Dr. Abdulrahman Al-Zamil: Dynamic Saudi Problem Solver

By Richard H. Curtiss

For Americans and others doing business in Saudi Arabia, one of the friendliest faces in the Kingdom is that of Deputy Minister of Commerce Abdulrahman Al-Zamil. Like a good insurance company, this dynamic problem solver is there when you need him.

I first interviewed Dr. Al-Zamil in 1984 in the course of making an educational film about Saudi Arabia. He told me that some 60,000 Americans were employed at that time in his country, and that every billion dollars Saudi Arabia spent on American goods created 40,000 more jobs for Americans at home. By his calculations, which the US Department of Commerce later confirmed, at any given time throughout the 1980s, more than a million Americans owed their jobs directly to the long-standing Saudi preference for American technology, military hardware, and commercial exports.

Impressed with his grasp of all aspects of Saudi-US economic relations, I referred to him several times for information as the filming progressed. One day I mentioned that I was woefully behind schedule.

"What do you need?" he snapped with the good-natured brusqueness that enables him to keep so many projects afoot simultaneously.

"My car and guide from the Ministry of Information stop work every day at 2 pm," I said. "I have to keep filming from sunrise to sunset or I won't finish before my crew has to return to the States."

"Okay," he said. "Have lunch at your hotel and every day at 3 pm I'll have a car waiting for you there. Use it every afternoon and evening until you finish your film."

We finished on time, and it was only afterward that I learned he had borrowed the car and driver from a British businessman who was out of town. "It's okay," this American-educated Renaissance man explained. "He owes me plenty of favors."

Now enrolled as a member of the legion of people who owe him favors, I've subsequently visited Abdulrahman Al-Zamil's office many times and listened with awe as he works two telephones simultaneously, solving problems between foreigners and Saudis, Saudis and Saudis, and foreigners and foreigners. Since he holds a law degree from Cairo University and an MA and a Ph.D. from my own alma. mater, the University of Southern California, I would like to think Dr. Al-Zamil acquired his can-do attitude as part of his American education.

It's more likely, however, that it is part of his heritage as one of 12 sons and four daughters of a Saudi trader whose family name now emblazons industrial and business establishments in every Saudi city, as well as in the emirate of Bahrain.

Family Traditions

Born in 1942 in Unaiza, in north central Saudi Arabia, Abdulrahman Al-Zamil attended elementary schools in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and high school in Kuwait. His graduate work in the United States was part of a family tradition. Ten of his brothers also have degrees from American universities.

Most went on to positions in the family industrial establishment, H.A. Al-Zamil and Brothers, based in Saudi Arabia's highly industrialized Eastern Province. Even while studying in the United States, however, Dr. Al-Zamil manifested an interest in politics and a flair for large-scale organization. He became national vice president of the Arab Students Organization in the United States. With hundreds of campus chapters and thousands of members, this organization encompassed students from 21 Arab countries studying at American universities.

This experience convinced him that a close US-Saudi relationship could be of great benefit to both countries. First, however, Americans had a lot to learn about the Arabs in general, and Saudis in particular.

He returned to the Kingdom in 1972, just at the beginning of the enormous Saudi economic expansion, fueled by the 1973 rise in oil prices. In the subsequent 18 years, Saudi Arabia has undertaken to absorb in one generation the experience of 150 years of the Industrial Revolution in the West.

Although he has been at the center of this effort, Dr. Al-Zamil found time to marry in 1974. He and his wife now have five children. They live modestly and his only self-indulgence is the sports car he drives to work.

It was in the course of making Saudi Arabia's economic transition successful that Dr. Al-Zamil learned to cut red tape and make goverment the mentor rather than the enemy of Saudi and foreign entrepreneurs. The result is a free enterprise economy that is remarkably resourceful. Saudi Arabia feeds, houses, transports and provides medical and emergency services for up to two million pilgrims to the Islamic holy places in Mecca and Medina each year.

Unaware of the scale of the annual Islamic influx, American military planners were astonished that Saudi firms were able to absorb and care for the half million refugees who poured across the Kuwait border into Saudi Arabia in August and September of 1990, while at the same time providing food, fuel, transportation and other services for the more than half million foreign troops who were based on Saudi soil during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

Continuing the Campaign

Like all of his countrymen, Dr. Al-Zamil is proud of what his government has accomplished, and enormously grateful to the people of more than 20 nations who came from all over the world to defend Saudi Arabia and liberate Kuwait. He's particularly pleased about the American role. He and some of his fellow graduates of American universities have continued the campaign they began as members of the Arab Students Organization in the United States to inform Americans about the Arabs and Islam.

Last November, he led an 11 -member Saudi friendship delegation to the US. Splitting into two-and three-man teams, they met with American audiences in all parts of the country. Their warmest receptions, he said, were in meetings on US military bases with the families of US servicemembers.

"None of us will ever forget that America has proven the proverb that friends in need are friends indeed," he told his audiences. "The events since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait proved the value of the bridges of friendship that the Arabs have been working hard to build for the past 20 years."

Dr. Al-Zamil cites "the spontaneous gratitude and friendship demonstrated by the Kuwaitis as they welcomed the liberating allied forces" as indicative of the feelings "of every citizen of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries."

The war has also taught Saudis some disappointing lessons, Dr. Al-Zamil maintains. The four largest recipients of some $80 billion in Saudi government foreign aid were Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Yemen, the very countries from which Saudi Arabia felt threatened after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

"While we were providing this massive aid, we never intervened in anyone's internal affairs," Dr. Al-Zamil notes. "At the same time, more than four million Arabs and Muslims have been with us in the Gulf. We appreciate their contributions, but we were providing them opportunities that their own countries could not provide."

Changes in Aid Policies

He predicts two changes in Saudi aid policies. Instead of turning over money to the treasuries of recipient countries, Saudi Arabia will confine its aid to development projects. For example, he notes, his country right now is funding two such projects for Egypt. One will involve the building of a new highway linking Cairo and Alexandria. The other will involve the diversion of Nile water to Sinai, including Saudi funding of a tunnel to carry the water under the Suez canal.

In tones that echo US complaints after the Marshall Plan that revived war-shattered European and Far Eastern economies, Dr. AI-Zamil notes that although his country didn't intervene in the domestic affairs of the countries receiving Saudi aid, some of them freely offered unsolicited advice to their Saudi benefactors.

"From now on, we will not be interested in receiving advice from people like King Hussein or Yasser Arafat on what we should be doing at home or how we should be defending ourselves." he says.

In the course of their friendship mission tour of the United States in November, the Saudi participants were disappointed in the reluctance of some Arab-American and Muslim-American groups to condemn unequivocably the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

"The Gulf states made every attempt to solve the problem by giving Saddam Hussain every chance to withdraw peacefully," Dr. Al-Zamil told such audiences.

"Instead, he thought he could defy the whole world. What we tried to tell these Arab-American and Muslim-American groups, whose religious and cultural efforts we have supported generously in the past," he explains, "is that we Arabs of the GCC place just as much importance on the territorial integrity of our countries as they do on the territorial integrity of their own ancestral homelands, such as Lebanon and Pakistan. To me Saudi Arabia is number one, just as Palestine is number one to Palestinians."

Like the majority of his countrymen, this outspoken Saudi official has no second thoughts about the course his country chose when it felt threatened.

"All of us hated that war. But if it has liberated the Iraqis from the fear by which they were ruled, and if it now enables them to live in peace with their neighbors, then it's worth every life we have lost and every penny we have spent."

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.