Well, he'll offer you a cigarette
He'll offer you a light
Oh but he hasn't finished with you yet
On another long knife night
If anything, 2018 has perhaps been the year of the ruler:
the democratically chosen or unelected leader of a country, who leaves little
doubt that he is the man in charge.
Everybody can name a few rulers that left a lasting
impression on the world during the last few years. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Xi
Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are a few names that come to mind, when
the topic is ‘rulers’. And of course the leader who is on everybody’s retina currently:
President Donald Trump of the United States.
A less common choice for an ill-reputed ruler would perhaps be Mohammed
bin Salman, the crown prince of the secretive kingdom Saudi Arabia and ‘son of’
of the current, old king Salman. However, his relative mysteriousness might change
quite soon. And that is due to one man: journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
During the last few years the world became used to brutal
killings of people that stood up against questionable regimes all over the
world. Iran, Russia (i.e. the Skripal affair) and Egypt were countries that
showed little compassion with their political opponents and former ex-intelligence people gone
‘rogue’. And the number of journalists that have been killed in the line of
duty lately is depressingly long.
Still, there is hardly a case that made such a lasting
impression on me as the unfortunate case of Jamal Khashoggi. The journalist and
critical follower of the new unofficial ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman, who probably walked in a lethal trap at the least
conspicuous of places.
This is caused by the truly weird circumstances and
the gruesome details of this murder and especially the outrageous denial of the
people who are responsible for this “possible” killing.
The story is short and relatively simple. Khashoggi, who
wanted to divorce from his former wife and wanted to marry his new, Turkish
girlfriend, walks into the Saudi Arab consulate in Istanbul, in order to
arrange some divorce papers, and never comes out of it alive anymore.
Rumours
(or are it already facts) are that a fifteen(!)
people death squad, including a forensic medic, were waiting in the consulate
for Khashoggi and “arrested”(or captured) him. Afterwards, they brutally tortured
and killed him and dismembered his body with a surgical saw, before bringing
him outside in a blinded bus and reporting to the consul that the job was done
successfully.
Against his more and more impatient and worried wife-to-be and other
people, the consulate stated that he left the consulate alive and well. Only…
nobody saw that happen and nobody heard of him ever again in the days after the
presumed murder.
I am not naive and I know that various regimes do
anything to get rid of the unwelcome voices in their society, even if these
voices left their country a long time ago. Yet, that a country has the guts and bluntness to (allegedly) kill a political
opponent in their own consulate in a foreign country is totally new for me, in
spite of my middle aged life.
And it shocked me beyond belief that Saudi Arabia
had the nerve to do this and then deny that it ever happened. Nevertheless, this is
what all the signs seem to point at.
The whole idea of embassies and consulates is that they
represent their country: not only for their own citizens abroad, but also as a
meeting point for their allies and adversaries, in order to keep negotiations
and communication channels open in good and in dire times.
This is the reason for the
concept of diplomatic immunity and for the fact that countries virtually always
leave ambassadors, consuls and other diplomats of their visiting countries at peace, in spite of their (sometimes)
conflicting interests and (in some cases) the mounting hardship between countries. These are the foundations of
international diplomatic traffic.
It is definitely true that embassies and consulates are
the starting point of most intelligence operations all over the world and that
not all inhabitants of such residences have the interests of their hosting
country in mind; rather to the contrary. This is the reason that spying and eavesdropping of
diplomatic residences is an international sport. Everybody knows this and
everybody does their best to ignore this with a straight face, while maintaining the friendship and/or good relations.
The advantages
of diplomatic residences simply outweigh the drawbacks and that is the main
reason that most countries “play by the book” with respect to the do’s and don’ts
of international diplomacy.
It is exactly this circumstance that makes the Saudi
attack against Jamal Khashoggi – when proven beyond doubt – such an
outrageous and unprecedented incident. In possibly or deliberately lethal inteligence operations ‘deniability’
is of utmost importance, in order to curtail diplomatic damage when an
operation goes awry and perpetrators get caught by the police of their hosting country.
That deniability, however, is totally gone when a Saudi
Arab citizen enters the consulate of his country in Turkey on camera and is
never seen alive again.
There is simply no way denying that the consulate was
under control of the Saudi Arab government. There is consequently no way
denying that this must have been an officially approved kidnapping or murder
operation; approved by the very highest ranks of the country, meaning either King
Salman or (almost certainly) the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman are involved in it.
And to make the diplomatic damage for Saudi Arabia even
worse, Khashoggi allegedly
made audio recordings with his smart watch, while being arrested,
tortured and murdered by the 15 man hit squad that had been flown in.
That idea alone is gruesome and might give a clue why the
Turkish government knew so quickly that Khashoggi was murdered indeed, even
though evil tongues could state that the Turkish government already had top
notch eavesdropping and video equipment in the Saudi residence.
In spite of the shocking nature of this incident, it is hard to say what the consequences will be for the
Middle Eastern Kingdom in the long run, if any.
POTUS Donald Trump openly stated that the $110 billion in
Saudi investments in the US counted more for him than the life of one
journalist. And the fact that some of the captains of industry, like Richard
Branson or Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, canceled their visit to the Saudi
Future Investment Initiative conference could have more to do with political, mood-driven opportunism than with sheer shockedness about this “unfortunate incident”,
albeit it an outrageous one.
Saudi Arabia has not changed much during the last hundred
years – ask the poor people of Jemen or the thousands of imprisoned people, who
live in fear of being decapitated on Chop Chop Square. And the chance that ‘MBS’
will bring that desperately wanted change is minute in my humble opinion, since
the world and I learned about his
‘Night of the Long Knives’ of last year.
Nevertheless, money talks! And virtually nowhere it talks louder than
in Saudi Arabia, where the massive flow of oil yielded immeasurable fortunes during the 20th and 21st Century.
Unfortunately, all this happened in a country that lives closer to medieval times
than to modern times, in spite of their countless Bugatti’s, Ferrari’s and Rolls
Royces and other symbols of conspicuous wealth.
In spite of it all, this has never been a factor that stopped people, like King Willem-Alexander of The Netherlands, and countries
from doing massive business with the desert state.
So when all this blows over in a few weeks or months, I
expect that the roads, luxurious skyscrapers and countless palaces of the enormous royal family become
overcrowded again with the same powers-that-be and same captains of industry that
now take a raincheck for a few months.
The Dutch government will be a perfect testcase for this slightly cynical concept of mine: it already organized a trade mission to Saudi Arabia from November 18 – 21st and did so well before the Khashoggi case emerged. I would really be surprised if the Dutch government actually ponders for one moment about abandoning this trade mission.
You don’t slaughter the goose with the golden eggs, don’t ya?!
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