Family of Saudi blogger raises concerns over tweets
Canadian family members of jailed Saudi blogger Raif Badawi and his sister Samar Badawi say they are angry over the Twitter comments that have caused diplomatic fallout from Saudi Arabia towards Canada.
It’s impossible to blame them. Madwa Badawi, the teenage daughter of Raif Badawi and his wife Ensaf Haidar, says the family is “very angry” over the undiplomatic tweets by Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and Global Affairs Canada that demanded the Badawis and other activists be “released immediately” by Saudi officials.
“This is very bad for my father,” said Madwa, who was reached via telephone at the Sherbrooke, Quebec, home she shares with her mother and two other siblings who became Canadian citizens on July 1.
“Because of the (Twitter) comments, the Saudi Arabia government has done a big problem with Canada so they won’t want (my father) to come here,” she said, after apologizing for her broken English, which is much better than my French.
Madwa agreed that negotiations to release her father and aunt should have been done through private diplomatic channels and not publicly on social media.
“Would they use Twitter if it was their father?” she asked wisely.
It’s a rhetorical question and, like the rest of us, she knows the answer.
“No, they would not,” she answered.
“They would talk quietly, but for my father they make a big problem.”
No reasonable person with even the most rudimentary knowledge of how autocratic regimes behave would ever expect a public dressing down to work in such a situation.
As Madwa wondered, how would any of us feel if the futures of our loved ones were jeopardized by cavalier tweets sent out to impress a domestic audience, rather than to improve the fate of our jailed family member?
That her voice remained calm throughout the call was miraculous.
On August 2, Freeland criticized Saudi Arabia’s detention of the Badawis and other rights activists in the kingdom renowned for its abysmal human rights record.
“We continue to strongly call for the release of both Raif and Samar Badawi,” Freeland irresponsibly wrote in part.
The next day, the main Twitter account for Global Affairs Canada, which is under Freeland’s ministry, urged the Saudi government “to immediately release” the rights activists, only this time it used a hashtag before the words Saudi Arabia, making the tweet very searchable and visible to the oppressive state. Since then, a full-bore diplomatic war has been launched by the oil-rich, terrorism-exporting kingdom.
Raif Badawi was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for writing things on his blog that the Saudi government didn’t approve of. Samar Badawi was arrested more recently for her activism, which included fighting for the right of Saudi women to drive — something that was granted to women in June, rendering her arrest truly bizarre.
David Chatterson, a former Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, has been widely quoted as saying the tweets have harmed and not helped the Badawis.
“When I heard about the tweet, my question was, well, what’s our objective here? Was it to mitigate the circumstances of Badawi? he asked. “In which case we failed,” he told CBC News.
Saudi Arabia has retaliated by expelling Canada’s ambassador, recalling its own ambassador in Ottawa, suspending all scholarships to the 15,000 Saudi students studying in Canada, ordering any Saudi medical patients out of Canada, ceasing direct flights to Canada, banning all new business with Canada and barring Canadian wheat and barley imports. Some reports also indicate it has ordered stateowned pension funds to sell off Canadian assets.
That the Trudeau government’s foreign affairs can only be described as disastrous, is indisputable, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s India trip taking the top prize for international embarrassment.
But these tweets have endangered the lives of brave Saudi activists with ties to Canada. That should make every Canadian as angry as Madwa.