A Saudi Propaganda Showcase

Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 7:30:39 pm PST

The apartheid religious kingdom of Saudi Arabia knows the value of propaganda—especially well-funded propaganda: Saudi ‘showcase’ opens OPEC to the world.

CALGARY — With oil prices bent on hitting US$100 a barrel as soon as next week, and energy consumers around the world increasingly fretting about where the next oil supplies will come from, cloistered Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, is taking an unusual step: borrowing a page from marketing-savvy Western organizations and putting on a charm offensive on a grand scale.

The occasion is the Third OPEC Summit, hosted by the Kingdom’s oil minister, Ali Al-Naimi, in Riyadh next week. The week-long event culminates with a meeting of the heads of state of OPEC’s 13 member countries on Nov. 17 and 18. (The first summit was held in Algeria in 1975 and the second was hosted by Venezuela in 2000).

Rather than keeping usually arcane discussions about world oil supplies, prices and energy policies behind the scenes, organizers are switching on the spotlight.

They even recruited the global public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, to invite media from around the world. Hundreds of journalists from Canada, the U.S., Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Mexico are converging in Saudi Arabia for the event. They have been promised unprecedented access to OPEC’s decision-makers, oil industry executives, and even “familiarization tours” of Saudi Arabia’s historically off-limits oil installations.

“This meeting looks like it’s a showcase,” said Bob Skinner, a former director of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and an expert on the global oil industry who now works in Calgary. "It’s to be commended. The King probably wants to say, ‘We are not a bunch of jihadis, Al-Qaeda apologists. We are open.’