Five of the Mutaween were arrested on Monday following recent deaths. Ahmed al-Bulawi, a fifty year old man, died during interrogation by the Mutaween. Twenty eight year old Salman al-Huriasy was killed while being detained by them. Another woman was seriously injured because she jumped from a four story building to avoid the Mutaween.

        The Mutaween are religious police employed by the Saudi government to enforce its civic values. The official title of the service is the “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”  They enforce Islamic Sharia law follow through its broad discretionary powers. It also ensures that the deeply religious codes are followed. For example, it inspects clothing to make sure that people dress appropriately and that shops are closed for prayer.  According to the BBC, there are 3,500 government sponsored officers, and thousands of other volunteers to supplement its force.

         The religious police have been criticized since March 2002 when fifteen schoolgirls were killed in a fire. Male rescuers were prohibited from attempting to rescue the girls because they were unveiled. The Mutaween has since relaxed its broad enforcement techniques. For example, they have stopped beating women with sticks, solely because their faces were showing.

 

        The two men who died were Ahmed Bulawi and Salman al-Hurisasy. Bulawi was arrested by the Mutaween for “illegal seclusion with a female, who was not his wife.” He was in a car with a woman. It turned out that the woman was a relative of his wife. During the interrogation process of the Mutaween, fifty year old Bulawi died of a heart attack. Al- Hurisasy was arrested for offenses relating to alcohol. According to his family, he was dragged out of his house to be interrogated while the Mutaween beat him.  He died during detention from his wounds.

The Saudi government has tried to silence the growing uprising. The Saudi state news agency released a report that the leader of the religious police would be very firm on prosecuting its members. He stated that he has created committees to review procedures and raise his control on the agency to reduce the number of errors committed.

The difficulty with the organization is the fact that there is no membership requirements to become a member of the Mutaween. Anyone can become a member at any time, making it impossible to stop an impostor from enforcing the vague mandate of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.  Therefore, the offenses cannot be dealt with unless the Mutaween has strict membership requirements, and its discretionary power of the religious police is limited. Otherwise, people like Bulawi and al-Hurisasy may continue to die. 

BBC News. Saudi hold five religious police. 4 June 2007.
BBC News. Saudi Minister rebukes religious police. 4 November 2002.
Reuters. Saudi religious police hold review after deaths. 6 June 2007.
Yahoo News. Saudi religious police quizzed over man’s death. 3 June 2007.

June 5 will mark the 40th anniversary of the 1967 War between Israel and its Arab neighbors.  Before the end of the war, Israeli military forces occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza.  Throughout the occupation, Israelis and Palestinians experienced 40 years of economic hardships and fierce fighting between themselves and each other.

         The Moroccan police made 14 arrests related to a major smuggling ring in Western Sahara. The arrests were made after a shootout which occurred in the city of Dajla in southern Western Sahara. It was the result of a three month investigation to discover a major gang responsible for smuggling immigrants into the Canary Islands. The group’s leader, however, escaped by boat to Mauritius.
       

    The UN estimates that 1.2 million Iraqi refugees have entered Syria since the beginning of the Iraq war.  However, the Syrian government’s numbers put the number of refugees to be higher.  As violence increased in Iraq in the recent months, there has also been an increase in unaccompanied women refugees and women-headed households entering Syria.  These women, many supporting families, are living in a country where the cost of living and unemployment rates are both increasing.  Many of these women find that their only marketable asset is their bodies.  They face a difficult choice – engage in prostitution or be forced to return to Iraq.   

        Yemen has closed two independent news networks. The networks www.al-shoura.net and www.aleshteraki.net were shut down because they did not follow government regulations. They were shut down without a court ruling, and are the latest in the government’s growing restrictions on the information about the conflict. Previously, it has silenced television and radio stations, as well as NGOs.  Yemen Journalist Syndicate Secretary-General Marwan Dammaj said, “The Ministry of Information has issued instructions to journalists and editors not to cover the war in Sa’ada in a way that runs counter to the official media’s reporting.”