Bad heir days loom for Saudi prince
The release of a damning declassified CIA report on the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a snub by US President Joe Biden could spell the end for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
‘Has the sacrificial animal arrived yet?” These chilling words by a Saudi brigadier-general, captured on tape, add to the overwhelming evidence that the slaughter of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2 2018 in the country’s embassy in Istanbul was brutal and premeditated.
Well before his arrival at the consulate that day, Turkish secret agents had also secretly recorded a pathologist discussing his dissecting methods and whether
Khashoggi’s hips were too wide to fit into a bag.
These recordings add weight to long-held suspicions that the bloody chain of command responsible for ordering the Saudi dissident’s assassination went right up to Mohammed bin Salman, the oil-rich kingdom’s de facto crown prince since his ageing father ascended the throne in 2015.
The heat on MBS, as he is known, will ramp up to nuclear proportions — possibly this week — as US intelligence officials prepare to release a declassified CIA report to Congress assessing his role in the assassination of Khashoggi, a US resident and Washington Post columnist.
US President Joe Biden’s administration also signalled this week the prince would no longer be treated as the heir apparent.
The Trump administration prevented the CIA from releasing the investigative report into MBS , which concluded that their pet Saudi prince was a ruthless tyrant who wouldn’t blink at slaughtering a critic in the manner of a beast of burden.
Extraordinarily, Trump even released a statement casting doubt on the CIA’s findings.
At the centre of this relationship with the previous US administration was a bromance between first son-in-law and “presidential adviser” Jared Kushner and MBS. After the 2018 Istanbul assassination, Kushner reportedly advised the prince via WhatsApp on how to manage the international outrage and weather the storm.
According to a 2018 New York Times report, even before Trump took office the prince had already identified Kushner as his useful idiot in the administration, somebody he could cultivate in order to consolidate his own power and enlist US support for his hawkish policies.
The Times wrote that soon after Trump moved into the White House, Kushner was inquiring whether the US could influence the Saudi succession.
According to Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck, authors of Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman’s Ruthless Quest for Global Power, MBS is a master of the delicate art of court intrigue. He made himself indispensable to the former monarch, King Abdullah, by performing tasks too distasteful for other princes. Tasks like evicting the widow of a former king from a palace she refused to vacate.
Kushner managed to usher Prince Mohammed into a formal lunch with Trump in a state dining room at the White House, capitalising on a last-minute cancellation by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany because of a snowstorm, wrote the Times.
At first MBS seemed like just the young dynamic heir the kingdom needed, a powerful force determined to sweep away the cobwebs of a moribund, fusty state.
The day after Abdullah’s funeral and his father’s ascension to the throne, the prince took over the royal court, summoning at
4am officials and businessmen to meet later to discuss modernising the regime. He reined in the country’s notorious religious police to expand the rights of Saudi women.
However, analysts say he seemed emboldened by his White House relationship to unleash his ruthless streak. He ousted his older cousin, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, removing him from the interior ministry and replacing him as crown prince.
Days after Kushner visited Riyadh in
2017, MBS detained about 200 billionaires and relatives, including several royal cousins, in the Saudi capital’s Ritz-Carlton, where they could at least enjoy the hotel’s 52 acres of lavishly landscaped gardens. Many dissidents are still languishing in prison.
MBS’s extravagant excesses also helped to dent his reputation. While preaching austerity, he arranged a marathon orgy of sex and debauchery in 2015 for several dozen friends that would last the better part of a month.
Some 150 “models” from around the world were flown to Velaa Private Island, an opulent Maldives resort. Reports say that, upon arrival, each woman was driven in a golf cart to a clinic and tested for sexually transmitted diseases before being settled into a private villa.
MBS had booked the entire resort for a month, at a cost of $50m (R733m). Staff were banned from bringing in cellphones with cameras, but stories surfaced in the local press and the media in Iran, his country’s greatest enemy, went to town with lurid details.
At about the same time, the young crown prince bought one the world’s most expensive superyachts for €429m (R7.6bn), as well as a château near Versailles, with a gold-leafed fountain, marble statues and a moat, for more than $300m. The château boasted a hedged labyrinth set in a 57-acre landscaped park.
He also bought Leonardo da Vinci’s painting for a recordwells breaking $450m.
His profligacy with money extended to human life, as he was the architect of the war in Yemen, expecting a quick victory against the Houthi movement, allied with Iran. The war has dragged out into a six-year proxy civil war that the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
So far, the war has claimed an estimated 233,000 lives, and 80% of the population, 24-million people, are in need of humanitarian aid. Of these, 12-million are children.
With American officials exposed to potential war crimes charges, Biden’s new US administration has pledged to end support for the Saudi war efforts.
The Saudi practice of using their petrodollars to hire tens of thousands of starving survivors of the Sudanese conflict in Darfur to become their mercenaries is also under the spotlight.
A 2018 New York Times investigation revealed that almost all of the Sudanese fighters in Yemen — many of them childsoldiers — were veterans of the ethnic and religious cleansing visited upon Darfur by the tribal militia once known as the Janjaweed.
These merciless horsemen swept through the villages of Darfur, systematically raping women and girls, burning villages, killing animals and stuffing bodies down the to spoil the water.
According to witnesses quoted in the investigation, Saudi commanders ordered the Sudanese fighters into battle almost exclusively by remote control, keeping themselves a safe distance from the fighting.
“The Saudis told us what to do through the telephones and devices,” Mohamed Suleiman al-Fadil, a 28-year-old soldier, told the New York Times. “They never fought with us.”
“The Saudis would give us a phone call and then pull back,” agreed another veteran. “They treat the Sudanese like their firewood.”
Writing in the Guardian, Middle East specialist Mohamad Bazzi noted that in its final days, the Trump administration gave Saudi Arabia some parting gifts. It approved two new arms deal packages worth more than $750m in precision-guided bombs and other weapons and designated the Houthi movement a terrorist organisation, barring aid to a starving nation.
Now there’s a new sheriff in the White House. President Biden reversed both actions.
His first major foreign policy speech as president promised to stop American participation in the Yemeni war and end sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in that conflict.
Saudi Arabia became the world’s largest importer of weapons from 2015 to 2019, up 130% compared with the previous five years, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. That increase coincided with MBS’s ascendance and Saudi Arabia’s initial March 2015 intervention in Yemen.
This week, a state department spokesperson responded to a reporter’s question of whether the US was trying to pressure the Saudi king to change the line of succession and demote MBS by saying Saudi Arabia was a key partner on “many priorities” but that the partnership needed to “reflect and be respectful of the values and interests the US brings”.
“The American people expect that US policy towards its strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia prioritises the rule of law and respect for human rights. The United States will co-operate with Saudi Arabia where our priorities align and will not shy away from defending US interests and values where they do not,” the spokesperson said.
“The whole world has a problem on its hands when it comes to MBS ascending to the throne because we have all seen how reckless and brutal he is,” commented Michele Dunne, the director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East programme.
Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Guardian that Biden was sending a clear message to the Saudi royal family that as long as Prince Mohammed is in the line of succession, Saudi Arabia would be treated “as a pariah”.
“I don’t know what the administration is thinking but the best outcome would be to remove him. He can retire to his château in France,” Riedel said.
He arranged a marathon orgy of sex and debauchery in 2015 that would last the better part of a month