The tragic
death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was an eye-opener, directing the
world’s attention to Saudi Arabia’s inner dynamics and regional policies. Yet,
in assuming that Khashoggi’s ominous fate was caused by a power-hungry, wayward
and rogue prince, this attention has failed to see that what happened in
Istanbul was but a microcosm of an entire region’s political saga. The focus,
therefore, on the need to remove from power Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman (commonly known as MbS) is a misguided panacea for an incorrect
diagnosis.
First, political
leaders are not born in a vacuum. In reality, superordinate political
structures create not only policies and ideologies, but also, over prolonged
periods of time, dominant mentalities, prevalent outlooks and modes of
behaviour. As such, it is the rogue regimes and mafia-like systems of
government that, more often than not, act as incubators for rogue leaders and
madmen, not the other way around.
MbS is a
prime example – he is the son of an authoritarian political structure, not its
creator. Even if he and his henchmen are sidelined, the system will in all
likelihood spawn a replacement. History has clearly illustrated that leaders’
idiosyncrasies are less consequential than the nature of the political
structures in which they operate. Suffice to say that under the rule of the
colourless and politically unambitious King Khaled (1975–82), another prominent
Saudi dissident, Nasser al-Saeed, was kidnapped in Lebanon, transferred to
Saudi Arabia, brutally tortured and then thrown out of a plane.
Second, in
the largely authoritarian Middle East, Saudi Arabia is hardly an anomaly.
Whether archaic absolute monarchies, princely states, or republics of fear run
by securitocracies, these countries have been, since independence, hijacked by
an alliance of politicians, business elites and intelligence barons who impose
their writ without pity on nations they treat like family heirlooms. Under
their rule, extrajudicial killings, summary executions, horrific tales of
torture and human rights abuses have been the norm, not the exception.
It is
remarkable, for example, that the hit squad that murdered Khashoggi followed
the same pernicious script used by Moroccan intelligence officers against a
prominent dissident six decades ago. In 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka, a Third World leader
of the stature of Che Guevara and Jawaharlal Nehru, was kidnapped from his
Paris exile and brought to the Moroccan capital, where he was tortured and his
body dissolved in a 1.5-meter-high and 2.5-meter-wide tank filled with acid.
Dozens of Moroccan dissidents, we now know, perished in the same tank between
1961 and 1967.
In the same
vein, Gaddafi’s Libya (1969–2011) established a sophisticated system of
torture, composed of a hierarchy of multiple units, each featuring command
structures and bureaucracy. In Ba’athist Iraq, the system’s brutality did not
spare the president’s close relatives. In the mid-1990s, two of Saddam
Hussein’s sons-in-law who had defected to neighbouring Jordan were promised
immunity; both were eliminated immediately upon their return.
Torture is
the modus operandi even in the region’s less brutal authoritarian regimes. When
the CIA asked Omar Soliman, director of Egypt’s intelligence apparatus under
the rule of President Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011), for a DNA sample from the brother
of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, he said, ‘It’s no problem. We’ll just cut
the brother’s arm off and send it to you.’
While these
regimes project an image of being imperfect but improving, to believe this
would be to take the drapery for the substance. These cases, and countless
others, form a pattern that reveals what lies behind the façade of modern-day
governance, vast bureaucracies and diplomatic niceties: a deep-seated thuggish
mentality. In essence, these regimes share, to a striking degree, many of the
predatory characteristics of criminal gangs, including the reliance upon
violence and intimidation to resolve differences, personal rule underpinned by
secrecy and opacity, perverse disrespect for the law, and, needless to say,
lack of accountability. Under gangsterism, the rule of law is a farce; rulers
turn into untouchable deities, polity is an act of collusion, security agencies
are the only functioning institutions, and fear, immense and pervasive, reigns.
Marred by
illegitimacy and wary of dissent, politics in the Middle East has not been
about allocation (who gets what when) or competition among social forces within
a legal framework, but rather, primarily, about control and order. To
compensate for the legitimacy deficit, ruling elites – sheikhs, party
nomenklaturas, military juntas and plutocrats – have resorted to religious
rhetoric, revolutionary fervour, nationalist myths or fake historicity. As a
result, the study of Arab politics has become, inescapably, an inquiry into
corruption and pretence, a study of holy slogans and unholy practices, of
dramatised theatrics and fluxes of despair, of deep seasons of killings
punctuated by false dawns – in short, of great nations lost to repression and
plunder cloaked in trappings of pomp and an air of political symbology.
The sooner
these regimes, which fare terribly on indices measuring corruption, human
rights and the rule of law, are reformed, the better. Their stupendous
ceremonials at home, official politesse at international forums, and public
relations campaigns in Western capitals, now so de rigueur, should not blind us
to the fact that the rule of gangs, or quasi-gangs, is immoral, dangerous, and
very costly at every level.
If the
Khashoggi tragedy is seen as the climax of an encounter between a courageous
journalist and an unprincipled politician, it will be repeated over and over
again, as it has been countless times in the modern history of the Middle East.
Only in context can the full picture be seen, the correct diagnosis made and
the right remedy devised.
Nael Shama
* This essay
appeared first on London School of Economics’ Middle East Centre blog on
February 13, 2019.
Photo: Photo
of Brasserie Lipp, with a plaque remembering Mehdi Ben Barka’s disappearance.
