Friday, November 2, 2018
In the Aftermath of Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder, Saudi Arabia Enters a Dangerous Period
By Dexter Filkins
After a month, it seems we finally have a good picture of Jamal Khashoggi’s last moments. In early October, the Saudi journalist and Washington Postcolumnist entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and was immediately descended upon by members of the Saudi government hit squad sent to kill him. They strangled him to death, according to Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, Irfan Fidan. Within seven minutes of walking through the consulate’s front door, Khashoggi was dead. Apparently relying on music to soothe his conscience, the forensic scientist among the assassins then sawed up and possibly destroyed his body. Then they fled the country.
Yet for all the details that have emerged about Khashoggi’s murder, there are still crucial elements of the crime we don’t know—namely, where the body, or what was left of it, was disposed of, and whether Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in whose employ many of the assassins worked, ordered or condoned the killing. How can we find out?
Here’s how: Force the Saudi government to make available Mubarak Mohammed al-Otaibi, the consul-general, who was in his office at the time of the murder. Otaibi was present during Khashoggi’s murder but apparently did not take part. “Do this outside,’’ Otaibi complained to the killers, according to a Turkish official interviewed by the newspaper Yeni Safak. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”
Otaibi left Turkey on October 16th and hasn’t been seen since. The Turkish authorities asked the Saudis to extradite eighteen suspects in connection to the hit squad; the Saudis refused and arrested the men themselves. But what about Otaibi? Of him, the Saudis have been silent. Otaibi is a key: he’s an eyewitness to Khashoggi’s killing. He may have had advance knowledge of the plan, and he might know who ordered it.
M.B.S. and his cohorts in Riyadh seem utterly determined to bury the truth; they have lied repeatedly about Khashoggi’s murder and their government’s involvement in it. The Saudi government’s latest implausible story is that it doesn’t know where Khashoggi’s body is, even though Turkish officials say the killers dispatched a “local collaborator” to get rid of it. Otaibi might be able to shed light on that, too.
Why was the Saudi regime so determined to silence Khashoggi? Perhaps more than any other Saudi, Khashoggi was rooting out the truth about M.B.S.’s draconian ways and sharing it with the world. A few weeks before he was killed, Khashoggi sent me an e-mail urging me to write about M.B.S.’s campaign of arrests. “You will notice the mockery of justice,’’ he wrote. “I’ll be in Istanbul but will take your call.”
In the past year, M.B.S. has embarked on an unprecedented crackdown on domestic dissent, arresting hundreds of journalists, clerics, and women’s-rights activists—anyone who dared to smudge the rosy image of M.B.S. as a benevolent visionary. Not even groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International know for sure how many political prisoners are in Saudi jails. In an interview just after Khashoggi disappeared, M.B.S. told Bloomberg that fifteen hundred Saudis had been arrested in the past three years for such things as “terrorism” and “extremism.” “We are trying to get rid of extremism and terrorism without a civil war,” M.B.S. said.
In one of his final e-mails to me, Khashoggi attached a copy of an indictment in an especially egregious case—that of Salman al-Odah, a cleric in the city of Riyadh. Odah is a well-known and popular critic of the Saudi government who came to notice during the first Gulf War, when he chastised Saudi leaders for inviting American troops into the country. In the nineteen-nineties, he spent several years in prison for allegedly inciting a rebellion against the monarchy. In recent years, Odah has preached a moderate line. Following the 9/11 attacks, he publicly condemned Osama bin Laden for killing innocents and exhorting other Muslims to follow and do likewise. (“My brother Osama,” he said. “Will you be happy to meet God Almighty carrying the burden of these hundreds of thousands or millions of victims on your back?”) In recent years, his criticisms went little further than urging the Saudi monarchy to launch democratic reforms. On Twitter, his Arabic account has fourteen million followers. “My father had a legitimacy independent of the state,” his son, Abdullah Alaoudh, told me. “That’s what the monarchy fears.”
The thirty-seven-count indictment of Odah is basically a series of generalities and accusations without evidence. It accuses him of such things as “cynicism and sarcasm about the government’s achievements,” and “saying that the Saudi leadership monopolizes wealth and is the cause of poverty” in the country. It charges Odah with funding terrorism but offers no facts to back that up.
Indeed, the best anyone can decipher is that Odah’s crime was failing to send out a government-written tweet in support of the Saudi blockade of Qatar, launched with the help of the United Arab Emirates last year. The Saudi and Emirati campaign, apparently aimed at toppling the Qatari government, was—not unlike the indictment of Odah—unsupported by evidence. It was roundly denounced by the United States and much of the rest of the world. “There is not a single allegation against al-Odah of violence or incitement to violence,” Adam Coogle, of Human Rights Watch, said. Even so, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
By Saudi standards, the case against Odah is unexceptional. According to Human Rights Watch, in the past year, the Saudi government detained at least thirteen women’s-rights activists and at least sixty clerics. Remember the mass detention, in late 2017, of some two hundred and fifty prominent Saudis, including some of the richest people in the world, in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh? The operation, orchestrated by M.B.S. himself, was intended to force the detainees to surrender large parts of their fortunes. Details are sketchy, but it appears that some of the detainees were tortured. At least one man, Ali al-Qahtani, a retired general, died of a heart attack after being subjected to harsh interrogation.
Most of those held inside were released, but more than fifty are still inside. One of them is Prince Turki bin Abdullah, the former governor of Riyadh province. According to a person with ties to Abdullah, the family has been stripped of its wealth and allowed to speak occasionally to Abdullah over the telephone. “We don’t know where he is,” the person told me. There have been persistent rumors that Abdul Aziz bin Fahd—M.B.S.’s cousin and a son of King Fahd—is dead.
It seems increasingly clear that the Trump Administration, which placed M.B.S. at the center of its Middle East strategy, will do nothing to resist the Saudis’ stonewalling of the effort to find the truth about Jamal Khashoggi’s death. Recently, a senior member of the Trump Administration told me that, inside the government, M.B.S. is widely regarded as reckless—but that it was difficult to imagine that Trump would try to push him out. “Trump’s not going to budge,” the official told me.
That puts matters in the hands of the Saudis themselves. While there have been some hints of discontent within the royal family, there so far appears to be no serious consideration of removing M.B.S.—not yet, anyway. In the process of purging the royal court of rivals, the crown prince has made many powerful enemies, some of whom are undoubtedly seething with thoughts of revenge. Even if—especially if—M.B.S. hangs on to his position, it seems likely that the Saudi royal family, and Saudi Arabia more generally, are entering a dangerous period. Bruce Riedel, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, told me, “There is no political way out, except through violence.”
#KhashoggiMurder - NOT ONLY #KHASHOGGI - ''License to Kill''
By Larry Diamond
“You can’t betray [us] and not get punished for it. Anyone, even those still alive, will reap the consequences. Anyone. It is a matter of time.”
—A currently serving murderous dictator
Any notion that Khashoggi’s murder was a “rogue operation” of interrogation gone awry will similarly melt in the face of withering evidence and logic. You don’t bring the kind of 15-member team of security officials—including a leading expert in forensic medicine—to conduct an interrogation unless you intend it to end with murder that must be thoroughly covered up. You don’t immediately scrub and repaint the scene of the interrogation if there was no crime to cover up. And, if the Turkish intelligence accounts are true, you don’t bring a bone saw to an “interrogation” unless you not only intend to murder the detainee but also to dismember his body to enable inconspicuous evacuation of the remains from the scene of the crime, and indeed the country. Moreover, as former CIA Director John Brennan observed on Meet the Press last Sunday, it is inconceivable that such a complex, heinous and brazen international criminal operation could have been mounted without the knowledge of the now de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the audacious and impulsive young man who appears to be making all the country’s key decisions, foreign and domestic—Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Since being elevated to his current position in June 2017, the 33-year-old Crown Prince has alternately appeared as both reformer and repressor, an agent of badly needed social modernization and a throwback to royal despotism. His efforts to rein in the vast social power of the extreme Wahhabi religious establishmentraised the prospect of a gradual but sweeping transformation toward greater openness, rationality, moderation, and innovation. But his ruthless power grabs—his rapid, driven ascent at barely half the age of royal competitors, breaking all the rules of Saudi royal succession; his detention and alleged coercive interrogation of a wide swath of the Saudi elite shortly after taking power; and his merciless, indiscriminate use of Saudi military force in Yemen, spreading death and displacement on a scale that could amount to war crimes—have suggested a darker, Shakespearian streak: breathtaking personal ambition tinged with total and ruthless resolve. Well before Khashoggi’s murder, some worried that the international persona of the charming, tech-savvy prince might mask a chilling, psychopathic streak.
The quote atop this article, however, is not from Mohammed bin Salman. It comes from another absolute autocrat who has made a practice of killing his political enemies and rivals abroad. If you just guessed Vladimir Putin (or Kim Jong Un) it was a reasonable conjecture. But, as reported by the BBC, the words were uttered in January 2014 by Rwandan President Paul Kagame, at a prayer breakfast shortly after Rwanda’s former external intelligence chief, Col Patrick Karegeya, was strangled to death in his Johannesburg hotel room. Karegeya, who had fled to exile in South Africa after breaking with Kagame in 2008, had (according to the BBC) been advising the governments of South Africa and Tanzania as they were sending troops to a UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo that was battling M23, a rebel group widely believed to be supported by Kagame and his military. Other Rwandan officials also engaged in thinly concealed gloating about Karegeya’s murder, including the defense minister, who declared, “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog, and the cleaners will wipe away the trash.”
Notwithstanding the fawning admiration he has earned from international development agencies, and from former Western democratic leaders turned development philanthropists like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Kagame has proven himself to be a murderous thug. A stunning investigation by The Globe and Mail revealed, as has other international reporting, what appears to be a systematic campaign of the Rwandan dictatorship to track down and murder perceived enemies at home and abroad, leaving fearful surviving dissidents to hide their whereabouts and frequently change their locations. The campaign has wiped out “a succession of prominent critics and campaigners, judges and journalists,” who “have been beaten, beheaded, shot and stabbed” to death “after crossing Kagame.”
Western democracies cannot hide behind a veil of ignorance. They have known for years of Kagame’s penchant for killing his enemies abroad, and of his destructive covert military interventions in the DRC and elsewhere in Africa. They have even occasionally warned exiled Rwandans at risk. But of how much value are warnings when the legitimating embrace of diplomacy, aid, and international esteem continues unabated? After Scotland Yard tipped him off to a Rwandan assassination plot against him in 2011, a Rwandan dissident told a British journalist, “You just feel anything can happen, especially when nothing is done at the international level against Kagame. It is like he has a license to kill.”
And of course that is precisely what Vladimir Putin perceives he has had, while leaving a trail of vengeance and violence that includes more than two-dozen murders and mysterious deaths in at least half a dozen foreign countries. As with Kagame, the list of absurdly suspicious deaths, assassinations, and assassination attempts has piled up with impunity over the now nearly two decades of Putin’s control of the Kremlin and its far-reaching—and clearly revitalized—intelligence apparatuses.
These have featured not only mafia-style methods of execution—people pushed from balconies or gunned down in broad daylight—but also a bizarre, terrorizing succession of attacks by poison, an extremely painful method of elimination that dates far back in Russian history, was perfected in the Soviet communist era, and was then taken to radioactive extreme under Putin. The known instances have included the 2006 assassination in London of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who drank a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonioum-210 by two Russian agents; the 2003 attempted murder-by-poisoning of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko, who was campaigning not just for democracy but also to pull Ukraine out of the orbit of Russian domination; the sudden death by suspected poisoning of Alexander Perepilichny, who had fled to the UK after assisting an international investigation of Russian money-laundering; the poisoning attempts on the life of the young journalist and dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza, a leading advocate of the Sergei Magnitsky Act that now empowers the United States to impose targeted sanctions on Russian leaders who violate human rights; and the nearly successful nerve-agent attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain earlier this year.
As David Filipov of the Washington Post documented in 2017, many of Putin’s other enemies have died in more conventional ways, including: Denis Voronenkov, an opposition politician and fierce Putin critic who was shot and killed in Kiev in 2017 after fleeing to Ukraine the previous year; Boris Nemtsov, perhaps the most potent political opponent of Putin, who was gunned down just steps from the Kremlin in February 2015; Boris Berezosky, the billionaire oligarch exiled in Britain, who was found dead in the locked bathroom of his British home in 2013 with a noose around his head; human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who was shot near the Kremlin in 2009; the accountability whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who was brutally beaten to death in police custody in 2009; Anna Politkovskaya, a crusading Russian reporter for Novaya Gazeta, who wrote a book accusing Putin of turning Russia into a police state and then became one of its victims, shot and killed at point-blank range in an elevator in her apartment building; and Sergei Yushenkov, a former military officer and then opposition leader who was gunned down in Moscow while gathering evidence he believed would prove that Putin’s government was behind the spectacular 1999 apartment bombings—blamed on Chechen terrorists—that paved the way for Putin’s consolidation of power.
Putin, like Kagame, has made no secret of his determination for revenge against those who betray him. In 2010, he warned, “traitors will kick the bucket, believe me.” At the same time, of course, Russia has consistently denied any knowledge of or responsibility for the growing pattern of Putin’s critics and enemies dying (or nearly so) in suspicious circumstances abroad.
In a trenchant and tragically clairvoyant Washington Post column after Mohammed bin Salman’s “Night of the Long Knives” last November (during which he arrested much of the established Saudi elite), Khashoggi compared the Crown Prince to Vladimir Putin. Decrying the country’s staggering corruption, waste, and inequality, Khashoggi welcomed the declared campaign against corruption but warned that (as in Russia) it could only succeed with transparent investigations and a rule of law. The Crown Prince, he insisted, could not be “above the standard he is now setting for the rest of his family, and for the country.”
Now we face a great test of whether an American resident—a journalist, a public intellectual, and a forthright dissident, to whom America gave both refuge and inspiration—can be murdered in a third country with impunity by a ruler and a state that have brazenly acted above the law. With every new incident of international murder and intimidation, our values, our commitment to freedom, and our national interest in a world governed by law are under challenge. We must make it clear not only to the Saudi monarchy but to all the world’s dictators that they cannot murder their opponents with impunity. They must know that there will be consequences, and that we will hold them personally responsible.
This is why the Congress broadened the original 2012 Magnitsky law by passing in 2016 a Global Magnitsky Act that provides for targeted sanctions—travel bans and asset freezes—on gross violators of human rights. These provisions must now be applied to all Saudi officials responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, to Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his senior leadership, and to other rulers in Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere who make a practice of murdering their opponents at home and abroad. And our democratic allies in Europe—beginning with Britain, which (like the United States) has welcomed into its banks and real estate markets huge volumes of ill-gotten wealth from dictatorships—must join in imposing targeted sanctions.
All of this must be based on evidence, and if the Trump Administration will not seek it and provide it, Congress must demand it and subpoena it. For a time in the 1970s, it was Congress that took the lead in pressing for a new American resolve to defend human rights in the world and demand accountability for violations. It made a difference then, helping to ignite a period of sweeping global democratic change. Now, Congress must take the lead again.
It was only when the United States and Europe replied to the Skripal assassination attempt earlier this year with much more vigorous diplomatic and personal sanctions that Putin might have begun to get the message that continuing his reign of murder abroad would cost him dearly. It is still not costing him enough, but the precedent is now there. If dictators can murder any citizen who crosses them any place in the world, then the rule of law is not secure anywhere, and none of us are safe.
#AasiaBibiVerdict - In Asia Bibi blasphemy violence, Imran Khan faces the Frankenstein’s monster
By GUL BUKHARI
Not too long ago, Imran Khan had actively supported the violent protests against the Nawaz Sharif government.
Blasphemy accused Asia Bibi’s acquittal and final release, after more than nine years in prison, by the Supreme Court has plunged Pakistan into chaos.
The Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a Barelvi group led by cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi who is known for his extremely profane language and the 22-day long Faizabad Dharna of 2017, mounted protests in every major city to oppose the verdict. In video messages, the TLP leaders called for murder of the three judges on the bench that acquitted Asia Bibi, and urged Muslim generals to rebel against the ‘Qadiani’ Bajwa, a derogatory term for Ahmadis, and oust the ‘Jew’ Imran Khan.
TLYR calls on guards, cooks, drivers of judges to kill them tonight. 2/2
Where on earth is Govt?? pic.twitter.com/90JXX83csc
It has been a long wait for Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman who worked as a farm picker in Nankana, Punjab. She was accused of blasphemy and swiftly imprisoned in June 2009. In 2010, a trial court convicted her and handed out death sentence for disrespecting Prophet Muhammad. Mother of five young children, she has languished in prison since then. Her appeal was rejected by the Lahore High Court in 2014, but she finally got justice from the Supreme Court Wednesday.
Asia’s case gained international spotlight because of Pakistan’s human rights record. Just this year, the European Union tied trade access to her case.
The protests turned into grotesque rioting and arson. Schools had to shut down and many children in different cities were stuck because half of the roads were blocked by the TLP and the other half by local police.
In Karachi and two other cities in Sindh, the violence snowballed into Shia-Sunni fight with two dead in Karachi by night. Government ministers and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan remained conspicuous by their absence the entire day.
Clerics of other religious parties joined the chorus with all the Deobandi, Ahle Hadees, and Barelvi groups denouncing the judgment and announcing that they will join the protests Friday onwards. These groups were joined by two major religio-political parties, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) and the Jamaat-e-Islami.
There was no statement from the military or its Twitter-happy spokesman either. Media had been given instructions the previous night on ‘no coverage’ of any protests – and it complied. There was a complete media blackout in Pakistan for the last 48 hours. However, social media was flooded with details.
At nightfall, finally, PM Imran Khan addressed the nation. Within two months of coming to power, his five years of politics of dharna, incitement to violence, blasphemy campaigns, civil disobedience, disruption to traffic and closing down of different cities had come to bite him back. He first appealed and then threatened the TLP for its actions. Not too long ago, Imran had actively supported the TLP’s violent protests against the Nawaz Sharif government.
Social media reacted immediately, putting out clips of Imran and his ministers’ past videos of violent speeches, incitement to violence, and their supporters rampaging the Pakistan Television building and Parliament.
Also read: Imran Khan got Saudi loan for ignoring Khashoggi murder, but he still can’t woo investors
They asked: Has all this dawned on you only now because you are PM? Next came the video of President of Pakistan Arif Alvi. A year ago, he too was on the roads of Karachi saying, “sara karachi band hoga, koi gari nahi chalaygi”.
Ironically, Imran Khan in his seven-minute address to nation Wednesday said exactly what his government was trying to hide from the Pakistani public. In the video, the PM ended up saying what the TLP leaders had been saying all day, the things that the media had blacked out: that General Bajwa was a ‘Qadiani’ and the army should rebel, and that protesters had called for the murder of the judges. But interestingly, Imran Khan skipped any mention of him being called a ‘Jew’ and demands for his ouster.
After going MIA the whole day, Imran Khan was now threatening use of force and promised protection of life and property. But even after his speech, violence, loss of life, mayhem in schools, colleges, and markets continued all night and well into Thursday. At the time of writing this piece, the situation remains volatile with one more death reported on the Lahore-Islamabad motorway.
The politics around the issue of blasphemy that Imran Khan used incessantly during his days in the opposition has now turned into the proverbial Frankenstein’s monster. His opposition politics was clearly supported by the establishment then – clear from the way the army chief refused to come to the aid of government to control the TLP in 2017, and how a military general distributed money among the goons at the end of the ‘protest’. Imran’s opposition politics inevitably emboldened these radical voices. At that time, all the sane voices had warned against this fire of dangerous politics – but none heeded. But the fact that it would come back to haunt the nation so soon was entirely unexpected.
A reading of the historic judgment by the Supreme Court vindicates everything that human rights campaigners have asserted for years: that she was falsely accused and it was a malicious suit arising out of a dispute between a Muslim farm picker and her. The fight was over the Muslim woman refusing to drink water brought by her because she was a Christian.
None of the earlier judgments had focused on the dispute itself, overlooking the countless holes and contradictions in the prosecution’s case. Justice Asif Saeed Khosa went far enough to say that the Muslim women committed blasphemy by disparaging Asia Bibi’s religion, book and God. For the first time any member of the legal community, no less a judge, has not only focused on this point, but also made it a part of his judgment – a point I had made in my article in 2011.
While we heave a sigh of relief over the verdict, Pakistan risks burning in the fire of religious hatred, use of religion for politics, and the clear prospect of sectarian wars.
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