Hillary Clinton voices support for Saudi women drivers

The Envoy

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke up today in support of a campaign by Saudi women to get the right to drive in the conservative, oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdom.

"What these women are doing is brave and what they are seeking is right," Clinton said at a news conference today, Bloomberg News' Flavia Krause-Jackson reported.

"The effort belongs to them," Clinton said of the campaign by dozens of Saudi women last week to drive. "I am moved by it and I support them."

Clinton had earlier raised the matter with her Saudi counterpart, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, in a private telephone conversation last week, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told journalists Monday. Washington is usually careful to keep its disagreements with its oil-rich Persian Gulf ally behind closed doors, but tensions have been growing with Riyadh over its resistance to the Arab Spring democratic uprisings, which Washington has cautiously welcomed.

But Saudi women activists called for Clinton to publicly endorse their campaign.

"Quiet diplomacy is not what we need right now," the group, Saudi Women for Driving, said in a statement, Bloomberg's Jackson wrote. "What we need is for you, personally, to make a strong, simple and public statement supporting our right to drive."

Saudi women campaigners used Facebook and Twitter to rally dozens of Saudi women with international drivers' license to get in their cars and drive on June 17--an organized protest against a ban on women driving in the kingdom, which adheres to the strict Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam. Some who took to their cars then posted videos of themselves driving. The video below was posted by female Saudi blogger Eman Al Nafjian (via the New York Times' the Lede blog):

Another Saudi women's drivers' rights advocate, Maha al-Qahtani, drove around Riyadh for 45 minutes last Friday before police stopped and ticketed her for driving without a license, the New York Times' Robert Mackey reported. "She posted a photograph of the ticket on Yfrog," he added.

(A Saudi woman drives a car as part of a campaign to defy Saudi Arabia's ban on women driving, in Riyadh on Friday, June 17, 2011. Change.org/AP.)