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| People take part in a candle light vigil to remember journalist Jamal Khashoggi outside the Saudi Consulate on Oct. 25 in Istanbul. (Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images) |
In the months before the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia’s government racked up a startling record of human rights abuses.
It has led a coalition waging a brutal war in neighboring Yemen, which has killed at least 10,000 people, though the United Nations stopped updating the toll two years ago, including 40 children whose school bus was bombed in August. Saudi officials have jailed dissidents, business people, clerics and journalists, as well as royal rivals to the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Repeated efforts by United Nations diplomats to broker a truce between the chief antagonists, a Saudi-led military coalition and Yemen’s Houthi insurgents, have failed.
The war has led to a staggering humanitarian catastrophe, punctuated by disease, famine and near-famine conditions in parts of the country.
Last week Mark Lowcock, the top humanitarian relief official of the United Nations, said the number of Yemenis who need emergency food to survive could soon reach 14 million, half the population.
The Saudis intervened in Yemen in March 2015 after the Houthis had occupied much of the country and expelled the Saudi-backed government in Sana, the capital. The Saudis contend that the Houthis are supported by Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional adversary.
None of the Saudi atrocities and trespasses generated sustained outrage, at least not in the West. Thanks to crafty public relations management, Mohammed until recently enjoyed an image as a progressive reformer and staunch American ally. On a recent goodwill tour of the United States, he was cordially received by the likes of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Oprah Winfrey and Rupert Murdoch.
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| Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman attends the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh on October 23, 2018. (Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty Images) |
The murder of Khashoggi in Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul appears to have changed all that. Mr. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, was killed in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate by a team of Saudi operatives. The operatives had close ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, architect of the Yemen war and a key Trump administration ally in isolating Iran. The Saudi leadership has denied responsibility for Mr. Khashoggi’s killing in explanations that have changed several times since he disappeared on Oct. 2.
On Wednesday, in Turkey’s first official account of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi inside the consulate, the Istanbul chief prosecutor said he had been immediately strangled and his body dismembered and destroyed.
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| Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist, had visited the Istanbul consulate to obtain documents that would allow him to marry his fiancée.Middle East Monitor, via Reuters |
Why the reaction to Khashoggi, a man few people had heard of until his murder, when so many other acts of barbarity by the Saudis have been largely overlooked?
The answer may be a combination of the time and place of Khashoggi’s murder, and the apparently gruesome circumstances of his death, which may have made his story more “relatable” to American viewers and readers. The accumulation of details has created the kind of sustained news coverage that the faceless victims of war and violence rarely receive, experts on international affairs say.
The Khashoggi story has been prominent in the American news media almost since he walked into the consulate on Oct. 2. Governments around the world, including the United States’, have called on Saudi Arabia to account for what happened. In the days since, a Saudi investment conference involving American media companies and investors has all but collapsed in reaction.
Apart from the geopolitical implications of Khashoggi’s killing, the volume of news coverage about him is a validation of a saying attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Though not widely known before this month, Khashoggi was well connected in Washington. A former Saudi insider himself, he lived in exile in Northern Virginia and was a familiar figure among Washington’s foreign-policy wonks, politicians and media figures. He had also worked since last year as a contributing columnist for The Post, an association that gave him an establishment perch and international cachet.
Brutal violence happens relatively frequently in Saudi Arabia, but the victims tend to be anonymous, Jamal was not anonymous.
It’s also important that Khashoggi was killed outside the kingdom. The murder of a dissident inside Saudi Arabia would very likely have been covered up. In this case, the events in question occurred in Turkey, a country with an adversarial relationship with Saudi Arabia and thus an incentive to expose what happened.
In fact, the Turkish government has been the leading source of leaks about the incident, providing such key bits of information as the identities of some men in the alleged Saudi “hit squad” and closed-circuit footage of Khashoggi entering the consulate. Each new revelation — released at strategic points over the past month — has propelled the story. (The irony is that Turkey ranks as the world’s foremost jailer of journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.)
What’s more, Turkish officials have been the source of media reports about the way Khashoggi was said to have been tortured, beheaded and dismembered inside the building.
“What’s been reported is so brazen and so gruesome that it seems like something out of a horror movie,” said Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch.
The allegations have turned the Khashoggi case into “one of the most craven and depraved killings of a journalist that I can recall,” said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. “The brutality inflicted is the kind of thing you see from a terrorist group, not a state actor.”