Mick Hartley

I’m not too keen on Starbucks myself, but this is ridiculous:

RIYADH, 5 February 2008 — A Saudi mother of three, who works as a business partner and financial consultant for a reputable company in Jeddah, didn’t expect that a trip to the capital to open the company’s new branch office would have her thrown behind bars by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

Yara, a petite 40-year-old woman, was in tears yesterday after she narrated to Arab News her encounter with a commission member that ended in high drama.

Yara, who has been married for 27 years, said she spent several hours in the women’s section of Riyadh’s Malaz Prison, was strip-searched, ordered to sign a confession that she was in a state of “khulwa” (a state of seclusion with an unrelated man) and for hours prevented from contacting her husband in Jeddah.

Her crime? Having a cup of coffee with a colleague in a Starbucks.

Yara said she arrived in the capital yesterday morning from Jeddah to check on the company’s new office.

“The minute I came into the office my colleagues told me that we have an issue with the electricity company and that we do not have power but that it would be back on in half an hour,” she said.

As they were waiting, they decided to go to the ground floor of the building to have a cup of coffee in the family section of Starbucks. Family sections are the only places where men and women can sit together in establishments in Saudi Arabia. Officially, these sections are for families only, but in practical terms these sections — usually in international chains like Starbucks — become the only places where unrelated men and women can be comfortable that they won’t be harassed by commission members.

But yesterday Yara and her colleague found themselves in trouble with the commission. One moment they were sitting together discussing brand equity and sovereign wealth funds; the next moment she found herself in commission custody.

Shortly after they took their coffee and Yara opened her laptop, a member of the commission approached the two and demanded the man step outside.

“Then (the commission member) came to me and said: ‘You need to come with us. This man is not a relative,’” she said.

When she told the commission member that she wanted to contact her husband by phone, he refused.

“I am the government,” Yara quoted him as saying. He then ordered her to come with him. […]

Inside the prison, Yara recounts being taken to a cell with a one-way mirror. On the other side was a sheikh.

“I could not see him because there was a dark window,” she said, adding that each time she paused he would reprimand her, telling her what she did was wrong. “He kept on telling me this is not allowed.”

Yara told the sheikh that her husband knew where she was and what she was doing. He then started writing a report. Another pre-written confession was fingerprinted, she said. She pleaded with prison authorities to contact her husband.

“They would not let me contact my husband,” she said. “I told them… please… my husband will have a heart attack if he does not know what has happened to me.”

She was not given a phone to call her husband. She was not given access to a lawyer. “They stripped me,” she said. “They checked that I had nothing with me and threw me in the cell with all the others.”

Meanwhile, Yara’s husband Hatim, an executive director of a prominent company, was in Jeddah when he received a phone call. “My friend contacted me and told me that the commission had captured my wife,” he said.

He booked the next flight to Riyadh and, after some strings were pulled, Yara was out of jail.

“I look at this as if she had been kidnapped by thugs,” said Hatim. “There’s really nothing else to it … I know this has nothing to do with the country, but these (people) are thugs. Unfortunately, they told her that they are ‘the government’ so she could not resist.”

The Syrian colleague was still in custody by the time Arab News went to press. He is a senior financial analyst, who is described by acquaintances as a devout Muslim whose mother teaches Qur’an recitation to children.