Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman boasted in an interview with the Discovery Channel this week that his flagship infrastructure project, the future city of Neom, will “compete with Miami” and help “create a new civilization for tomorrow.”
Bin Salman, commonly known by his initials MBS, addressed widespread criticism of the project by insisting it is “very do-able” and dismissed those expressed concerns that the project was “too ambitious,” vowing, “They can keep saying that and we can keep proving them wrong.”
Neom is the largest project in MBS’s “Vision 2030,” a holistic plan to overhaul the Saudi economy to make it not solely dependent on oil. The Saudi government identified a largely undeveloped site in northwest Saudi Arabia as the future city and MBS announced the project in 2017. At press time, Neom’s developers are predicting the city will house 10 million people and are advertising four major neighborhoods to be built there. The most ambitious of the four is The Line, a “green” skyscraper developers insist will house 5 million people, span 106 miles, generate extremely limited carbon emissions, and offer its residents “five-minute” neighborhoods featuring parks, shops, and other features within the building.
Neom has alarmed human rights advocates for a number of reasons. Among them are unanswered questions about the legal system within the city, and especially The Line, which will not feature cars and effectively trap residents. Another major concern is that, despite MBS’s assurances to the Discovery Channel that the future site of the city is “empty,” it is actually home to about 20,000 members of the indigenous Huwaitat tribe, who are reportedly facing forced removal and execution for opposing their expulsion.
The Discovery Channel’s special on the project – Explore The Line: City of Future in the Deserts of Saudi – NEOM City – aired on the Discovery Channel’s international broadcasts on Monday.
The feature does not appear available on the Discovery Channel’s American website at press time. The documentary-style program celebrated Neom as “the Babylon of the 21st century in the making,” “one of the most anticipated and intriguing projects in the history of city-building,” and “the biggest infrastructure project in history.”
“Neom will compete with Miami in terms of entertainment, culture, sports, and retail,” MBS promised in his interview for the program.
In addition to The Line, Neom’s promoters claim the city will feature three other major neighborhoods: the sports and concert haven Trojena, the luxury seaside resort Sindalah, and the futuristic tech hub Oxagon.
The Crown Prince has suggested that in venues such as Trojena’s, which developers advertise as being home to rowdy music festivals and extreme sports competitions, Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist interpretation of Sharia, or the Islamic law, may not apply. Neom will reportedly even feature alcohol sales.
In his interview, Mohammed bin Salman repeatedly described the future site of Neom as uninhabited.
“North-western Saudi Arabia is untouched,” he asserted. “It’s empty [and] has a mix of topography, from mountains to islands, beaches, dunes, to oases, corals, skiing to diving.”
“Since we have empty place and we want to have a place for 10 million people, then let’s think from scratch,” he suggested.
In reality, the Huwaitat tribe has lived in the area for centuries and strongly opposes the project, which will significantly alter the the region and potentially bring millions of tourists into their homeland.
“For the Huwaitat tribe, Neom is being built on our blood, on our bones,” Huwaitat activist Alia Hayel Aboutiyah al-Huwaiti told the Guardian in 2020. “It’s definitely not for the people already living there! It’s for tourists, people with money. But not for the original people living there.”
Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, an anti-Neom voice in the community shot dead in his home by Saudi authorities for publicly protesting the project, documented forced removals of indigenous people in videos posted to Youtube in 2020.
“They have begun the process of removing people, beginning with surveying homes with the intent of removing people and deporting them from their land,” he narrated. “They arrested anyone who said they’re against deportation, they don’t want to leave, they want to remain [in] their homes, that they don’t want money.”
In May of this year, United Nations human rights experts expressed alarm at the scheduled executions of three othe Huwaitat tribe members for protesting Neom.
“Despite being charged with terrorism, they were reportedly arrested for resisting forced evictions in the name of the NEOM project and the construction of a 170km linear city called The Line,” the UN experts said. “Under international law, States that have not yet abolished the death penalty may only impose it for the ‘most serious crimes’, involving intentional killing. We do not believe the actions in question meet this threshold.”
Elsewhere in his Discovery Channel interview, MBS explained that his initial idea of Neom consisted in creating a central hub and designing spokes of streets outside of the initial circle. One designer of those recruited to discuss the project suggested one line across the desert landscape, an idea that appealed to MBS more.
The crown prince insisted Neom is “very doable and the ideas are amazing.”
“Saudi Arabia wants to create a new civilisation for tomorrow. We encourage other countries to do the same for a better planet. It’s going to be something new and creative,” he urged.
Watch: #SaudiArabia will continue to prove wrong doubters who do not think the Kingdom’s megaprojects, including THE LINE in #NEOM, can be built, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman says. pic.twitter.com/aCLARQentW
— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) June 27, 2023
MBS also claimed the project was on schedule and would be completed in time for the country’s Vision 2030 goals, contradicting multiple reports of squandered money, poor planning, and an insistence from the crown prince on the development of impossible projects.
“According to more than 25 current and former employees interviewed for this story, as well as 2,700 pages of internal documents, the project has been plagued by setbacks,” Bloomberg reported a year ago, “many stemming from the difficulty of implementing MBS’s grandiose, ever-changing ideas—and of telling a prince who’s overseen the imprisonment of many of his own family members that his desires can’t be met.”
The promotion of an infrastructure plan by the Saudi royal family, which leftist President Joe Biden promised to turn into a “pariah” during his 2020 campaign, differs significantly from much of the Discovery Channel’s content, particularly in the United States. In June, for example, the offshoot streaming service Discovery+ debuted a program about child drag queens, with featured boys ranging from ages 12 to 15. Discovery Channel’s parent company, the mammoth conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, sponsored a gay film festival this month featuring a celebration of “queer childhood.”
In Saudi Arabia, “appearing in a dress that violates public decorum and outrages morality may turn into a crime in several cases. The attire that implies imitating women is criminalised under the penal regulations,” legal advisor Mohammed Al Wahaibi explained last year. Saudi sharia also criminalizes all same-sex activity, as any sexual relations outside of marriage are illegal, as are same-sex marriages. Saudi Arabia proscribes the death penality for homosexuality.
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