WASHINGTON: She is the invisible woman at the centre of the storm swirling around embattled World Bank President Paul D. Wolfowitz. Serious, discreet and strong-willed, Shaha Ali Riza has been variously described as Wolfowitz’s “girlfriend”, his “female companion” and, according to Salon.com, his “neoconcubine”.

But little beyond labels is publicly known about the 52-year-old British citizen who has been dating Wolfowitz, a most high-profile and powerful man, for the past seven years. People close to Riza have encouraged her to go public and tell her side of the story, but she remains silent.

When a friend is asked how Riza is feeling at the moment, the friend, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation, says, “What would you expect? How would you like to be portrayed as somebody’s bimbo when you’re a highly educated person who has actually worked hard to make life better for women and civil society in the Middle East and has actually achieved a lot.”

Riza declined to comment for this story, but through interviews with friends and colleagues, the portrait emerges of a Muslim woman who draws her identity from both the Western and Arab worlds, a passionate advocate for women’s rights, reform and democracy in the Middle East. Born in Saudi Arabia and educated at Oxford, she is a well-travelled, multilingual woman whose expertise in the Middle East has impressed academics, think-tankers and other influential Washington figures.

“She’s a very competent person and knows the region well,” says former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who became acquainted with Riza as a board member of the Foundation for the Future, established two years ago to fund pro-democracy efforts.

“Her work on behalf of the Foundation for the Future has been excellent,” adds O'Connor, who specifically mentions Riza’s work on pro-democracy projects in Morocco and Lebanon. “Her knowledge of Arabic has been extremely helpful. She’s an impressive woman.”

Since Riza joined the World Bank in 1997, some colleagues say she has faced criticism for having sharp elbows, an air of arrogance and an obsession with women’s rights, sometimes to the exclusion of other diplomatic considerations. Others admire her energy.

“Shaha is a passionate, articulate, perceptive woman who understands gender issues,” says Jan Piercy, former US executive director at the World Bank. “She gets it – how the barriers to women’s full participation impede a country’s development.”

When Wolfowitz became bank president in 2005, she was required to leave her position as a communications specialist and she went to the Foundation for the Future. The foundation receives support from the State Department. The bank still pays her salary.Piercy and others point out that the World Bank would like to set a high ethical bar for the countries it serves. Nepotism – or the appearance of any kind of non-merit-based favouritism – can undermine a nascent democracy or economy.After recent disclosures that Wolfowitz had directed generous pay and promotions for Riza in her “external assignment”, the drumbeat for his ouster grew in tempo and volume. Amid the din, her friends say, Riza has been reduced to a demeaning caricature as “the girlfriend” whose successes relied on Wolfowitz’s intervention.

She defended herself at a bank ethics committee hearing in April, saying her life and career “were torn asunder” when she was reassigned.

“I was not given a choice to stay,” Riza said, according to a transcript of her statement. She pointed out the “irony of my working to ensure women’s participation and rights through the work of the World Bank and to be then stripped of my own rights by this same institution”.

She told the committee in her memo that she felt discriminated against by the World Bank “not only because I am a woman, but because I am a Muslim Arab woman who dares to question the status quo both in the work of the institution and within the institution itself”.

Despite their different cultural and religious backgrounds – Wolfowitz is Jewish – the two share a formidable self-assurance. Friends also often point to the couple’s intellectual common ground. Both are true believers when it comes to spreading democratic ideals in Arab lands where dictators repress free elections and free expression.

Few details about Riza’s youth or family are publicly known, but acquaintances say she grew up in Libya. She attended Catholic boarding schools in England and on the island of Malta, received a bachelor’s degree from the London School of Economics and a master’s in social studies from St. Antony’s College in Oxford. There she met Turkish Cypriot Bulent Aliriza. They married and had a son.

They moved to the United States. Today Bulent Aliriza is senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of its Turkey Project. He declined to comment for this story.

In the early 1990s, Riza joined the National Endowment for Democracy and is credited there with development of the organisation’s Middle East programme. —Dawn/ The Washington Post News Service

To be continued