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saudi arabia
40 Groups Slam 'Deep Hypocrisy' of Saudi-Hosted Internet Governance Forum
"Is this a bad joke?" asked one campaigner.
Sep 06, 2024
As Saudi Arabia prepares to host a global internet summit in December, 40 human rights groups on Friday urged authorities in the kingdom to release everyone imprisoned for online expression, including an activist serving a 27-year prison sentence for criticizing her country's severe repression of women.
The 40 groups said in a joint statement that "Saudi Arabia must free all individuals arbitrarily detained solely for their online expression ahead of hosting the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Riyadh, which will take place from December 15-19."
"It is counter to the IGF's stated values for Saudi Arabia to host the IGF," the organizations asserted. "In 2024 it adopted a thematic focus on advancing human rights and inclusion in the digital age and Saudi Arabia continues to prosecute, lock up, forcibly disappear, and intimidate people into silence for expressing themselves on social media."
As Amnesty International—which accused Saudi Arabia of "deep hypocrisy"—noted:
Saudi authorities have waged a chilling crackdown against people who demonstrate even the slightest sign of dissenting or critical views online. Among those who have been convicted for their online expression is Salma al-Shehab. She was arrested in January 2021 and, after a grossly unfair trial, sentenced in January 2023 to a shocking 27-year prison term followed by a 27-year travel ban on trumped-up terrorism charges, simply because she tweeted in support of women's rights.
In another deeply disturbing case, in January 2024, Saudi Arabia's terrorism court sentenced Manahel al-Otaibi to 11 years in prison in connection with social media posts promoting women's rights and sharing images of herself online at a mall without wearing an abaya (a traditional loose-fitting long-sleeved robe).
Those targeted also include Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, a Red Crescent worker, who in April 2020, after a grossly unfair trial, was sentenced to 20 years, to be followed by a 20-year travel ban, for his satirical tweets, and Mohammad bin Nasser al-Ghamdi, a retired school teacher, who was sentenced to death in July 2023 for criticizing authorities on X (formerly Twitter) and his online activity on YouTube.
"These cases are emblematic of the Saudi authorities' chilling crackdown on freedom of expression, but they are not isolated examples," the 40 groups said in their statement. "Dozens of people in Saudi Arabia, including visitors to the country, have been detained solely for their online expression."
"Consequently," the signers added, "many civil society organizations and advocates, who would ordinarily attend the IGF, have chosen not to travel to Saudi Arabia, fearing that they cannot safely and freely participate in the conference."
Representatives of some of the 40 groups that signed the statement weighed in on Saudi Arabia hosting the IGF.
"Is this a bad joke?" asked Freedom Forward executive director Sunjeev Bery. "There's a phrase for this: 'rights-washing.' Rights-washing is when a human rights violator tries to hide their crimes by wrapping themselves in human rights language and causes."
"Saudi Arabia's dictatorship is one of the most repressive governments on the planet," Bery added. "Saudi internet users who dare to speak their minds are often arrested, tortured, and jailed for years."
Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard said that "Saudi Arabia's authorities have 100 days before the IGF begins to demonstrate that they will ease their draconian crackdown on freedom of expression, and to show that they will use this event as an opportunity to carry out genuine reforms rather than as part of an image-washing campaign."
"In order to prove that their hosting of the conference about the internet's future is more than just a cynical PR exercise, the Saudi authorities must release all those arbitrarily detained solely for exercising their right to freedom of expression online before the IGF begins," she added.
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Biden's New Weapons Deal With Saudi Arabia's Prince Bonesaw
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
Aug 16, 2024
Perhaps we should be grateful that it took President Biden over four years to fully abandon his campaign pledge to end arms sales to Saudi Arabia, eroding the promise bit by bit before finally announcing at the end of the day on Friday, August 9, that the administration would resume sales of offensive air-to-ground munitions to the Kingdom.
In reality, the ban was merely the last vestige of a long-abandoned policy to isolate and sanction Saudi Arabia for its various, gruesome atrocities and abuses both at home and abroad. In its place, the Biden administration’s courtiers doubled down on their embrace of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS), offering up a never-ending basket of concessions and goodies, as the golden ticket for continued U.S. primacy in the Middle East, come what may to everyone and everything else.
What follows will be their rush to the finish line, bestowing on the prince the biggest prize of all — an unprecedented U.S. security guarantee — before the clock runs out on Joe Biden’s presidency.
Cutting off the biggest U.S. weapons purchaser in the world carried well-understood costs of its own, upsetting not only U.S. defense companies deprived of the Saudi cash cow, but also encouraging MBS to retaliate by flaunting closer ties with China and Russia. And so just a few months into the first year of the Biden administration, his national security team walked back the arms embargo, clarifying that they only intended to block “offensive” weapons, not “defensive” ones.
Queries from members of Congress about the distinction between these terms went unanswered. Soon, billions in weapons were flowing, paving the way for a further mending of relations with the Saudi ruler, culminating in the now infamous July 2022 Biden/MBS “fist bump” in Jeddah.
Once the Biden team announced that it too would follow Trump’s lead to make adding Saudi Arabia to the Abraham Accords its number one Middle East foreign policy priority, any lingering concerns about rewarding the Kingdom with new military support despite its widespread horrors in Yemen and at home, or fueling its further belligerence in the region, were swept under the desert sands.
Coupled with national security adviser Jake Sullivan’s open admission of his secondary priorities — cheap oil and keeping China out of the region — the only answer to MBS’s “jump” was to ask “how high?” MBS turned to a hardball game of reverse leverage, not only refusing to open his oil spigot to relieve global oil prices ahead of the 2022 November primaries despite Biden’s pleas, but prominently hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in a multiday red carpet affair, announcing China would build a civilian nuclear plant and support missile development in the country, and refusing to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
And so it was time for the Biden team to bow to MBS’s wishes. The first major concession was to grant the Crown Prince immunity from U.S. prosecution, squashing several lawsuits against him for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempted murder of Saad Aljabri, and the targeted harassment and attacks against Al-Jazeera journalist Ghada Oueiss. The next was for the Biden team to secure the ultimate prize in the Saudi bucket list: a NATO Article 5 treaty level U.S. security guarantee for the Kingdom. Efforts by the Biden team to woo the Crown Prince with a mere aerial security umbrella was not sufficient to persuade him; only a bilateral, treaty level guarantee would work, he made clear.
The Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, and the nine months of relentless Israeli bombardment and starvation of Gaza’s civilian population that it precipitated, upended these plans. A humiliated Sullivan, who only days before the cataclysmic assault pronounced that the Middle East was “quieter today than it has been in two decades now” and boasted that “the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced,” was forced to shelve the plans for a Saudi/Israeli peace agreement.
Even MBS could not dare to openly endorse Israel in the face of near universal Saudi sympathy for Palestinian suffering.
While a largely AIPAC-funded Congress would likely have supported a U.S. security guarantee for Saudi Arabia in exchange for its joining the Abraham Accords, without this, ratification of a treaty level commitment would be a very hard sell. The Biden team is now considering the idea of delinking the security guarantee, as well as poaching China’s development of the civilian nuclear plant, from normalization with Israel in a “less for less” deal.
Under a proposed “Strategic Alliance Agreement” the U.S. would commit to helping defend Saudi Arabia if it were attacked, in exchange for Saudi granting Washington access to Saudi territory and airspace, prohibiting China from building bases in the Kingdom or pursuing security cooperation with it, and signing a parallel “Defense Cooperation Agreement,” to boost weapons sales, intelligence sharing and strategic planning on terrorism and Iran.
Such a move strips away the cover of “regional peace for Israel” as the motivation for the Saudi security guarantee, more nakedly exposing the underlying motivations driving the Biden team: a stale but cemented worldview that U.S. interests require military hegemony in the Middle East, alongside cheap oil and defense industry profits. It’s hard to discount the siren call of personal profiteering for Biden officials, who will no doubt consider multi-million payouts from the UAE and Saudi, even if they’re not as lucrative as the billions in take-home by Trump officials Stephen Mnuchin and Jared Kushner. (Recall also that Secretary Blinken’s WestExec Advisors, whose client list Secretary Blinken has never disclosed, is now partly owned by Teneo, a firm that works for the MBS controlled Saudi public investment fund.)
It appears that the decades of costs in arming and defending dictatorships in the Middle East — from the mass slaughters of civilians and perpetual war-footings, encouraging destabilizing bellicosity, entrapping our country in zero-sum military conflicts, and undermining U.S. global standing as a credible force for human rights and democracy — remain entirely lost on the Democratic leadership.
With the clock ticking on the expiration of the Biden term as the Gaza war rages on, it’s doubtful that the administration will be able to deliver any expansion of the Abraham Accords or a security agreement for MBS. It’s not even clear MBS will accept these rewards, saving them for the next round of haggling with a new administration. For now, we’ll just have to hope that “Mr. Bonesaw” will show more sense than the Biden administration and avoid any new wars in the region.
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US Resumes Offensive Weapons Sales to Major Human Rights Abuser: Saudi Arabia
Such a move will only strengthen this repressive regime and increase regional conflicts.
Aug 13, 2024
One issue that has slipped beneath the radar in terms of news coverage is the recent decision by the Biden administration to resume the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia. For starters, the U.S. will be sending a shipment of bombs worth $750 million in the coming months.
These weapons were cut off by the Biden administration in 2021 because the Saudis were using them in Yemen in their war against the Houthis, killing thousands of civilians.
The resumption of the sale of offensive weapons is part of U.S. efforts to push the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel. In 2020, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed normalization agreements that are collectively known as the Abraham Accords. These deals were brokered primarily by the Trump administration. Some of the countries that signed on, such as the UAE, view the accord not only as a way to bolster trade, but as a military alliance against their historical rival, Iran.
For the Saudis, however, normalization has been pushed off the table by the Israeli assault on Gaza and public sympathy for the Palestinians. A December 2023 survey by the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that a near unanimous 96 percent of Saudis say that Arab countries should break all contacts with Israel to protest against Israeli attacks in Gaza.
The Saudis say that Israel must first end the war in Gaza and, even more elusive, create a credible pathway to a Palestinian state. Saudi Arabia has told the United States it will not open diplomatic relations with Israel unless it agrees to accept an independent Palestinian state on the internationally-recognized pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. Such a Palestinian state is precisely what Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Knesset are dead set against.
But U.S. officials still want to push for normalization, and the Biden administration has offered a series of incentives, including negotiating a defense pact and an agreement for civil nuclear cooperation.
The U.S. also wants to build closer Saudi ties to drive a wedge into the peace process between Saudi Arabia and Iran that was brokered by China last year, and to counter the inroads that China is making in the region. More immediately, the U.S. wants Saudi cooperation in repelling Iranian retaliatory attacks on Israel. In mid-April, when Iran retaliated against the April 1 Israeli airstrike that killed a top Revolutionary Guard commander in Syria, the Saudis, along with Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, cooperated with the U.S. and Israel in repelling some 300 missiles and drones that Iran fired on Israel. The Israelis are now bracing for another Iranian response to the killing in Tehran of Hamas political leader Ismael Haniya.
But the arms sales violate the Biden administration’s earlier promises of a new approach to Saudi Arabia that would focus on human rights. In 2020 Biden vowed to treat Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, as a “pariah,” mainly because of the 2018 assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Despite recent cosmetic openings like musical concerts and some real reforms like giving women the right to drive and the abolition of the religious police, Saudi Arabia remains one of the most repressive countries in the world. While U.S. officials regularly criticize elections in neighboring Iran, there are no elections in Saudi Arabia. It continues to be one of the last remaining absolute monarchies in the world.
You don’t have to look at the damning reports from groups like Amnesty International and Human Right Watch to see the extent of Saudi repression. Just look at the U.S. State Department’s 2023 human rights report. It talks about extrajudicial killings; enforced disappearance; torture; life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; lack of an independent judiciary; punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative; violence against journalists and press censorship; serious restrictions on internet freedom, religious freedom and freedom of movement, including the right to leave the country; bans on independent trade unions; violence against gay and transgender persons; and the excessive use of the death penalty.
Remember: this stinging critique is coming from the US government–a major ally of the Saudis.
Sending more weapons to the Saudis will only strengthen this repressive regime and increase regional conflicts. But, of course, it will also increase the profits of weapons companies, such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. That, in turn, increases the campaign coffers of our politicians.
So the U.S. government is authorizing the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, while it continues to tout itself as the defender of the “free world.” Go figure.
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