Extraditions demanded over Khashoggi’s death
Erdogan says Turkey has ‘more information’ about journalist’s killing
ISTANBUL— Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday that Turkey had uncovered further evidence in the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, pressing Saudi Arabia to reveal who gave the orders and demanding that its leaders explain what happened to Khashoggi’s body.
“There is more information,” Erdogan said at a gathering in the capital, Ankara, and suggested he might make more evidence public in the future. “But beyond all else, who gave the order?”
Turkey’s chief prosecutor officially asked Saudi Arabia to extradite 18 Saudis to Turkey to face charges of deliberate murder in the death of Khashoggi, Turkish media reported Friday.
Khashoggi’s Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said in a television interview Friday that he had been relaxed and hopeful when he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to pick up a document that would allow them to marry. He was killed inside the consulate by a team of men from Saudi Arabia.
Cengiz described how she met and became engaged to Khashoggi, a critic of the kingdom’s leadership who wrote opinion pieces for the Washington Post, and how she put out the alarm when he did not emerge from the consulate.
His first meeting at the consulate several days earlier had been courteous, so he had few qualms going back, she said.
As hours passed and Khashoggi did not reappear, Cengiz said, she thought he was enjoying chatting with the consular staff. It was only when she realized the consulate had closed for the day that she felt a great feeling of dread and asked the guards where he was.
“It never occurred to me something like that would be done to a person like Jamal Khashoggi,” she said.
Saudi Arabia buckled under pressure from Turkey and acknowledged a week ago that Khashoggi was killed, though officials insisted that his death had been an accident. The kingdom’s official story changed yet again on Thursday, when a state prosecutor said the killing had been premeditated.
The nature of the killing of Khashoggi has led many Western analysts, intelligence officials and elected leaders to suggest that it could not have been carried out without the approval of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto ruler and a crucial ally of the White House. Saudi Arabia has insisted that no one high in the royal family knew of the operation in advance or sanctioned it, though it has acknowledged that highranking aides close to the crown prince were involved.
Saudi Arabia on Friday tacitly threatened that it could look to support from Moscow.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia spoke by telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the Khashoggi case on Thursday, according to statements from both governments. On Friday, a Kremlin spokesperson expressed confidence in the official Saudi investigation and account of the case — remarks that were extensively covered by Russian and Saudi news media.
“There is no reason that would lead anyone not to believe Saudi Arabia’s announcements,” spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, implicated in the brutal assassination of esteemed Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is a proxy for the world’s strongman leaders. And he might be the first among them to be brought down. Mohammed bin Salman was appointed to his current position by his father, King Salman.
Otherwise, though, MBS, as he is known, is akin to the demagogues who have risen to power on a global wave of populist discontent. Like them, MBS offers false hopes of a new era of prosperity while ruling by fear and fearmongering.
MBS clones have taken power in the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, Poland and Austria, and another is expected to assume the Brazilian presidency tomorrow. And the U.S. chief executive is a cheerleader for those strongmen.
But within that confederacy of thugs, Mohammed bin Salman’s grip on power is uncertain.
MBS is a 33-year-old neophyte in domestic economic policy and geopolitics. He could be swiftly replaced by his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
Veteran Saudi observers believe that can be avoided if the king succeeds in his post-Khashoggi effort to housebreak his son. Then again, the king has already ousted two previous heirs apparent before elevating MBS only last year.
Khashoggi was no dissident. The principal subject of his criticism was MBS, whom Khashoggi regarded as a dangerously impulsive leader undermining his country’s interests.
Khashoggi was an intensely patriotic Saudi who for several years worked loyally for the ruling House of Saud. Khashoggi’s high regard among diplomats and intelligence agencies — and not just his martyrdom as an investigative journalist — accounts for the shock in world capitals over his death.
That global outrage has jeopardized MBS’s master plan for reinventing a Saudi petro-economy before demand for Saudi oil eventually goes into irreversible decline. Khashoggi’s death highlights Saudi Arabia’s status as a rogue state too risky for most global investors to deal with. Mohammed bin Salman has overseen the continuing Saudi-led genocide in Yemen, the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster, with an estimated eight million people at risk of famine in coming months. MBS abducted the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri. And he spearheaded a quixotic blockade of Qatar, location of America’s key
air-force base in fighting Islamic State (ISIS).
“Some may argue that such recklessness simply manifests the growing pains of a new Saudi Arabia,” regional expert Daniel Benjamin writes in the current Foreign Affairs.
“But the evidence – including the brief and stunning hostage taking of the Lebanese prime minister and the quarrel with Canada over human rights – suggests there is no growth going on here. There is only (MBS’s) heedlessness and overweening ambition.”
The Saudi violations of international law coincide with MBS’s ruthless internal consolidation of power. Mohammed bin Salman has silenced the Saudi clerical establishment and neutralized the National Guard, accumulating more power than any Saudi leader in history.
The fragile hold on power of the ruling House of Saud has always relied on the collegiality of its members. MBS has smashed that, trying to turn the country into an autocracy. How long his fellow members of the Saudi royal family, many living abroad in self-imposed exile, will tolerate that is anyone’s guess. That, of course, increases global investor uncertainty about the country’s stability.
MBS’s lengthy, high-profile detention of fellow royals last year was meant to discredit any coalition within the House of Saud that might rise against him. In humiliating those Saudi tycoons, MBS took a page from the playbook of Vladimir Putin, who has succeeded in reducing Russia’s oligarchs to obsequious functionaries of the Russian president.
Canada was ahead of the curve in recognizing the monstrosity of MBS’s rule. But the silence among world leaders was deafening when Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian foreign affairs minister, in August called out Riyadh for attacking women’s rights advocates.
Just two months later, those same world leaders have been voluble in condemning the murder of Khashoggi. On Capitol Hill in Washington, there have been calls for MBS’s removal.
Saudi Arabia is acutely vulnerable to the world’s oppro- brium. Saudi Arabia is no longer the world’s biggest oil producer. It has been eclipsed by U.S. frackers.
It was Saudi Arabia’s 2016 market-share war with the frackers that drove down the world oil price to as low as $29 (U.S.), throwing Alberta into recession. But the gambit failed. Depletion of the Saudi treasury forced the country to restore its normal, lower levels of production to boost the world price.
And yet, a heavily indebted Saudi Arabia is still running budget deficits, due to continued weak oil prices and soaring government expenses.
The Saudi war machine runs on materiel imported from the U.S. and Germany, and to a lesser extent Canada. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has frozen arms exports to Saudi Arabia pending the outcome of investigations into Khashoggi’s death. Canada and the U.S. could further undercut MBS’s power by doing the same.
As noted, MBS’s audacious bid to reinvent Saudi Arabia as a diversified powerhouse in electric vehicles, life sciences, financial services and defence technologies is now close to a dead letter.
Dubbed “Vision 2030,” the transformation was to have cost more than $1 trillion (U.S.).
But weak oil prices rule out an under-financed Public Investment Fund (PIF), Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund, as an expected source of Vision 2030 funding. Another $100 billion (U.S.) was to have come from the initial public offering (IPO) of the state-owned Saudi Aramco, world’s biggest oil company.
But uncertainly about volatile oil prices scared investors away, and the IPO has been indefinitely shelved.
The aftershocks of Khashoggi’s assassination appear to be the death blow for MBS’s Vision 2030. Guilt by association with a pariah state is easily avoided by offshore institutional investors, who were counted on to provide additional hundreds of billions of dollars in Vision 2030 funding. They have an abundance of politically safer investments to choose from.
Yet Vision 2030 could still happen with someone other than MBS as crown prince. His successor would have to end Saudi Arabia’s armed aggression in Yemen and elsewhere in the region, and better align the country’s internal humanrights practices with the UN’s International Bill of Human Rights.
It’s difficult to see an alternative to that admittedly radical course correction. Absent drastic change, Saudi Arabia’s relevance will fade in a world shifting away from the oil that is the country’s sole economic sustenance.
After all, less than a century ago, Saudi Arabia was among the least strategically important places on Earth. To paraphrase the Scriptures, “from sand to sand” appears to be the kingdom’s future if it remains on its current disastrous path.