Editorial of the “World”. Saudi Arabia holds its own when it comes to the death penalty. The one that places it alongside the worst executing states on the planet, Iran and China. The kingdom headed de facto by Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman announced on Saturday March 12 that it had killed 81 people sentenced to death in a single day, an unprecedented figure in the recent history of the giant of the Arabian Peninsula.
You have to go back more than forty years to find a comparable mass execution, in 1980, in very different circumstances. The self-proclaimed guardian dynasty of the Holy Places of Islam had been shaken a few months earlier by the capture of the Great Mosque of Mecca by a jihadist commando. Sixty-three insurgents had been executed.
The statement issued to announce this decimation assured that those sentenced to death had been able to have the rights recognized by the Saudi judicial system. It is permitted, even advised, to doubt it. Opacity is the rule, as dozens of arbitrary arrests have shown since the crown prince consolidated, from 2015, his hold on a kingdom previously run collegially. A year after he came to power, 43 Saudis had already been executed in a single day, including dissident Shiite cleric Nimr Al-Nimr.
The elbow room
No one knows in truth precisely what was reproached to the men passed by the weapons, ” convicted of various crimes, including the murder of innocent men, women and children “, according to the official press release. The Saudi power questioned affiliations to ” terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State organization or the Yemeni Houthi rebellion.
But the credibility of the authorities is weak, since the name of Mohammed bin Salman, alias “MBS”, was linked to the execution and dismemberment in 2018 of a dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, perpetrated in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, in Turkey. Against all evidence, the prince continues to deny any responsibility, as he did again in an interview published on March 3 by the American magazine The Atlantic.
We remember that the Saudi subordinates thrown into the woods after this appalling assassination had initially been sentenced to the death penalty, before it was commuted to life imprisonment, still in the greatest opacity. “ The world must already know that when Mohammad Bin Salman promises reforms, bloodshed follows. », commented the British human rights NGO Reprieve.
The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army and the explosion in the price of hydrocarbons give, it is true, free rein to Mohammed ben Salman. While US President Joe Biden has so far refused to deal directly with him, the Crown Prince has certainly taken note of the recent rapprochement between the US and Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela. Washington had yet sworn the loss of the latter when Donald Trump occupied the Oval Office.
Unlike Venezuela, ruined by twenty years of Chavismo, Saudi Arabia is one of the few oil producers able to play the shock absorbers on world markets, because of its ability to rapidly increase its oil production. The temptation of Westerners is undoubtedly strong to reconnect with Riyadh in the name of containing Russia. But where would be the consistency to get along with a leader who, after raining his bombs on Yemen, keeps his executioners so busy?
