U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walks with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, right, upon her arrival at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Monday, Feb. 15, 2010. (AP Photo/State Department)

(CNSNews.com) – Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has championed women’s rights from Azerbaijan to Zambia, it took her weeks to respond to an appeal to publicly support a campaign by Saudi women to be permitted to drive.

Even then, her comments on Tuesday came not of her own initiative, but in response to a question at a press availability – and after Saudi women activists and journalists had questioned her public silence on the subject.

In her answer, Clinton signaled once again the Obama administration’s sensitivity about the U.S. being seen to be preaching change to a non-Western culture – and to an important U.S. ally. She repeatedly stressed that the driving campaign was coming from Saudi women themselves.

“I am moved by it and I support them, but I want to underscore the fact that this is not coming from outside of their country,” she said.

“We have raised this issue at the highest level of the Saudi government,” Clinton continued. “We’ve made clear our views that women everywhere, including women in the kingdom, have the right to make decisions about their lives and their futures. They have the right to contribute to society and to provide for their children and their families. And mobility, such as provided by the freedom to drive, provides access to economic opportunity, including jobs, which does fuel growth and stability.”

Clinton concluded by reiterating that the campaign was a Saudi one. “I want to, again, underscore and emphasize that this is not about the United States, it’s not about what any of us on the outside say; it is about the women themselves and their right to raise their concerns with their own government.”

Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Institute for Gulf Affairs (IGA), was unimpressed by Clinton’s remarks, calling them an unhelpful “distraction.”

“I wonder why did she suddenly remember women’s rights in Saudi Arabia two years after her appointment as a secretary of state?” he told CNSNews.com late on Tuesday.

Al-Ahmed said Clinton remained “aloof to women rights in Saudi Arabia,” and had not raised pressing issues such as the ban on women voting or running for office. (The kingdom is planning municipal elections in September – for only the second time ever – and says women may not vote or be candidates.)

“Clinton appears to want to be a hero for something she has not worked to achieve,” he said. “I say that because I have been trying with the State Department [to get action] on such issues with no success. In fact, the U.S. and the E.U. have never had a policy to empower women in Saudi Arabia, and they had decades to do it.”

Another Saudi rights advocate welcomed Clinton’s statement, despite it having come “very late.”

“It’s powerful and will give the struggling and destructively marginalized Saudi women a tremendous moral boost,” said Ali Alyami, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia.

“I can only hope that she and the president will continue to speak up publicly and frequently in support of the Saudi women's rights not only to drive, but to obtain their God-given and natural rights,” he told CNSNews.com.

“Empowering Saudi women is in the U.S.’s and the international community’s best interests,” Alyami said, adding that the women were at the forefront of advocating religious tolerance and rejecting religious extremism.

‘Where are you when we need you most?’

Resistance to the driving ban, enforced on the basis of a decade-old fatwa by the Wahhabi-ruled kingdom’s then-mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Baz, has made headlines on and off over a number of years, but especially so over the past month, since a public act of defiance by a mother and IT consultant named Manal al Sharif.

Sharif posted online a video clip of herself driving, and discussing the implications of the ban while doing so. The religious police, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, arrested her and she was held in custody for nine days.

Last Friday, a month after Sharif’s one-woman demonstration, a “drive-in” campaign by Saudi women got underway, with an estimated 40 women getting behind the wheel. A report in the Saudi daily, Arab News, called it a failure, although the organizers had said from the outset it would be open ended and non-confrontational.

Back on June 3, four days after Sharif was released from prison, Saudi Women for Driving – an “informal consortium of Saudi women’s rights activists” facilitated by the activist website change.org – first wrote to Clinton, asking her to “make a public statement supporting our right to drive.”

After hearing nothing, on Monday this week the group wrote again: “As we launch the largest women’s rights movement in Saudi history, where are you when we need you most?” they asked Clinton. “In the context of the Arab Spring and U.S. commitments to support women’s rights, is this not something the United States’ top diplomat would want to publicly support?”

Expressing appreciation for public endorsements from several U.S. congresswomen, the group told Clinton that such a statement coming from her “would be a game changing moment.”

On Monday, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland defended Clinton. “I don't think that anybody can question the secretary’s commitment to universal human rights for women,” she said, adding that Clinton and others were employing “quiet diplomacy” on the matter.

In a phone conversation Friday between Clinton and Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal on a range of Mideast issues, Nuland said, “the subject of driving did come up.”

The “quiet diplomacy” comment prompted yet another response from Saudi Women for Driving.

“Quiet diplomacy is not what we need right now,” the group said in a statement early Tuesday. “What we need is for you, personally, to make a strong, simple and public statement supporting our right to drive.”

Hours later, a CNN reporter asked Clinton about the issue during a press conference at the State Department with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and their Japanese counterparts.

Discrimination

Saudi Arabia’s policies towards women affect them on many levels. Al-Ahmed’s IGA has launched a campaign calling for Saudi Arabia to be banned from international sporting events, including the 2012 Olympic Games, until women are freely allowed to participate.

In the eight summer Olympics in which Saudi Arabia has participated since 1972, it has sent a total of 166 male athletes, and no women. The International Olympic Committee’s charter prohibits “any form of discrimination with regard to a country or a person on grounds of race, religion, politics, sex or otherwise.”

The “Arab spring” protests have largely bypassed the oil-rich kingdom, despite some small-scale demonstrations – most by Shi’ites unhappy about the Saudi-backed crackdown on protests in Bahrain – and an unsuccessful online attempt to launch a “day of rage.”

In a major speech on the protests sweeping parts of the Arab world last month, President Obama drew some criticism for making not one mention of Saudi Arabia.