Dispatch: The Saudi Government’s Global Campaign to Silence Its Critics

By Sarah Aziza

Mohammed bin Salman’s effort to burnish his image as a modernizing force of liberal reform knows no boundaries.

on the morning of August 18, 2017, Rana deboarded her Saudia Airlines flight in Munich, Germany, bleary-eyed and clutching a small leather bag. Her husband, a near-stranger whom she had married two days earlier, in Riyadh, with the stroke of her father’s pen, marched ahead of her. As the couple approached passport control, he reluctantly handed Rana her passport, which he had taken before landing. Rana stole a glance inside to insure that the note she had scribbled in the airplane’s bathroom was still tucked between the newly minted pages. The line crawled forward. Rana’s heart pounded. A German officer processed her husband’s paperwork, then waved Rana over. Rana slid her documents to the official on the other side of the glass window. Inside, a short plea, written in English, read, “i want to apply for asylum.” And then, in shaky German, “mein Mann weiß nicht”—“my husband doesn’t know.”

The moment had been a lifetime in the making. Rana’s earliest memories were dominated by the violent fits of her father, whose abuse once drove her mother to run away, with Rana, then just a toddler, in tow. The experience served as an early lesson on Saudi Arabia’s patriarchal norms. Rana’s mother, under pressure from her family, abandoned her hopes for a divorce and returned to her husband. Later, she explained her reasoning to Rana: it is better to suffer abuse inside a respectable marriage, she said, than to live as a woman in disgrace.

At school, Rana chafed under long hours of religious instruction, which taught her to fear hellfire and respect men as fundamentally superior. At Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University, a brief phase of online activism landed her at the disciplinary office, where the administration threatened police action. Later, while trying to help a friend suffering from domestic violence, Rana was rebuffed by authorities for attempting to file a police report. After college, Rana’s hopes for a career as an English translator were repeatedly blocked by her father, who considered the prospect shameful. She was eventually able to start a small phone-repair business with several female friends, but she was soon confronted by her worst nightmare: her parents arranged for her marriage. On their first meeting, her young suitor informed her that he’d expect to start having children immediately, and that she would devote herself to child-rearing. “I saw him, and I saw the end of my life,” she told me.

Rana, who was twenty-four at the time, was still unwilling to surrender. “I realized there would be no future for me in Saudi Arabia,” she recalled. “I had no choice but to find a way out.” In this, she made her new husband an unwitting accomplice: he agreed to take her on a honeymoon, giving her an alibi to obtain a passport and travel documents—something no Saudi woman can do without the permission of her wali, or male guardian. He’d even been accommodating when she suggested that they travel to Germany, which she’d identified, after extensive research, as the best asylum destination in Europe.

Moments after handing over her passport in Munich—on her first day outside of her native country—Rana was escorted away from her husband, who quickly grew hysterical. For the next fourteen hours, she was shuttled between various holding facilities, each packed with migrants from around the world, before being assigned a room in a nearby halfway house. Collapsing into bed that night, numb with exhaustion and relief, her mind circled a single thought. “I had left behind a life that others chose for me, and, finally, I was choosing for myself,” she told me. “I thought, This choice is freedom.”

But, even as Rana slipped beyond the stifling grip of her husband and father, she unwittingly placed herself in the crosshairs of a new, more formidable foe. Back home, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince popularly known as M.B.S., had come to dominate the Saudi royal court and was working tirelessly to project an image of himself as a liberal reformer. The young monarch had spent billions on an international P.R. campaign, touting a message of a Saudi renaissance, in which his subjects would enjoy unprecedented freedom and prosperity. This new Saudi Arabia would, in turn, become an “investment powerhouse” for global capital and a respected peer among the world’s most powerful economies. The crown prince frequently played up themes of women’s empowerment as evidence of his country’s liberal awakening, promising to increase the female workforce to thirty per cent by 2030 and to allow women to drive for the first time in the country’s history.

The crown prince’s ambitious agenda won him acclaim from many in the West, who hailed him as the harbinger of a more moderate, even democratic, Arabian Gulf. However, at home, M.B.S. was seizing power through blatantly autocratic means. By the end of 2017, about a year before the murder of the prominent Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, M.B.S. had locked up hundreds of people, including civilians and members of the royal family, in an effort to clamp down on opposition, both real and imagined. At the same time, the crown prince was overseeing a quiet campaign of suppression of Saudis abroad, working through Embassies and back channels to silence them through blackmail, intimidation, and forced repatriation. These efforts were not reserved for vocal dissidents like Khashoggi, who fled Saudi Arabia around the same time that Rana did. Increasingly, the Saudi government was widening its net of censorship and harassment to include private Saudi citizens who possessed little or no political profile.

The reason appeared to be a matter of image control: though Rana had refrained from publicizing her critical opinions of the government, she still represented a troubling demographic for M.B.S. The number of Saudi asylum seekers had increased dramatically since the beginning of the crown prince’s rise—from five hundred and seventy-five cases, in 2015, the year he emerged on the political scene, to more than twelve hundred, in 2017. (This was in addition to a swelling number of Saudis who, like Khashoggi, opted for self-exile under separate visa processes.) The implicit critique of this exodus was enough to stoke the ire of the crown prince. Rana would soon learn what the case of Khashoggi later taught the world: the young monarch’s obsessive need to control his reputation heeded no national boundaries.

It began with a WhatsApp message that appeared on Rana’s phone a few weeks after her arrival in Germany. She had been moved to a small town in the northeast of the country, where she was staying in a complex reserved for refugee families. The message came from one of Rana’s friends and former business partners in Riyadh, informing her that the small phone-repair shop she’d helped launch was in trouble with the government. On a recent trip to the bank, the partner had been informed that Rana’s name had been flagged; as a result, authorities had frozen the company’s assets. The news puzzled Rana, who had painstakingly set her affairs in order before fleeing Saudi Arabia, registering at two separate government offices, including the Ministry of Commerce and Investment, to grant power of attorney to her co-founders. Rana’s associates hired a lawyer, who informed them that, while their paperwork was in order, the authorities would not reverse their decision. “Everything they tried failed,” Rana said. “The authorities just insisted I had to go to the Embassy to fix the problem.” (Rana’s name, as well as the names of other women in this story, have been changed to protect their safety.)

The Saudi state frequently uses finances and other “national services” as leverage to lure its citizens into face-to-face meetings with government officials. One Saudi asylum seeker, who fled to Frankfurt, in the summer of 2018, received a text alert, as her plane touched down, that the government had frozen her bank account. She was later notified that her National Identification Card and all the privileges afforded to Saudi citizens, including passport renewals, e-banking, and residency permits, had been revoked. She was instructed to return to Saudi Arabia to fix the issue.

Saudi authorities have also used bank activity as a way of locating citizens, Adam Coogle, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, who focusses on Saudi Arabia, says. He cited a case of three Saudi women who fled to Lebanon, along with seven of their children, in 2016. “Twenty minutes after they swiped their credit card to register at a hotel, Lebanese authorities showed up to turn them over to the Saudis.” Khashoggi’s own case was predicated on paperwork—after seeking government documents for his upcoming marriage at the consulate in Istanbul, on September 28th, he was told to return a week later, during which time the trap was laid for his murder. Rana, who is quiet and deliberate by nature, had serious misgivings about entering her country’s Embassy in Berlin. While Khashoggi’s murder was still months away, Rana had heard plenty of stories—some documented and others rumored—of Saudis disappearing abroad. “Inside the Embassy, I’m not in Germany. I’m in their territory,” Rana said. “I could disappear and no one would know, or they wouldn’t be able to help me.” None of Rana’s business partners had known in advance of her plan to flee the country, but all of them understood her hesitation about meeting with officials. “Now, especially under M.B.S., everyone is suspicious of the government,” she said.

In the meantime, Rana tried to focus on her new, often confounding life in Germany. In the camp, she befriended a few Saudi women who, like her, had fled oppressive homes in hopes of a new life. She was particularly drawn to Farah, a twenty-five-year-old former BodyPump coach, from Riyadh, with a buoyant mane of dark hair and an athletic swagger. “She is very outgoing and bold,” Rana said with a smile. “The opposite of me.” One thing the two did have in common was their troubling run-ins with the Saudi state. Within days of arriving in Germany, Farah began receiving messages on Twitter and Snapchat from pro-government accounts, warning her that she’d pay for disgracing the reputation of Saudi Arabia. Farah also began hearing from friends back in Saudi Arabia that authorities had been interrogating people associated with her. During questioning, her friends said, the investigators revealed personal information about Farah’s life in Germany, including details about her whereabouts and activities. “That was different,” Farah told me. “How did they know so much about my life? Did someone I knew feed them information?”

As Farah and I shared a hookah and milk chocolates in the drafty, bare-walled apartment that Rana now calls home, the subject turned to family. Rana emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray of spaghetti and cream-cheese sauce—one of the few recipes that she’d mastered since acquiring a place of her own—and joined us on the couch, which doubles as her bed. Both women were aware that the government routinely penalizes the relatives of those it deems disloyal or dangerous to the state. Farah cited the case of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi activist currently living in Canada. After Abdulaziz flouted the Saudi government’s efforts to silence him, the state arrested his two brothers back in Jeddah. Similarly, after Khashoggi fled the state, the government harassed his family members and placed his son, Salah, under a travel ban. Members of Farah’s family were interrogated shortly after her escape and have since cut off their already strained communication. “I didn’t want anything to happen to my family,” Farah said, “even if we weren’t close.” Rana says that most of her relatives and friends are reluctant to speak with her for fear of reprisal. “Sometimes I get a little video or note from one of my younger siblings on Snapchat, but, mostly, that’s it,” she told me. “I don’t miss Saudi Arabia at all, but I do miss my mother.”

Still, the women strived to create a sense of normalcy, occupying themselves with German classes, Netflix, and part-time work. Their delicate calm was shattered, though, in April, 2018, when Farah encountered two strange Arab men outside of her apartment building. Their message, spoken in the Saudi dialect of Arabic, was ominous. “They told me they knew information about me, they knew who I was, a Saudi woman who had left the country,” Farah explained. “They told me, ‘You will be sorry.’ ” The men had not presented any government identification and made no specific threats. But Farah felt sure that they were loyalists of the regime. Around the same time, she received a cryptic photograph over WhatsApp from a man claiming to be an employee of the Interior Ministry. In the picture, a file containing Farah’s name and photograph lay open on a desk. The document included an order for her arrest.