Silenced forever: Saudi Arabia admits that Khashoggi is dead
Silenced forever: Saudi Arabia admits that Khashoggi is dead
Two days after Jamal Khashoggi disappeared at the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul, The Washington Post published a column with his phrase and the headline "Una voz perdida". The space below was blank.
That influential voice in the affairs of Saudi Arabia has been silenced forever after three decades as a writer, editor, commentator and media adviser.
Eighteen days after the disappearance of Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia he acknowledged early on Saturday that the 59-year-old writer died in what he said was a "fist fight" inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The Saudi announcement shed little light on the mystery of Khashoggi's disappearance and contradicted the leaks of the Turkish media that he was tortured, murdered and dismembered.
Once close to the royal family and advisor to the country's former intelligence chief, Khashoggi became a staunch critic of his young and ambitious crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, for suppressing any opposition and hindering the country in a conflict in the neighbor Yemen that killed thousands of people.
His disappearance and death sparked a diplomatic storm and rocked Saudi Arabia's alliances with its partners, provoked sanctions against the oil-rich kingdom and horrified freedom of expression advocates and people around the world who never read their work.
In a final column for the Post, which the newspaper said it received from its assistant on October 3 and was published on October 17, Khashoggi warned that Middle East governments "have had free rein to continue silencing the media. communication in a growing increase rate. "
He noted that some Middle Eastern leaders were blocking access to the Internet in order to strictly control what their citizens can see.
"The Arab world faces its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but by domestic forces competing for power," Khashoggi wrote.
Born into a family of riches and connections: he was the nephew of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and a cousin of Princess Diana Dodi Fayed's boyfriend. Khashoggi was a voice of moderation in a kingdom at war with terrorism after September 11. , 2001, attacks in the United States.
He spent years explaining his policies to outsiders, but became unpopular at home, saying that the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen would "validate" those who compared the actions of the kingdom with what Russia and Iran were doing in Syria. He also criticized Riyadh's diplomatic break with Qatar.
After Khashoggi criticized the celebration in the kingdom of the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, a royal court official who was close to him advised him to stop tweeting and publishing stories, a sign that his opinion is no longer It was welcome.
Khashoggi entered a self-imposed exile, moved to Washington in 2017, wrote regular columns for the Post and pursued pro-democracy projects.
The repression of the crown prince intensified after Khashoggi left, reaching some of his friends and associates. A former boss, Saudi billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal, was among dozens of businessmen and members of the royal family who were arrested in a luxury hotel in November 2017 in a crackdown on corruption that soon resembled a shakedown of the most powerful people in the kingdom.
"The members of Saudi royalty see themselves as the Party, sharing power and governing by consent, in an agreement that is largely opaque," Khashoggi wrote after the crackdown, adding that the Crown Prince "is changing this agreement and centralizing all power within its position. "
But he told The Economist in May that he disagreed with the Saudis who "were asking for regime change and things like that ... I believe in the system, I just want a reform system. grant A voice that allows me to speak. "
While supporting the fight against corruption, he described what was happening in Saudi Arabia as "selective justice". He argued that corruption was so entrenched that royalty monopolizes land ownership and less than 40 percent of Saudis can own their homes.
"The crown prince is involved in a great economic transformation, and since there is nobody to discuss it, he will not see the (errors) of these transformations," he told The Economist.
A British-Palestinian friend, Azzam Tamimi, said Khashoggi spoke to Westerners in a language they understand.
Prince Mohammed "spent millions on public relations and wanted to present himself as a modernist savior who grants rights to women," Tamimi said. "Jamal used to show the other side that Mohammed bin Salam did not want to show."
Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was born in Medina in 1958 and graduated from Indiana State University. He began his career as a journalist in the 1980s, covering the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the decade-long war that followed the English-language newspaper, the Saudi Gazette. It covered the Algerian war in the 1990s against Islamic militants, the Balkan wars and the rise of the Islamists in Sudan.
In his youth, according to a friend, Khashoggi briefly joined the Muslim Brotherhood, the strongest organization of political Islam in the region. Soon he left, wanting to remain outside the organized groups, but throughout his life maintained good relations with all parties.
He was the editor of Medina's Islamist leaning newspaper for nine years.
While in Afghanistan, he interviewed Osama bin Laden before becoming the leader of al-Qaida. Later they met again in Sudan in 1995.
"He could have done much better for himself, his family and his religion if he stayed moderate," Khashoggi said after bin Laden was killed by a US raid on Pakistan in 2011.
In a Daily Star column in Lebanon on September 10, 2002, Khashoggi wrote: "The hijacked planes of Osama bin Laden not only attacked the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they also attacked Islam as a faith They attacked the values of tolerance and coexistence that Islam preaches. "
He had a brief stint in 2003 as editor of a Saudi liberal newspaper, Al-Watan, founded after September 11, and was often cited in the West as a reformist and expert voice on Islamic radicals. But after two months, he was fired when the ultra-conservative clerics of the kingdom rejected his criticism of the powerful religious police.
Khashoggi served as media adviser to Turki Al-Faisal, the country's former spymaster, who at the time was the ambassador to Britain and then to the United States.
He returned to Al-Watan in 2007, where he continued to criticize the clerics when the late King Abdullah began with cautious reforms to try to get rid of them. Three years later, he was forced to resign after a series of articles criticizing Salafism, the Sunni ultraconservative movement.
In 2010, he was chosen to lead the new Bahrain-based station Al-Arab, which is touted as a rival to Al-Jazeera, a harsh critic of the kingdom and funded by Qatar. But it was closed hours after its launch for hosting a Bahraini opposition figure.
After the uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011, he criticized the crackdown by several Arab governments on the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that Saudi Arabia considers an existential threat.
The friends remembered him as a devout Muslim who loved his homeland, an avid history buff, and a humble man with a sense of humor, a videogame aficionado, who sometimes played while waiting for an interview.
A first marriage that produced two sons and two daughters collapsed, and Khashoggi told his friends that he failed due to pressure from the Saudi government for his criticism.
His visit to the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul on October 2 was to obtain the necessary documents for his wedding scheduled for the next day in Hatice Cengiz, who waited in vain to leave the premises.
Khashoggi said he had no plans to return to Saudi Arabia because "I did not want to risk losing my freedom, I do not really like being in jail, I just want to be a free writer, I think so, in the service of my people, of my country. "
Sherif Mansour, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Khashoggi was one of the few Saudis who helped track news of missing and detained journalists and activists.
"Saudi Arabia has always been a black hole in terms of information, and now, after Jamal's case, it's even harder to get something," Mansour said. "Those journalists depended on Khashoggi to tell their stories, now it's up to us to tell their story and make sure that the risks he took on behalf of those journalists were not in vain."
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