A Human Rights Watch report claims that Saudi border guards have murdered hundreds of African migrants.
In July, when the Biden White House floated the idea — via a gauzy Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times — of offering formal U.S. security guarantees to Saudi Arabia in return for diplomatic normalization with Israel, I called this lunatic idea “foolishness on top of foolishness.”
“America’s implicit security guarantees of the Saudi monarchy,” I wrote, “have brought us little but grief for 40 years.”
During every one of those years, the Saudi dictatorship has played us fast and loose. It has never been aligned with our values or our interests. It has tolerated and indirectly funded our radical-jihadist enemies to shore itself up domestically. It has brutalized and terrorized its people, especially its women and religious minorities. It has used its oil reserves as a weapon against us and has participated in and led a cartel that has placed the United States under an oil embargo, causing tremendous economic damage. Under no circumstances should we compound this grave error and naïveté by granting explicit treaty security guarantees in exchange for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s mess of pottage.
Today, the Times reports on a Human Rights Watch brief claiming that “border guards in Saudi Arabia have regularly opened fire on African migrants seeking to cross into the kingdom from Yemen, killing hundreds of men, women and children in a recent 15-month period.”
The guards have beaten the migrants with rocks and bars, forced male migrants to rape women while guards watched and shot detained migrants in their limbs, leading to permanent injuries and amputations, the report said.
The shooting of migrants is “widespread and systematic,” it said, adding that if killing them were Saudi government policy, it would constitute a crime against humanity.
A Saudi government statement dismissed the report as inaccurate.
I don’t know first-hand if the HRW report is accurate (you can read the whole thing here), but, taking into account the entirety of Saudi history — the well-established human-rights abuses, the character of the kingdom’s brutal kleptocratic government — it reads as plenty plausible to me. Could anyone be truly shocked — shocked! — to learn that the vicious Saudi dictatorship had engaged in such behavior?
Once again, hell no to new U.S. security guarantees to Saudi.
Oh by the way, Joe Biden is planning on meeting with Mohammed bin Salman on the sidelines of the G-20 summit next month to discuss the details of Tom Friedman’s dreamy “significant Biden foreign policy legacy.”