Jamal Khashoggi: Biden faces calls to 'strike a blow' for Saudi human rights
Joe Biden is expected to call Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, as his administration prepares to release a declassified intelligence assessment that will reportedly name the royal’s son and heir as complicit in the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
The White House confirmed on Wednesday that Biden’s call to the 85year-old ruler would take place “soon” and that the declassified report on Khashoggi’s murder was being readied for release. Biden, who said he has read the report, is insisting that he speak only to the king.
Reuters, citing four officials familiar with the matter, reported late on Wednesday that the assessment would find Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had approved and likely ordered the murder.
The revelation comes as the White House is facing calls by human rights activists and Saudi dissidents to “strike a blow” against Saudi human rights violations with new sanctions that they say could help rein in Prince Mohammed’s crackdown on dissidents and turn the page on the Trump administration’s “embrace of despots”.
Media reports have in the past said that US intelligence agencies had a medium- to high-degree of confidence that the crown prince and de facto ruler was responsible for ordering Khashoggi’s killing in the Saudi consulate.
“The release of the report is a long-awaited step that must be accompanied by accountability to ensure that this barbaric crime doesn’t happen again,” said Khalid Aljabri, a Saudi who is living in exile in Canada and is the son of Saad Aljabri, a former senior official and aide to Mohammed bin Nayef, the former crown prince who is now in jail.
“Toothless sanctions by the Trump administration didn’t deter MBS [as the crown prince is often known] from going after others. The Biden administration must take more effective steps by sanctioning senior officials and political figures, institutions and entities that contributed to the murder,” he said.
Jake Sullivan, the White House’s national security adviser, said last week in an interview on CNN that the administration was preparing to accompany the release of the classified report in the 2018 murder with a “further answer” by the administration that will hold individuals accountable for the crime. It is far from clear what kinds of actions Sullivan had in mind.
Before last year’s presidential election, Biden said Saudi Arabia deserved to be treated as a “pariah” for its murder of Khashoggi – a critical voice against the Saudi government – and for Prince Mohammed’s targeting of critics. But some analysts now predict that the administration will have to take more measured steps.
“I don’t think they can sanction MBS personally, but you could see steps against state-owned enterprises and perhaps limits on the PIF [Saudi sovereign wealth fund] investments in the US. They could also issue a statement that we will not deal with MBS as head of state, which has already been said,” said Kirsten Fontenrose, director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
In an opinion piece on CNN this week, Abdullah Alaoudh, the DC-based professor and son of a prominent Saudi cleric and political prisoner who is facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia, and Michael Eisner, a former state department lawyer, called on the administration to implement “targeted sanctions” that would pressure the Saudi government to lift travel bans on dissidents and their families.
“Such a measure would signal to the Saudis and the world that the US stands firmly on the side of civil society and has turned the page on the Trump administration’s policy of embracing despots,” they said.
The pair also said the Biden administration could take a “small but significant step” by instituting a bar on entry into the US of Saudi leaders, targeting the Saudi royal court and interior ministry.
“The Biden administration should move to apply the exact same Magnitsky Act sanctions – including a travel ban and freeze of his assets – that the US applied to his 17 accomplices for the murder of Khashoggi,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World (Dawn).
While most experts say it is unlikely, a move to sanction Prince Mohammed directly could have profound implications for his future as heir to the throne.
Some analysts point out that even if Biden sought to challenge the prince, it is not clear who might step in Prince Mohammed’s shoes following a campaign in Saudi Arabia to silence or imprison his most likely political rivals.
Agnès Callamard, the outgoing special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing for the United Nations, who investigated the Khashoggi murder, said that targeted sanctions against Prince Mohammed’s personal assets and bank account ought to be ordered as a “minimum” if intelligence showed the crown prince ordered or incited the crime. She added that Biden ought also to exert pressure on the Saudis to identify the location of Khashoggi’s remains, allow for Khashoggi’s children to leave Saudi if they wish, and, if evidence suggests he ordered the killing, freeze Prince Mohammed’s diplomatic engagements with the US.
“Banishing the persons responsible for ordering the killing of Jamal Khashoggi from the international stage is an important step towards delivering justice to Jamal Khashoggi,” Callamard said.
Boris Johnson is “an unrepentant and inveterate liar” who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says in a new book.
She also claims some Brexiters are consumed with hatred for Germany and gripped by a myth that they liberated Europe on their own, describing Brexit as a triumph of emotion over reason, won by a campaign full of lies in which negative attitudes to migration were exploited by figures such as Johnson and Michael Gove.
Bermann, who served as the French ambassador to the UK from 2014 to 2017 and has been one of the most senior diplomats in the French diplomatic service, including as ambassador to China and to Russia, assesses the British handling of the Covid pandemic as among the worst in the world alongside that of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. She predicts Johnson will seek to use Covid to mask the true economic cost of Brexit on the UK economy.
Johnson, she says, comes from an Eton and Oxford University class that believes they are entitled to use language to provoke. Describing him as intelligent and charming, she says he uses “lies to embellish reality, as a game and as instrument of power. The ends justify the means. He has no rules.”
Asked at a Royal United Services
Institute thinktank event about her description of him as an unrepentant liar, she said: “He would not object to being called that. He knows he is a liar. He has always played with that. He was fired from his first post for that reason.”
In her book, Goodbye Britannia, she seeks to define the psyche that led to Brexit. She describes “the partisans of Brexit as reciting a history in which the UK is never defeated, never invaded”. She suggests a country that considers it singlehandedly won the second world war, liberating the continent and deserving of gratitude.
Referencing the more than 22 million Russians who died in the war, she says “this does not disturb the discourse of the Brexiters who peddle the myth that the UK liberated Europe alone and needs no one”.
She adds that France does have a debt of gratitude to the British, but “it is right to remember that they were not alone and you cannot live with a history that stopped in June 1944”.
“The corollary of an England saving Europe,” she adds, “is a detestation of Germany and contempt for cowardice – the term is often used for those who allowed themselves to be occupied, not to mention collaborated.”
The British account of the second world war, relayed in films such as Dunkirk, she says, led to loss of confidence in the EU as an instrument of peace.
She admits she did not believe the Brexit referendum would be lost by David Cameron’s government, pointing out that both sides of the debate had told her the same. In retrospect, she viewed the defeat as the first crisis of electoral democracy, and the harbinger of the populism that has been followed through in the US and Europe.
“David Cameron was always telling other heads of government that he would win and he rejected any help from EU countries,” she told Rusi. She said that if Cameron had warned the EU that he was going to lose, Europe would have come up with a new offer on migration. British ministers told her that they might win with as much as 60% of the vote.
In the book, she asks: “How this country whose influence had been decisive in Brussels, which insolently rolled out the red carpet for French entrepreneurs and which Xi Jinping had elected in October 2015 as the gateway to Europe, at the dawn of a golden period, how has it undertaken to scuttle itself?”
She predicts: “Boris Johnson’s temptation will be to hide the bill for Brexit under the Covid carpet, valued at more than £200bn for 2020, almost as much as the United Kingdom’s total contribution to the European Union since its accession in 1973, which was £215bn.”
She says it is inevitable that the UK will struggle now to find influence outside the EU, and has a Scottish independence referendum hanging over its head.
She says she believes the EU would feel obliged to open talks with Scotland in the event of a referendum vote to leave the UK, but that is not the official EU position, partly due to pressure from Spain. Madrid fears the knock-on impact among Catalan separatists if an independent Scotland was allowed to join the EU.