After a period of deceptive calm following the suppression of the 1979 siege of the Mecca mosque by the radical Islamic cell of Juhayman al-Otaibi, a violent Islamist opposition made its presence felt.
Suppression of press freedom might just be the last straw.
It was the unelected, despotic Saudi regime that, terrified by the implications of the Arab spring, opposed pro-democracy movements in Egypt and elsewhere, and energetically assisted in the brutal suppression of Shia Muslim reformers in Bahrain.
"Dangerously, Blair and others are turning a blind eye to the suppression of human rights, the widespread arrests, the crackdown on freedom of media and the absence of rule of law.
This is not possible in North Korea because of the suppression of any voices adverse to the regime.
"What is adding to the oppression that I feel is that I find that this imprisonment is serving no purpose, it is not resistance and there is no revolution," wrote Abd El Fattah, explaining that while his suppression seemed a necessary hardship under Mubarak, the military council (Scaf) and then Morsi, it now seemed pointless.
The confederation adds that the country "fails to maintain a legal framework adequate to protect the rights of migrant workers" consistent with the convention and an amendment passed this year requiring signatories to enforce the suppression of forced labour.
The fire suppression system – which was tragically almost complete before the blaze, but delayed by the discovery of asbestos – will be finished, along with services threaded through newly exposed ducts and voids.
Soon after the rioting broke out, the Iranian regime seized on the unrest to get back at the British government by condemning what it described as "the violent suppression of the political opposition and the oppressed".
Hardly surprising given England and Ireland have been in a state of almost continuous hostility, from the first Norman invasion, through the settlements under Henry VIII and a period of suppression and famine that led Jonathan Swift to propose the Irish might be better off selling their children as food to the English nobility, even going so far as to suggest a few recipes.
SINCE the suppression of the red-shirt protests in May, official Thailand has been consumed in a frenzy of committee-dom.
