Al-Nahar, Lebanon, October 16
Every now and again we are reminded of the brutality of Arab regimes. The recent kidnapping and murdering of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by his very own government is a stark reminder about abuse of power. Khashoggi is certainly not the first to “disappear” due to his political activity. I still remember the case of Mehdi Ben Barka, a Moroccan political activist who went missing in Paris in 1965, during a visit to the city. While Barka espoused leftist political views, he never posed a real threat to the regime of King Hassan II of Morocco. And still, the 45-year-old Moroccan disappeared from the face of Earth one bright morning. Only a few decades later it was discovered that Moroccan intelligence, with the aid of French police, had killed him. A different case that reminded me of Khashoggi is the disappearance of Mansour Rashid el-Kikhia, who served as Libya’s foreign minister and later as its ambassador to the United Nations. After defying the rule of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, el-Kikhia mysteriously vanished in 1993 while attending a conference in Cairo. His body was discovered in Libya only two decades later, during the recent uprising, in the home of a former security official. It turned out that the Libyan intelligence services, together with their Egyptian counterparts, kidnapped el-Kikhia, interrogated him, and executed him. These are just two examples of hundreds, if not thousands, of similarly brutal cases. Arab regimes have long followed a practice of torturing and killing anyone who is perceived as a threat to the stability of the regime. While Gulf states seemed to have refrained from this practice to date, things are clearly changing. Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman in particular has been working on modernizing his country and improving its relations with the West. To this end, he introduced his national transformation plan known as “Vision 2020,” which seeks to promote democratization in the Kingdom. Sadly, if Khashoggi’s fate is similar to that of Barka or el-Kikhia, Saudi Arabia is still miles away from achieving true democratization. In fact, it would prove to be much closer to Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya than any other country in the world. –Bassem Ajmi