Will Any Lessons Be Learned from the Tragedy at Mina?
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada
For a good few hours, on the morning of September 24, the day of Eid-ul-Azha, my wife and I held our breath—hardly—in deadly suspense. Our only daughter, our first child, was also among the pilgrims of this year’s Haj. Our agony was relieved when she called from her cell phone to assure us that she and her husband were both well and not in harm’s way.
But tens of thousands of other parents, siblings and myriad relatives of those perished in the stampede at Mina weren’t so lucky. They didn’t hear from their loved-ones and never, perhaps, will.
The toll of those mauled in the deadly stampede at Mina has, already, gone past the figure of 1100, according to figures splashed in the Pakistani media based on an official count. But official tallies are, invariably, on the conservative side. Besides, the Saudis are notoriously niggardly in telling the whole truth in the wake of such outrageous tragedies; they are naïve enough to believe—or delude themselves—that they can still get away with half-truths in this age of cyber communications.
But does it matter how many actually perished in the deadliest human calamity to befall the pilgrims at Mina in more than a quarter century--and that too on the last leg of their arduous journey of faith, called the pilgrimage of Haj?
The fatalities could be 1100 or 11,000. What’s important is to ask what went into making this horrible, nightmarish, tragedy and could it have been prevented?
The Saudi officialdom was quick in holding the pilgrims’ indiscipline, indiscretion and ignorance of the rules laid down by the Haj caretakers responsible for the deadly occurrence. They said the pilgrims didn’t observe the rules and ignored their calls for disciplined behavior which, as a consequence, triggered the stampede and the resultant deaths at such a colossal cost.
The Saudis may expect to get away with their self-serving alibi and think the world must acknowledge that their government has been laboriously working, year-after-year, at expanding and enlarging the infrastructure of amenities at the Haj sites to cater to the increasing needs of a growing population of pilgrims flocking to their shores every year.
There is credit to be given to the Saudi authorities for the enormous work they have put into the Haj infrastructure over the past two decades. Regular visitors to the land, like this scribe, for instance, don’t hold back their compliments to the Saudis for all their hard work. The sites that are organic to the ritual of Haj have undergone an incredible make-over in the past two decades. My wife and I had performed Haj in 1995—a good twenty years ago—but Mina and Arafat—two of the holiest sites of the pilgrimage—are totally different places, today, than what they looked like 20 years ago. Amazing and incredible improvements have been effected on these sites, and all, no doubt, for the good of the pilgrims.
To be fair to the Saudis, some pilgrims, with their endemic indiscipline and indiscretion, have no appreciation for all the hard work that has been going on into the Haj infrastructure. Their ignorance of rules and willful violation of basic norms of discipline grate on many of Saudi sensitivities, and those of other visitors to the holy ritual of Haj.
But that’s only one side of the story and gives only a lopsided and distorted version of the episode. There’s also a flip side of the coin—or more than one flip side—that the Saudis simply loathe to see and prefer to dismiss with disdain.
The world knows that the Saudi input into the Haj infrastructure and the network of amenities is not, by any stretch of imagination, an entirely altruistic thing. Haj is a source of easy and plentiful money to the government as well as the entrepreneurial and merchant classes of Saudis. Every year pilgrims pump at least 10 billion dollars—a conservative estimate, once again—into the coffers of the government and the sinews of the Saudi economy. It’s a huge industry that has mushroomed and proliferatedaround the core concept of Haj and given a mundane face to the business that may happen to be at cross purposes with the pristine concept of Haj.
But none would grudge the windfall benefits to the host Saudis from the business of organizing and overseeing the ritual of Haj if the hosts and organizers were as efficient, disciplined and organized themselves as they expected the visiting pilgrims to be.
The truth, sadly, is anchored in just the opposite of discipline, organization or good conduct. No visitor to the land returns from there with any pleasant or happy memories of the Saudi hospitality. Which is awful and disgusting, to say the very least.
First, there’s no concept of service among the Saudis. They may covet and flaunt, with all the fanfare, their self-conferred honorific title of Custodians of the Two Holy Places—Mecca and Medina—of Islam. But that’s all there’s to it: a title without any sense of responsibility or perception of service endemic to it.
The arrogance of even a lowly Saudi factotum is legendary. They are so openly disdainful of visitors to their land that there’s, shamefully, not even an effort to camouflage their uncouth and unruly behavior. The Pakistanis and Indians—miskeens (paupers) in the Saudi lexicon—are principal targets of their uncivilized handling of visitors. Our people, animated by their over-simplistic definition of the concept of one Ummah of believers-above-any-discrimination come back with a very sour taste in their mouth as to how they were mistreated and humiliated by their ‘Saudi brethren.’
It’s a simple rule of thumb that where there’s no sense of service, or obligation, there is zero input of efficiency in whatever modicum of service is dispensed by the elaborate machinery of caretakers of Haj. The poor pilgrims are hardly worthy of being taken as co-equals in faith by their Saudi hosts. Hence the insulting treatment of them is a given thing in the convoluted sense of service of the Saudis deployed for Haj service.
The police force is expected to be the pivot of the administrative super-structure that the Saudi bigwigs tout with so much pomp. But this police force is recruited—temporarily for Haj duty—from among the mainly Bedouin tribes from the heart of the Saudi desert. It’s a kind of bribe to the tribes to stay in tow behind the ruling Saudi elite. Efficiency or any sense of commitment to their job is the last mini-print on their roster of duties.
Add to this the scourge of a VIP culture that has been snowballing like pestilence among the Saudi royalty. The stories of Saudi princes dazzling the world with their pomp and pelf have been making regular headlines in global news media, especially in the West for which the Saudi royals seem to have an obtrusive soft corner, if not an incurable weakness.
One reads regularly of the Saudi monarch sealing off an entire beach in France for their entourage’s royal comfort; or an entire luxury hotel booked for their pleasure in Washington; or a fleet of 400-plus limousines spawning a deluge on American motorways.
With such a hard-to-disguise weakness for VIP pomp shamelessly paraded on alien soil, who would have the gall to doubt this blight also stalking the holy ritual of Haj—on home soil—and remorselessly shredding the Qur’anic commandment of total equality of believers in the observance of Haj?
The Saudis may ridicule and denounce as political propaganda the outspoken Iranian government for shouting out, in protest, that the Mina tragedy was perpetrated because road outlets and exits were closed on pilgrims to accommodate the VIP movements of Saudi royals. But there’s a lot of grain in what the Iranians are saying: the tragedy could have been prevented and avoided if those enforcing discipline in the movement of pilgrims hadn’t gone berserk under the weight of VIP demands on them.
Now that the damage has been done, many are ready to tout their prescriptions and remedies for ensuring there’s no repeat visitation of such a tragedy in the future. The suggestions range from cutting down on the number of pilgrims to deploying more hands to police various disciplines of Haj.
There’s a lot of merit in the idea of deep cuts in the overall numbers of pilgrims flocking to Haj from all parts of the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. But it wouldn’t pass muster because of two reasons. One, governance in most Muslim states is autocratic and undemocratic. Religious rituals are like a dope—opiate in the famous words of Marx—regularly administered to their cowed down and muzzled citizenry in order to keep them silent and in check. So these governments, understandably, would hate any idea of reducing the quantity of this disguised dope. Moreover, feelings and sentiments of masses could be easily hurt by any move seen as outrageous to their belief of religious freedom.
For another, the Saudis themselves may not like the idea of cutting down on their income from Haj business, especially with the oil prices plummeting to uncomfortable levels for oil producers. The Saudis are already drawing down on their savings to make up for budgetary short-falls. Add to this the obvious discomfort of a Saudi merchant class which is also the most loyal to the rulers among their subjects; why should they be provoked into taking up cudgels with the rulers on what’s to them a bread-and-butter issue.
Ideally, the whole paraphernalia of Haj should be overseen and supervised by a pan-Islamic body representing the Ummah. After all, Haj belongs to all Muslims. Why should it be a monopoly of the Saudis, just because the holy sites are located on a soil controlled by them?
It may be recalled that the Late Muammar Qaddafi, at the peak of his power and popularity, had floated the idea that the Holy sites in Saudi Arabia be administered, collectively, by all the Islamic countries. However, he was quickly denounced and castigated for his maverick idea by Saudi Arabia and its conservative friends.
Factoring in the existing ground realities, one may have no choice but concede the fact that nothing would change unless a sense of service and commitment seeps into the work ethics of the legions of Saudis deployed on Haj service. Their mindset is archaic and doesn’t match the call of the modern times.
A skewed and convoluted mindset isn’t solely a preserve of the minions working for the monarchy and its regal appendages. It’s fundamentally a royal handicap whose baneful ripple effects travel down to the lowliest cadres of minions working at the grassroots level.
There’s no trace of service in this skewed mindset but, instead, an over-arching sense of ownership. They are lords of the land—as far as they can see—and have the God-given right to take everything from it. Visitors to their land are seen as unwelcome intruders who deserved to be shoved around, abused and ill-treated as a matter of right.
This overblown sense of over-lordship has lately been asserting itself in lands beyond the kingdom. The adventure in Syria, bankrolled by the Saudis to get rid of the annoying Assad regime, may have gone haywire and spawned just the opposite of what was sought from it.
But no lessons have been learned from the Syrian imbroglio, nor refuge given to any Syrian fleeing the terror in his land. On the contrary, another—and bloodier—theatre of war and unprovoked aggression has been opened in next door Yemen, where the poor Houthis and their partisans on the run are being butchered without remorse or regret. The royal arrogance and unbridled hubris of power seems riveted on rearranging the geography in Saudi Arabia’s neighborhood to suit its untenable regional and sectarian designs.
So what it boils down is that you may have the most sophisticated, state-of-the-art infrastructure on the ground for Haj services but it will not prevent recurrence of this year’s tragedy at Mina unless there was a matching mindset animating the thought process of those whose hands moved the wheels.
As of now, the Saudi ruling elite gives no indication that it is prepared to shed its outrageous and anachronistic sense of their own importance in the grand scheme of things. As long as these pompous VIPs are ruling the roost, caged in a reprehensible sense of their indispensability in the world order, Haj would anytime be a risky and hazardous undertaking for ordinary and every-day Muslims from around the world. Don’t be surprised if you come across, sooner than later, a new life insurance policy bandied around for wannabe pilgrims to Haj. (The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)
