MBS has blood on his hands, and Western leaders are complicit

It’s been five years since Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS, took over from his father to rule Saudi Arabia. In 2018, Theresa May’s government claimed that his visit signified a “new era in bilateral relations”.

At the time, MBS was lauded for his progressive changes in domestic policy, including improvements in women’s access to driving and public events. He was called the “prince of change”.

Because the situation in Saudi Arabia for women and minorities was even worse than it is currently, it’s unsurprising that the tiniest improvements were portrayed as radical. It’s also likely that this portrayal was the result of a deliberate, carefully crafted PR campaign to rehabilitate the kingdom’s image in the wake of an established history of human rights abuses.

"But the reality is that any domestic improvements have been overshadowed by MBS’s evidently despotic tactics and policy changes, which have been well-documented on the domestic as well as the international stage"

But the reality is that any domestic improvements have been overshadowed by MBS’s evidently despotic tactics and policy changes, which have been well-documented on the domestic as well as the international stage. In particular, his involvement in the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi briefly turned him into a pariah.

But the memory of politicians is short-lived, especially when it comes to furthering their own agendas. Any damage done to MBS’s image in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder has been all but forgotten. Power and wealth, when combined, make a potent narcotic that forever keeps world leaders from holding rulers like MBS to account for their actions.

In a world where Russia has become the arch enemy of the West, MBS is now a convenient saviour. Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves make his past crimes easy to brush under the carpet. Never mind that those crimes may actually mirror Putin’s – that the war in Yemen, still raging on seven years later, has caused much greater devastation than anything Putin has done to Ukraine.

On the 5th anniversary of MbS's reign, @kaiss_ramzi draws on @MENA_Rights's report to reflect on the ruler's consolidation of power through Saudi Arabia’s security apparatus that's responsible for the torture & disappearance of opponents & peaceful critics https://t.co/YnnYugRShO

— The New Arab (@The_NewArab) June 21, 2022

The kingdom has been accused of war crimes in Yemen along with presiding over one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. But we’ve already established that when it comes to victims of war, brown and Muslim bodies have far less value than white ones.

While Russia is frozen from banking systems and boycotted by large corporations for the violence it perpetrates against the Ukrainians, the war criminals in Yemen get rewarded with renewed trade relations and weapons deals worth billions. Saudi Arabia is handed a golden opportunity to exploit the gap left by Russia in a market refusing to let go of its reliance on fossil fuels.

Because of Saudi oil reserves, they can do as they like, with impunity – ‘a hundred murders forgiven’ as the Urdu proverb goes. Except it’s so much worse because the murders aren’t metaphorical – and far exceed that number. The death toll in Yemen is now in the tens of thousands, many of them children.

Of course it doesn’t stop there, because MBS has blood on his hands at home, too. Boris Johnson’s visit to Riyadh in March went ahead after the kingdom carried out its highest ever recorded number of executions in a single day.

Dissidents and people from minority groups continue to be targeted, arbitrarily detained, tortured, and executed. As activist Ramzi Kaiss writes, MBS has turned Saudi Arabia into “a surveillance state whereby activists, critics and ordinary citizens are systematically subjected to patterns of enforced disappearance, brutal torture methods and arbitrary detention.”

What a far cry, then, from the progressive change we were promised. Five years ago, MBS’s lifting of the ban on women driving was over-optimistically hailed as a beacon of hope. But reforms on laws affecting women have probably been used cynically by Saudi authorities in an attempt to gain better PR in Western media, while women’s rights activists continue to be targeted.

"As ever, it’s down to activists, campaigners, lawyers, human rights organisations, and people at the grassroots to resist and speak out against tyrants like MBS"

Meanwhile, the oppressive male guardianship system persists, and conditions for women in general have caused more and more of them to flee the country and seek asylum elsewhere. 2019 was dubbed “the year of the runaway” after several Saudi women shared stories about their escape from the kingdom on social media.

Some restrictions may have been relaxed on women travelling and living independently. However, various forms of detention facilities with appalling conditions continue to imprison women in Saudi Arabia not just figuratively but literally.

And yet the politicians that ostensibly wanted to free Afghan women from the Taliban are content with relying on Saudi oil and taking Saudi funds in exchange for weapons. It’s almost as though the rights of Muslim women hold no inherent value – they’re little more than a stick with which to beat the bogeymen of Western imperialism as and when required.

As ever, it’s down to activists, campaigners, lawyers, human rights organisations, and people at the grassroots to resist and speak out against tyrants like MBS. In Saudi Arabia, they continue to do this despite the risks, and the very high personal cost, that comes with resistance.

While the most powerful politicians in the world clamber to win MBS’s favour, the people his kingdom oppresses are left to fend for themselves.

Afroze Fatima Zaidi is a writer, editor and journalist. She has a background in academia and writing for online platforms.

Follow her on Twitter: @afrozefz

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.