Balkis Press/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in March 2018
A prominent Egyptian blogger kidnapped from a police station while reporting for parole. At least three other journalists arrested, among 2,000 other people in the past ten days across Egypt. In the Emirates, a digital-rights advocate is on hunger strike for a second time, after a severe beating in his solitary cell at the hands of Emirati authorities. An Algerian journalist arrested, a Syrian reporter abducted, a Palestinian journalist detained, and Iraqi and Kurdish media working under increasing constraints.
And that’s just the recent news from the region.
A year after the Saudi hit team targeted and dismembered journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the consulate in Istanbul, Arab and Middle East autocrats feel they have a license to do whatever they want with the press. The Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has faced no real consequences for his abhorrent action.
“From the decades I have spent crossing that line,” Jamal Khashoggi wrote in an essay for Der Spiegel in 2017, “I know from experience that there is now no distance between the official government position and what we as citizens are allowed to say.” Khashoggi, in the article, likened MBS’s approach to the Stasi’s, after years in which the Saudis endured a less violent regime. “We had far greater latitude in the past—not quite free speech, but also not a demand for total, blind obedience,” he lamented. Ten months later he would be disappeared and his body, or its parts, still have not been found. And today, that same autocratic thuggery is spreading across the region, putting the Arab media at dire risk.
Cairo is in crackdown mode since a viral corruption scandal has agitated an extremely strained citizenry, faced with a rock-bottom economy and zero political opportunity for change. Scenes out of a dystopian film unfolded last week with the usually bustling downtown fully sterilized with checkpoints, as an increasingly paranoid President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi returned from the United Nations to find rare protests against his rule. Now, the barracks are back in Liberation Square.
El-Sisi’s fears were made manifest by the extralegal arrest of Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a software guru, political blogger, and onetime revolutionary icon. Alaa had checked into a police station in accord with his parole arrangement (he had been jailed on spurious charges for five years). But he did not leave the station on Sunday morning. Later in the day, Egyptian authorities arrested his lawyer, Mohamed El-Baqr. Though Alaa’s days as a political organizer had long since passed, the regime was panicked enough to seize him.
The mainstream Egyptian media, watched over by a military state and now run by regime functionaries, will not critically cover this case; that will fall to the last few independent media outlets in Cairo. I’m not holding my breath for the U.S. State Department to issue a stern statement about Trump’s “favorite dictator.”
And this sentiment encourages other states, as well as corporations. The practice of ignoring rampant human rights violations in the Arab world has now become common practice among corporations from other regions. In Abu Dhabi and Dubai, the wealthy new media centers of the Arab world, Western media conglomerates are trying to reach wealthy Arab readers and viewers. That means they sacrifice the ability to critically cover power and politics in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, where the governments are the only act in town and no friends of free expression.
In the Emirates, prisoner of conscience Ahmed Mansoor re-launched his hunger strike after Emirati authorities beat him up for protesting his conditions. In the early 2000s, Mansoor had started a web forum for political discussion, and following years of UAE government harassment, he was imprisoned two years ago. Few readers in the Gulf would be familiar with his plight, however; local media scarcely covers it. The best English-language paper there, The National, hasn’t written about Mansoor since May, and the Emirates’ glossy publications are hardly willing to take journalistic risks.
Saudi Arabia is investing in massive new cultural enterprises, as part of MBS’s so-called reforms, from the first movie theaters in decades (AMC got quite the contract!) to comic cons and new theme parks. Though the example of China should have definitively dispelled it, the argument is nonetheless made that these kinds of arrangements—social and societal nudges that mostly involve the import of U.S. commerce and capitalism—will help open up the country. As one Human Rights Watch researcher told The Washington Post, however, “The notion that the mere presence of more international companies would translate into human rights reforms is pretty naïve.”
For its part, the Trump administration all but ignored the Khashoggi killing and MBS’s responsibility for it, subordinating it to its alliance with Saudi Arabia in the fight against Iran. Given Trump’s venom for the press and the free flow of actual information, it’s no surprise that his administration has failed to address other states’ abuses of journalists and writers, activists and advocates.
The need to move past Khashoggi’s murder has rendered America’s top diplomat mute, absurd, or downright cruel.
It took a full month after the murder for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to call it a “heinous act.” Since then, Pompeo has been unable to condemn the killing without mentioning in the same breath the importance of the U.S.-Saudi partnership. When journalists follow up with him about the killing, Pompeo can get testy, once telling a CBS journalist, “You’re really doing America a disservice,” after she pressed him about the CIA’s assessment that MBS ordered the murder.
But even as MBS tried to eliminate one of his countrymen’s voices, the legacy of the Saudi writer will endure. Recently I was speaking to a veteran journalist who has reported from Saudi Arabia since the ’90s about a story I was working on about the future of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. “I would have put you in touch with Jamal Khashoggi if he was still alive,” he told me. “He would have been the one to talk to.”
