Saud al Faisal dies

RIYADH:

Former Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al Faisal passed away on Thursday, two Saudi sources said, two months after he was replaced following 40 years in the job.

Prince Saud, who was appointed in 1975, was the world’s longest serving foreign minister when he was replaced on April 29 by Adel al Jubeir, the then ambassador to Washington.

Prince Saud served under four Saudi kings, advancing the Kingdom’s foreign policy, especially after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States.

Prince Saud, a son of King Faisal, was born in 1940 in Taif near Makkah, where in 1989 he helped negotiate the agreement that ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

A degree at Princeton in the 1960s was followed by years at the Petroleum Ministry, where he was taken under the wing of his father’s canny and charismatic oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani. His career as a diplomat began traumatically: the new King Khaled named him as foreign minister following the assassination of Prince Saud’s father Faisal, who had retained the foreign affairs portfolio after being made king in 1962.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 10^th, 2015.