Khashoggi’s last story warned of dangers facing Arab writers
Jamal Khashoggi’s final column was a warning about the dangers Arab journalists faced at the hands of autocrats.
Increasingly, he wrote, journalists in the region were working in a dangerous atmosphere. In Saudi Arabia in February Saleh al-shehi was sentenced to five years in prison after one of his columns displeased the authorities. In October 2014 the Egyptian government seized an entire print run of a critical newspaper, Al-masry Al-youm.
‘‘These actions no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community,’’ Khashoggi wrote. ‘‘Instead they may trigger condemnation, quickly followed by silence. As a result Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate.’’ The column was sent to The Washington Post, which had published several of Khashoggi’s articles during the past year, the day after he disappeared, by his translator. It decided to publish on Thursday, having accepted that the journalist was dead.
Khashoggi, who would have been 60 last Saturday, was no ordinary dissident. He had worked for Prince Turki bin Faisal, a former intelligence chief and ambassador to Britain, and in earlier writings was rarely critical of the Saudi government.
In Al-hayat newspaper in April 2015 he praised King Salman’s decision to start a war on the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. He celebrated ‘‘an independent leader who enjoys popular legitimacy and support and who’s determined to go on with what he thinks is best’’.
Two and a half years later, however, Khashoggi was criticising Riyadh’s actions, arguing in
that Salman and his predecessor, King Abdullah, could have worked with President Barack Obama rather than trying to force change in Yemen.
‘‘The choice of waging even more war is tempting for those in Riyadh who want an overwhelming defeat for the Houthis and to get them out of the political game, but it will be very costly – not only for the kingdom but for the Yemeni people who are already suffering immensely,’’ Khashoggi wrote. What happened to change his mind? Almost certainly it was the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The prince, defence minister in 2015 and the driving force behind the assault on Yemen, was elevated to heir in June last year.
It appears that Khashoggi’s problems began then.
He wrote only four more pieces for Al-hayat and fled into self-imposed exile within three months.
In the pages of an American newspaper he clearly felt free to speak his mind. He knew, and communicated, how brutal the regime from which he had escaped could be. Even he did not expect that it would track him down and silence him so brazenly.