Since the aborted Day of Rage, small-scale protests outside government buildings in Riyadh, Jeddah, and the Eastern Province have become daily events. Protests appear to form spontaneously, aided by the speed of online and cell phone communication. Demonstrators raise cardboard signs demanding employment and the release of political prisoners, many of whom have been held without trial for more than ten years. At night in Awamiyya, heavily veiled women carry candles in memory of martyrs and prisoners and march in the Zaynabiyya procession, the name derived from Zaynab, the Prophet's granddaughter, whose brothers Hasan and Hussein are symbols of Shia martyrdom. The marching women support their Bahraini Shia coreligionists, demand the end of Saudi occupation of Bahrain, and remember young men long disappeared. Women teachers ask for secure jobs. Women students assemble in university halls protesting unfair grading of their exams and calling for the "downfall of the principal."
Protests are becoming common among private sector workers too. Security forces usually turn up, surround protesters, and force them to disperse. But they return another day. Meanwhile, the highest religious authority, Mufti Abd al-Aziz al-Shaikh, tours the country lecturing students about the sinful nature of peaceful protest and the obligation to obey the rulers.
Whatever sins the protesters may be involved in, disobeying rulers isn't one of them. Protesters avoid arrest by supporting the king and demanding that bureaucrats respect his royal decrees. Anger is therefore channelled toward low-level civil servants without challenging the regime directly or insisting on royal intervention. As long as protests do not question the policies of senior members of the royal family, they are tolerated, perhaps to some extent welcomed as a means to vent public anger.
Even minor protests are astonishing in a country where trade unions, civil society, and other modes of organization and mobilization are banned. The press has dubbed the wave of small-scale demonstrations "protest fever." Importantly, women are uniting in pursuit of their interests and rights, suggesting that this is the beginning of a civil rights movement. Saudi women have agitated before-in 1990 some were arrested for violating a driving ban-but the 2011 protests are different. At local and regional levels, women's demands are more fundamental than before. They want employment, the right to vote in municipal elections, and freedom of speech.
But both online and on the street, the regime still has the upper hand. When protesters agitate for the end of the regime, they are shown no mercy. As of this writing, seven demonstrators have been shot and killed by Saudi security forces. In the virtual world, government agents continue to use propaganda, counterarguments, and rumors against calls for protest.
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On March 18 frail King Abdullah-hoping to head off the spread of Egyptian-style protest and to stem frustration at the lack of housing, jobs, health facilities, and other welfare services-announced a package of twenty economic gifts to the people, worth an estimated $93 billion. While many Saudis expected serious political response to their patience and obedience, they received economic largesse.
Autocrats usually give the population what belongs to them, and this is exactly what King Abdullah did. Immediate handouts included an extra two months' salary to public sector employees, promotions for high-ranking military personnel, thousands of new hospital beds, and a minimum wage of approximately $260 per month for the unemployed. (Tight restrictions were later imposed on 18-35 year olds trying to access those funds.) Benefits promised over the next five years include 500,000 houses and 60,000 new jobs in security and military services. The expanded recruiting of soldiers and police and lavishing of rewards on security personnel who policed the protests all seem geared toward militarizing Saudi youth.
