Al Jazeera article censored outside the USA

Saudi Arabia uses terrorism as an excuse for human rights abuses

The kingdom is ramping up executions of Shias, with the tacit approval of the United States

December 3, 2015 2:00AM ET

by Arjun Sethi @arjunsethi81

Reports emerged last week that Saudi Arabia intends to imminently execute more than 50 people on a single day for alleged terrorist crimes.
Although the kingdom hasn’t officially confirmed the reports, the evidence is building. Okas, the first outlet to publish the report, has close ties to the Saudi Ministry of Interior and would not have published the story without obtaining government consent. Some of the prisoners slated for execution were likewise recently subject to an unscheduled medical exam, a sign that many believe portends imminent execution. There has already been a spike in capital punishment in Saudi Arabia this year, with at least 151 executions, compared with 90 for all of 2014.
The cases of six Shia activists from Awamiya, a largely Shia town in the oil-rich Eastern province, are particularly disconcerting. The majority of Saudi’s minority Shia population is concentrated in the Eastern province and has long faced government persecution. The six activists were convicted for protesting this mistreatment and other related crimes amid the Arab uprisings in 2011. Three of them were arrested when they were juveniles. Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shia religious leader who was convicted of similar charges, also faces imminent execution.
All the convictions were obtained through unfair trials marred by human and civil rights violations, including in some cases torture, forced confessions and lack of access to counsel. Each defendant was tried before the Specialized Criminal Court, a counterterrorism tribunal controlled by the Ministry of Interior that has few procedural safeguards and is often used to persecute political dissidents. Lawyers are generally prohibited from counseling their clients during interrogation and have limited participatory rights at trial. Prosecutors aren’t even required to disclose the charges and relevant evidence to defendants.
The problems aren’t just procedural. Saudi law criminalizes dissent and the expression of fundamental civil rights. Under an anti-terrorism law passed in 2014, for example, individuals may be executed for vague acts such as participating in or inciting protests, “contact or correspondence with any groups ... or individuals hostile to the kingdom” or “calling for atheist thought.”
One of the defendants, Ali al-Nimr, was convicted of crimes such as “breaking allegiance with the ruler” and “going out to a number of marches, demonstrations and gathering against the state and repeating some chants against the state.” For these offenses, he has been sentenced to beheading and crucifixion, with his beheaded body to be put on public display as a warning to others.
Because of these procedural and legal abominations, the planned executions for these Shia activists must not proceed. They should be retried in public proceedings and afforded due process protections consistent with international law, which includes a ban on the death penalty for anyone under the age of 18.
No other executions should take place in Saudi Arabia. Capital punishment is morally repugnant and rife with error and bias, as we know all too well in the United States. Moreover, any outcome produced by the Saudi criminal justice system is inherently suspect. Inadequate due process, violations of basic human rights and draconian laws that criminalize petty offenses and exercising of civil rights are fixtures of Saudi rule.

Saudi Arabia often escapes moral condemnation in large part because of its close relationship with the US.

They’re also fixtures of authoritarian regimes in general. Those who simply expect Saudi Arabia to reform its criminal justice system ignore the fact that the kingdom is an authoritarian regime that uses the law as a tool to maintain and consolidate power. They also ignore the reality that Saudi Arabia often escapes moral condemnation in large part because of its close relationship with the U.S.
In 2014, for example, President Barack Obama visited the kingdom but made no mention of its ongoing human rights violations. In return, he and the first family received $1.4 million in gifts from the Saudi king. (By law U.S. presidents must either pay for such gifts or turn them over to the National Archives.) The two leaders discussed energy security and military intelligence, shared interests that have connected the U.S. and Saudi Arabia for nearly a century.
Obama traveled to the kingdom earlier this year to offer his condolences on the passing of King Abdullah and to meet with the new ruler, King Salman. Again, human rights were never mentioned. Instead, U.S. National Security Adviser Susan Rice tweeted that Abdullah was a “close and valued friend of the United States.”
This deafening silence is not lost on Saudi Arabia and has emboldened its impunity. In the wake of the Arab uprisings, the kingdom’s brutal campaign against its Shia minority and political opposition has deepened. Shias have limited access to government employment and public education, few rights under the criminal justice system and diminished religious rights. Those who protest this discrimination face arbitrary trial and the prospect of execution for terrorism. Consider that Saudi Arabia has not carried out a mass execution for terrorism-related offenses since 1980, a year after an armed group occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
Dissent of any kind is quelled. In November, Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet and artist born in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for allegedly renouncing Islam. His supporters allege that he’s being punished for posting a video of police lashing a man in public.
Even the kingdom’s neighbors aren’t immune from its authoritarian agenda. Numerous reports suggest that the Saudi-led coalition against opposition groups in Yemen has indiscriminately attacked civilians and used cluster bombs in civilian-populated areas, in violation of international law.
Despite its appalling human rights record, Saudi Arabia was awarded a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council last year and this summer was selected to oversee an influential committee within the council that appoints officials to report on country-specific and thematic human rights challenges. Unsurprisingly, Saudi Arabia has used its newfound power to thwart an international inquiry into allegations that it committed war crimes in Yemen.
It’s not by happenstance that the kingdom announced the mass execution just days after 130 people were killed in Paris in the worst terrorist attacks in Europe in more than a decade. Even before Paris, the U.S. used its “war on terrorism” to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, engage in mass surveillance and develop an assassination program immune from judicial oversight. Is it any surprise that Saudi Arabia feels emboldened to intensify its own “war on terrorism”?

Arjun Sethi is a writer and lawyer in Washington, D.C. He is also an adjunct professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.

© 2015 Al Jazeera America, LLC. All rights reserved.

New Form of "Left" Chauvinism: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

During World War I, the European left split over whether to support the war aims of one's own capitalist government or to oppose the war as an attack against all working people. The left chauvinists were the political ancestors of some of the parliamentary parties in Europe today. Now, there is a new and very ugly kind of chauvinism displayed by American leftists who defend Russian imperialism and its invasion of Ukraine. They do this by ignoring the Ukrainian people and their aspirations and by trying to understand Ukraine solely in terms of great power politics. Because Putin's Russia is opposed to US and European imperialist governments, they automatically become adherents of Putin, they spout his propaganda, and they ignore the realities on the ground.

If Putin had invaded Brooklyn and a few Russian-speaking residents supported them, would those residents be called rebels or separatists? Would Putin's troops be ignored, and would the war in Brooklyn be called a "civil war"? Yet this is precisely what is happening in Ukraine.

The Russian invasion began in Crimea when Russian troops wearing unmarked uniforms left the Russian naval base in Sevastapol and seized the entire Crimean Peninsula. The Russian government at first denied that these were Russian troops. They pretended that these were Russian-speaking residents of Crimea. After a few weeks, however, the Russian government lifted this ridiculous facade and admitted that there were no Crimean rebels, only Russian soldiers. In the last opinion polls conducted in Ukraine before recent events, 54 percent of the residents of Crimea did say they wanted to be part of Russia. Of course, that meant that 46 percent wanted to remain part of Ukraine, but they had no opportunity to express those views.

Let us not forget that when Ukraine gained its independence, it was a major nuclear power. In a 1994 agreement signed by Ukraine, Russia, the USA, and the UK, Russia agreed to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity if Ukraine surrendered all its nuclear weapons and sent them to Russia.

Next, Russian began its invasion of eastern Ukraine. They used the excuse of fascism, even though in Ukraine, fascist parties are only able to get a few percent of the vote in elections, unlike the 25 percent fascist vote in France, for example. They used the excuse of oppression of Russian speakers, even though most Ukrainians speak Russian as well as Ukrainian and even though Russian-speaking Ukrainians were very active in support of the demonstrations in Ukraine, including in eastern cities. In the same public opinion polls mentioned earlier, Ukrainians as a whole polled 90 percent to remain independent from Russia. In the areas of eastern Ukraine where the fighting is going on, they polled 80 percent to remain independent from Russia.

So, where did the so-called rebels or separatists gain their support and their heavy arms? The simple answer is that invading Russians brought both the fighters and their weapons. Not all of them were regular Russian troops. Former soldiers and mercenaries of many varieties were recruited and paid by Putin's government. These were all Russians. I'm sure that a tiny number of Ukrainians joined them, but it makes no sense to call them rebels or separatists. They are collaborators with a Russian-orchestrated invasion.

To be sure, the US and European governments want to fish in these troubled waters. They have recklessly expanded NATO eastward in recent decades. They would like to bring Ukraine into their own sphere of control. But does that change the fundamental character of the Russian invasion of Ukraine from an invasion to a civil war? It certainly does not.

Russia is currently engaging in provocative military behavior elsewhere. Russian military jets flew over the English channel this week. They have flown over Swedish air space. These are no small matters. But Russia did not invade Ukraine because of a perceived military threat. Both Putin and Ukrainians know that the Russian military could easily conquer Ukraine in a few weeks at most if it chose to do so. Ukraine has no desire to join NATO and perhaps not even the EEU. What the Ukrainian people rose up against in massive numbers in 2013 and 2014 was a massively corrupt government and economic system, indeed a system quite similar to that in Russia itself and in neighboring Belarus, which is ruled by a brutal dictator.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has very little to do with great power rivalries and everything to do with his desire to maintain his own corrupt power. He will not tolerate a neighboring country breaking free from corruption and trying to build a genuinely democratic and economically functional society. The Ukrainian people do not have reliable and time-tested leaders or parties who could lead them in that direction, but Putin is unwilling to take the risk that those could eventually develop. He is telling the peoples of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus to give up all hope of improving their lives, and they are getting the message.

The fight of the nascent Ukrainian anticorruption and democracy movement is exactly the kind of thing that principled leftists should support. Instead, the "left" chauvinists are supporting Putin's government, perhaps because they confuse Putin with the Soviet government from decades ago. They spread the totally false narrative of a civil war, of rebels and separatists, and of a US-instigated uprising and coup in Ukraine, as if the US had the influence in Ukraine to cause millions of Ukrainians to go into the streets. Principled leftists, democrats, socialists, and others support the Ukrainian people against a hostile foreign invasion. Principled leftists denounce Putin's imperial objectives just as much as we denounce the imperial objectives of our own governments. What I'm wondering is: where are these principled leftists hiding and why are they not speaking out.