Despite the ongoing harsh criticism pointed at the Saudi NEOM project, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salaman (MBS) has continued his crackdown on al-Huwaitat tribe with the aim of implementing his controversial $500 billion megaproject.
The Saudi security forces stormed the Al-Huwaitat tribe, near the NEOM project, and deliberately cut off water and power services as part of Suadi efforts to make way for NEOM megacity project. A state of panic prevailed among the community during the raid.
The Specialized Criminal Court has earlier sentenced the elderly man from the Al-Huwaitat tribe, Muhammad Mahmoud Suleiman Al-Taqiqi, known as “Abu Fadwa Al-Huwaiti” to 30 years imprisonment.
A human rights group criticised the prison sentence, saying that “these harsh punishments inflicted on members of the Huwaitat tribe are part of a wider trend of individuals being sentenced to lengthy prison terms simply for rejecting their illegal displacement.”
Along the same line, Saudi Arabia authorities sentenced three members of the al-Huwaiti tribe to death for resisting their eviction.
In 2017, Saudi Crown Prince revealed the NEOM megacity project, that aspires to be the “safest, most efficient, most future oriented, and best place to live and work” in the kingdom.
NEOM’s land mass will extend across the Egyptian and Jordanian borders, rendering NEOM the first private zone to span three countries. The project will be backed by more than $500 billion over the coming years by Saudi Arabia.
However, critics accuse MBS, the driving force behind NEOM, of greenwashing – making grand promises about the environment to distract from reality.
MBS earlier declared that the first city “in an area we call the NEOM Riviera will be there in 2020. However, satellite images showed that a single square had been built in the desert. Only palaces have reportedly been built for the country's royal family.
Experts earlier said that bringing Neom out of the realm of science fiction is proving a formidable challenge, even for a near-absolute ruler with access to a $620 billion sovereign wealth fund.
According to current and former employees interviewed for this story, as well as 2,700 pages of internal documents, the project has been plagued by setbacks, 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.
Dozens of key staff have quit, complaining of a toxic work environment and a culture of wild overspending with few results. And along the way, Neom has become something of a full-employment guarantee for international architects, futurists, and even Hollywood production designers, each taking a cut of Saudi Arabia’s petroleum riches in exchange for work that some strongly suspect will never be used.
Few are willing to speak on the record, citing nondisclosure agreements or fear of retribution; at least one former employee who criticized the project was jailed in Saudi Arabia. (He’s since been released.)
As more of them arrived, foreign employees began describing their experiences with a joke: When you start at Neom, you bring two buckets.
