only be truly equal once they received

other rights they still lack, such as the

ability to marry or live on their own

without a male relative’s permission.

Even so, the changes were pivotal.

“These new regulations are history in

the making,” Princess Reema bint Ban-

dar al-Saud, the kingdom’s ambassador

to the United States and Saudi Arabia’s

first female ambassador, wrote on Twit-

ter. “They call for the equal engagement

of women and men in our society.”

She added: “Our leadership has

proved its unequivocal commitment to

gender equality.”

In recent years, Prince Mohammed

has loosened restrictions on women’s

dress and pushed for more women to en-

ter the work force, billing the social

opening as essential to build the insular

Islamic kingdom’s economy.

It was not clear why the new regula-

tions were announced now, but the news

was likely to draw some attention from

the mounting foreign criticism of Saudi

Arabia’s human rights record.

The murder of Mr. Khashoggi in the

Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last year

drew global condemnation. Saudi forces

are bogged down and accused of war

crimes in Yemen, leading to growing

calls by American lawmakers to cut sup-

port for the Saudi war effort. And waves

of arrests have scooped up clerics, intel-

lectuals, royals, businessmen and activ-

ists who had campaigned for an end to

the guardianship system.

A number of young Saudi women

have fled abroad in recent years, seek-

ing refuge from abusive family mem-

bers and a legal system they do not trust

to protect them, drawing unwanted at-

tention to the guardianship system.

The arrests, and the wider intoler-

ance of dissent under Prince Moham-

med, made it hard to fully gauge public

reaction to the changes, but many Saudi

women cheered them as liberating.

Ms. al-Helaissi, the Shura Council

member, said that she did not expect the

changes to have a great immediate ef-

fect on most families, but that the big-

gest beneficiaries would be divorced or

widowed women who could now run

their family affairs more easily.

The regulations allowing women to

register births, marriages and divorces

will make an enormous difference for

women who are separated from their

husbands and those who need to navi-

gate the bureaucracy on behalf of their

children, said Adam Coogle, a Saudi ex-

pert at Human Rights Watch.

In the past, he said, separated women

have reported being punished or ex-

torted by husbands who would not help

obtain birth certificates or other bureau-

cratic records for children.

The ban on employment discrimina-

tion will also prevent private employers

from telling women that they need a

guardian’s permission to be hired, a

common practice even though current

law does not require women to obtain

consent to work.

The new regulations are unlikely to

produce instant changes across Saudi

society, especially in conservative

homes, where men may retain power

over female relatives regardless of what

the laws say.

Absent some kind of government in-

tervention to enforce the regulations,

Mr. Coogle said, employers and officials

may continue to require guardians’ in-

volvement.

“That’s the trick,” he said. “We have to

see what kind of infrastructure they put

in place to implement these changes.”

But about two thirds of the kingdom’s

22 million citizens are under age 30, and

many lack their elders’ attachment to

the kingdom’s traditional social stric-

tures. They are already used to seeing

women working as supermarket

cashiers and driving themselves to and

from work.

Ms. AbuSulayman said on Twitter

that while her father never put obstacles

in her path, she had gone so far as to con-

sider moving abroad to avoid being sub-

ject to the guardianship of her brothers.

Now, she said, her eldest daughter —

who, under the current system, would

have had to obtain her father’s permis-

sion to renew her passport this year —

will grow up without restrictions on her

right to travel.

“She will never know about this

episode in our nation’s life,” Ms. AbuSu-

layman wrote. “A generation growing

up completely free and equal to their

brothers.”

But Saudi women’s experiences of

guardianship can vary drastically ac-

cording to their class and education, as

well as their male guardians’ attitudes.

If “some women’s dreams were

aborted” by the travel barriers, Ms.

AbuSulayman wrote, they were “a mi-

nor nuisance for most.” Still, she said,

they were “a symbolic indignity for a

wider concept of adulthood, account-

ability and meaning of personhood.”

Saudi social codes have long been

driven by an ultraconservative inter-

pretation of Islam and by traditional

Arabian practices that kept women not

only out of public life but also out of sight

in many cases.

Girls’ education was introduced only

in the 1960s, and even then it caused

trouble in conservative cities. For dec-

ades, top state clerics have promoted

strict segregation between women and

men and have preached that it would be

better if women stayed at home.

Most of those clerics have now been

silenced and some of their old teachings

expunged from government websites.

While many most likely oppose Prince

Mohammed’s social reforms, they have

kept quiet, either out of deference to the

monarchy or because they fear arrest

for speaking out.

Critics of the guardianship laws

hailed the changes, but they called on

the kingdom to push further by allowing

women to marry, live on their own and

leave state facilities like domestic vio-

lence shelters without consent from

their guardians. And they noted a dis-

tinct discrepancy in the announcement.

Even as the kingdom loosens the cuffs of

guardianship, about a dozen female

Saudi activists who spoke out about re-

forming the system remain imprisoned

on charges related to their activism on

women’s issues.

Excitement over rights for Saudi women

BEIRUT, LEBANON

Reforms erode a system

that has treated them

as second-class citizens

BY BEN HUBBARD

AND VIVIAN YEE

Buraydah train station in Saudi Arabia. One of the changes put in place by the crown prince allows Saudi women to travel without a male relative’s permission.

TASNEEM ALSULTAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“These new regulations are

history in the making. They call

for the equal engagement of

women and men in our society.”

Recently, while the police in Moscow

forcibly rounded up more than 1,

anti-Kremlin protesters, the largest

such mass detention in years, President

Vladimir V. Putin was out on the Baltic

Sea, sinking beneath the waves in a

bathysphere.

Surfacing from his latest action ad-

venture after inspecting a Soviet sub-

marine lost during World War II, Mr.

Putin paid tribute last weekend to its

crew, then concluded his remarks by

saying, “I love reading, and I love his-

tory.”

Yet a different kind of history seemed

to preoccupy the Kremlin when it came

to the demonstrations — the history of

clearing the political landscape of dis-

senters. The machinery of legal repres-

sion ground into action, aimed at snuff-

ing out a wave of weekly protests in

Moscow. Another one was held on Satur-

day, and organizers plan one on Aug. 10.

At least 10 key participants in the July

27 protests will be charged with foment-

ing mass civil unrest and violence,

which carries a prison term of up to 15

years, investigators announced on

Thursday. The largely peaceful protests

rippling through a chilly Moscow sum-

mer were prompted by the city’s Elec-

toral Commission barring opposition

candidates from registering for City

Council elections on Sept. 8.

In the most immediate sense, the

fierce government reaction is aimed at

preventing any opposition figure from

gaining a toehold on the political ladder

— including a seat on the 45-member

City Council.

There is a deeper level, however. The

protests and the harsh reaction can be

seen as the opening salvo in an expected

showdown over what happens in 2024,

when Mr. Putin is not allowed to seek a

fifth term as president. He is expected to

find a way, sooner rather than later, to

reshape Russia’s Constitution or to

somehow stay on, laying the ground-

work far in advance.

The Constitution limits a president to

two consecutive terms, so in 2008 Mr.

Putin became prime minister but re-

mained the real authority in the country.

He returned to the presidency in 2012,

and lengthened the presidential term

from four years to six.

The 2012 maneuver set off the biggest

anti-Kremlin marches in decades.

If Mr. Putin is eyeing a similar move,

this is an inopportune moment to allow

even relatively small protests to unroll

in the heart of Moscow — especially

since Russians are generally in a surly

mood, and the president’s approval rat-

ing has been trending downward for a

year.

Most of Russia’s 143 million people are

surviving on stagnant incomes in a

struggling economy. Nearly 21 million

live below the poverty line, an increase

of 500,000 this year, official statistics

show. Most Russians live in a gloomy, di-

lapidated world of terrible roads, crum-

bling buildings and unpredictable medi-

cal care.

The central government takes in rev-

enue generated across the country from

natural resources like oil and gas, and

sends little back.

Mr. Putin and his circle of security ad-

visers have long feared the potential for

a “color revolution” of the kind that

twice toppled governments in neighbor-

ing Ukraine. These K.G.B. alumni treat

even small movements and civil society

organizations as if they might generate

a wave that could swamp the Putin ad-

ministration for good.

The Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, were a

marginal faction in 1917, and even he

held out little hope that they could win

the revolution — but then they seized

the government in months. This is famil-

iar history to the people in the Kremlin.

The 57 rejected candidates for the

Moscow council include around 17

staunch Kremlin critics. Most of them

have been jailed on sentences of up to 30

days on charges linked to the demon-

strations.

One opposition politician who refused

to compromise with City Hall over the

location of the next protest was grabbed

outside the negotiating room and sent to

prison for a month.

“By the reaction of the authorities, we

see that this frightens them,” said Kon-

stantin von Eggert, a political analyst.

“They are scared of the first stone that

can start an avalanche.”

Some analysts view the sudden ill-

ness suffered by Aleksei A. Navalny, the

main opposition leader, while serving a

30-day jail sentence, as a warning that

the government could play even

rougher. The government described his

condition as an allergic reaction and re-

jected his allies’ suggestions that he had

been poisoned. He has requested an offi-

cial investigation.

On Saturday, the authorities an-

nounced that they had opened a crimi-

nal money-laundering investigation

against Mr. Navalny’s organization, the

Anti-Corruption Foundation. The case

involved funding of 1 billion rubles

(around $15 million) in “money obtained

by criminal means,” the state news

agency Tass reported.

OVD-Info, an independent organiza-

tion that tracks court cases, reported

that nearly 828 people had been de-

tained on Saturday.

Mr. Putin himself has not commented

publicly on the protests, leaving that to

various proxies.

Sergei S. Sobyanin, the mayor of Mos-

cow and a man sometimes mentioned as

a future prime minister, characterized

the protesters as a riotous mob, alleging

that many participants had come from

outside Moscow, intent on storming City

Hall by force.

“He who cries the loudest takes the

power?” he said in an interview tele-

vised nationally. “We’re not in Zimba-

bwe here, are we?”

Tabloid television stations smeared

the opposition candidates, even sug-

gesting that one woman, frustrated over

not being registered, had gone home,

gotten drunk and beaten her young

daughter.

Other government-funded news orga-

nizations and officials dusted off a favor-

ite Soviet chestnut, alleging that Ameri-

can and Swedish secret agents had fo-

mented the unrest. No evidence was

presented.

Coverage on state-run television

stressed that the protesters had no per-

mit, reporting that the police had been

provoked under a hail of bottles, asphalt

chunks and trash bins.

The government has presented some-

what contradictory figures about the

demonstrators. Before the latest pro-

test, an Interior Ministry statement said

there were 3,500 protesters, of whom

1,074 were detained. Yet the charge

sheet for one opposition figure said that

10,000 had participated. Most of those

detained have been released.

The government has compromised

with protesters three times this year,

and the huge deployment of police offi-

cers to block avenues near Moscow’s

City Hall suggest that the Kremlin felt

enough was enough.

The Moscow city government offered

to allow a protest on Aug. 10 on Sa-

kharov Avenue, near the center but dis-

tant from City Hall. Organizers rejected

that venue, calling it a “reservation” or a

“corral.” Smaller protests are also being

organized in other Russian cities.

Many demonstrators are young. They

grew up not in the Soviet Union, but in a

Russia where they could choose every-

day things like their shoes, their educa-

tion and their relationships. So why not

their politicians, they ask.

Surveys show that Russians aged 18

to 24 watch state television the least of

any demographic in the country and are

therefore the least susceptible to its

cheerleading that Russia is a paradise

compared with the wicked West.

One of the most popular memes from

the July 27 protest was a photo of a wom-

an reading the Constitution, which con-

tains the right to protest peacefully, in

front of a line of helmeted police officers

bristling with shields and clubs.

The government squelched the 2012

anti-Kremlin protests, known as the

Bolotnaya Square demonstrations, by

sentencing a few participants to jail

terms of up to four and a half years.

Demonstrators think the same strategy

could be at play again.

“There is the desire to show strength

in Moscow, but this will not stop the pro-

test movement unless they start impris-

oning people for 15 years,” said Mr. von

Eggert, the analyst. “This will continue

in a certain form, but whether it will

change the country, no, not yet. It will

keep the flame alive.”

Putin’s uncertain future shadows a crackdown on protests

MOSCOW

BY NEIL MACFARQUHAR

Ivan Nechepurenko and Oleg Matsnev

contributed reporting.

With its crackdown on demonstrations in Moscow, the Kremlin appears resolved to prevent its critics from gaining a political foothold.

YURI KOCHETKOV/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK

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