Ani nie

"What the prince doesn’t say is that there are already thousands of people living in harmony with nature in the same area: a tribal community that has been there for centuries and is now being replaced by the project. One of these tribesmen made videos protesting the evictions — videos of a different sort, you might imagine, than the one M.B.S. has produced. He was shot dead last year in a confrontation with Saudi security forces.

Anyone who has spent time in Saudi Arabia’s existing cities can sympathize with the desire to start anew. They are dusty and ugly. Narrow-minded clerics preside over corrupt bureaucracies that are resistant to change. But the Saudi landscape is already dotted with failed or abandoned megaprojects. Some Saudis have responded to M.B.S.’s film with acid comments about the need to renovate the country’s existing towns and neighborhoods before throwing billions into another Xanadu. Jamal Khashoggi suggested as much in a column written with a co-author a few months before he was murdered.

After M.B.S. finishes his presentation, a warm female voice describes life in the Line. The urban dystopia recedes, and happier images parade before us: misty mountaintops, waves lapping a pristine coast.

The film’s final words, spoken as a multicultural parade of faces flickers across the screen, are deliciously preposterous: “A home to all of us — welcome to the Line.” As I heard it, I couldn’t help wondering about the woman who spoke those words. Would she even consider moving to a remote desert city, to be subject to 24/7 surveillance and the whims of a murderous prince? My guess is that she did what so many others who work for the Saudis have done: spoke her lines, picked up the check and fled."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/28/magazine/saudi-arabia-neom-the-line.html