Five years after the gruesome murder of well-known Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi authorities have still not said what they did with the body. The case was formally closed by the Saudis in 2019 after eight perpetrators were convicted in a closed and dubious trial.
Khashoggi’s family, friends and supporters have been denied the opportunity to give him a dignified burial, he said The Washington Post, the American newspaper for which Khashoggi regularly wrote, in an editorial this week. A United Nations report on the case had already concluded that the critical journalist was the victim of ‘a premeditated extrajudicial killing for which Saudi Arabia is responsible’.
The title of his latest column: ‘What the Arab world needs most is free speech’, speaks volumes. Khashoggi once called Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, “no better than Vladimir Putin” when it came to silencing the opposition. UN investigators left little doubt that an execution in the Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul could not have been carried out without the knowledge of the all-powerful Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS.
On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, 59, a permanent resident of the United States, was lured to that consulate with the promise that he would receive certain papers he needed to marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. It turned out to be a trap, the journalist was never seen again. He was allegedly strangled and sawn into pieces. Half of the fifteen perpetrators belonged to the Saudi elite unit that ensures the protection of Crown Prince MBS.
A mockery
Under international pressure, trials eventually followed against executors and underlings, but they were a “mockery of justice,” as Khashoggi’s widow put it. Ruud Bosgraaf, political scientist and spokesperson for Amnesty International who has followed the case for years, can only confirm this. “First, a number of the suspects received the death penalty, later that was twenty years after some kind of reconciliation was arranged between the convicts and Khashoggi’s eldest son, who still lives in Saudi Arabia. But hey, what can that man do? Two options: either you adopt a conciliatory attitude and then you can still live reasonably, or you have to flee the country. The son has apparently chosen to remain in Saudi Arabia.” The son reportedly also received compensation.
In the aftermath of the murder, Bosgraaf saw the power of Saudi oil and money again. As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden had vowed in his election promises, after the assassination, to turn Saudi Arabia into a ‘pariah state’. But last year the American president shook hands with the crown prince most cordially. In the meantime, it would negotiate a defense pact with the Both governments – and the establishment of a nuclear power plant on Saudi territory – in exchange for full recognition of Israel.
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Yet it really bothered the Saudis that they briefly had that pariah status, according to Bosgraaf. “They have used all their financial and political resources to polish that image. For example, they used sports for that. Formula 1 was brought in, Newcastle football club was bought, and all kinds of famous football players and artists now perform in Saudi Arabia for a lot of money. They are also said to be trying to win the 2030 World Cup. In addition, Saudi Arabia likes to present itself as an important geopolitical player, negotiations are taking place with Israel and Iran and the country is investing billions in the climate. They probably would have done all that without the Khashoggi murder, but they were very concerned about making that case quickly forgotten.”
Did the latter succeed? Bosgraaf fears so. Although organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Right Watch continue to harp on the human rights violations that Saudi Arabia also commits, many major interests are at stake. It is not only the Americans who prefer to be friends with MBS. Dutch politicians responded with a fair amount of indignation at the time, but that was really it.
Draconian punishments
After meeting with MBS two years ago, President Biden said he had received commitments on reforms and institutional safeguards to guard against such behavior in the future.” But after Biden left office, Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Court handed down a series of draconian prison sentences against the regime’s critics, Amnesty said.
On July 9, 2023, authorities sentenced a retired teacher to death after he protested government policies on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Last month, the court sentenced an 18-year-old high school student Manal el-Ghafiri to 18 years in prison and a travel ban of the same duration for tweeting in support of prisoners of conscience. Meanwhile, Saudi border guards killed hundreds of Ethiopian immigrants and asylum seekers trying to cross the Yemeni-Saudi border.
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