- MENU
- HOME
- SEARCH
- WORLD
- MAIN
- AFRICA
- ASIA
- BALKANS
- EUROPE
- LATIN AMERICA
- MIDDLE EAST
- United Kingdom
- United States
- Argentina
- Australia
- Austria
- Benelux
- Brazil
- Canada
- China
- France
- Germany
- Greece
- Hungary
- India
- Indonesia
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italy
- Japan
- Korea
- Mexico
- New Zealand
- Pakistan
- Philippines
- Poland
- Russia
- South Africa
- Spain
- Taiwan
- Turkey
- USA
- BUSINESS
- WEALTH
- STOCKS
- TECH
- HEALTH
- LIFESTYLE
- ENTERTAINMENT
- SPORTS
- RSS
- iHaveNet.com: Middle East
DC's Dictator Summit
by Medea Benjamin and Nalini Ramachandran
President Obama hosting Gulf Cooperation Council (Photo: Tribes of the World / Flickr)
A Washington gathering of Persian Gulf autocrats sums up the absurdity of America's relationship with some of the world's most oppressive regimes.
Washington, DC is presently the converging point for some of the world's most oppressive regimes.
Recently, President Obama hosted a billionaire conglomerate known as the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which consists of the Middle Eastern monarchies of Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Oman. The cozy U.S.-GCC relationship exemplifies the twisted nature of U.S. foreign policy, especially in regards to one particular monarchy: Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has been accused of human rights violations against its own citizens, including political activists, journalists, and women. The Saudi king decided to skip the GCC summit, leaving the ministers of the interior and defense to take his place, because he opposes the U.S. efforts to reach a diplomatic solution to the nuclear program of its rival, Iran.
The Saudi monarchy has been using its military and financial might to impose its will throughout the Middle East. It’s financially bolstering the repressive regime of Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt, who came to power in a coup against the Muslim Brotherhood. Saudi tanks brutally crushed Shiite protests in Bahrain. Years after the first invasion, Saudi forces continue to dominate Bahrain. The Saudi devotion to Wahhabism, a radical sect of Islam, has been responsible for exporting extremism around the globe -- including to the 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers who hailed from the kingdom.
The latest Saudi offense is the bombing of Yemen, where the death toll has reached the thousands.
In late March, Saudi military forces intervened in an internal conflict in Yemen to oppose the rebel Houthi group, internationalizing what was an internal struggle. The Saudi king defended the air strikes in Yemen as a way to “save Yemen and its brotherly people from a group entrenched with the spirit of sectarianism,” in reference to the Houthis. In the process of claiming to save Yemen, close to 1,400 people have died, including hundreds of children. Humanitarian groups have been calling for a ceasefire repeatedly since March, with no avail until early May.
If salvation was the goal, the Saudis have failed miserably. The latest development in this ongoing saga has been the Houthis’ compliance with a five-day ceasefire, beginning at 11:00pm on Tuesday May 12th. In preparation for this ceasefire, Saudi forces terrorized the Yemeni border with an onslaught of air strikes in an attempt to “inflict as much damage as possible” before the mandatory arms rest.
To put things in perspective, the Saudis significantly heightened the harm and destruction in a struggle that has killed thousands of civilians, just two days before meeting with U.S. officials to discuss safety and security in the region. The irony is glaring.
You don't have to go beyond Saudi Arabia's border to see its abuses. Organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned the imprisonment of many political and human rights activists convicted for expressing dissent against the government, as well as the limited rights provided to women.
In January, Saudi Arabia received worldwide condemnation for sentencing a political blogger to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes in public. Raif Badawi, husband and father of three, did nothing more than exercise his freedom of expression, a crime that’s apparently punishable by a medieval form of torture. While the Saudi ambassador attended free speech rallies in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Badawi was subjected to his second round of lashings. Hundreds of political prisoners remain jailed -- including Badawi's lawyer, Waleed Abulkhair, who was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his role as a reform activist.
Women have also become the targets of political repression, as driving is still viewed as a criminal offense. Legally, women are not permitted to be in public without adhering to a strict dress code that requires head covering. They’re required to have a male guardian at all times, whether it be their brother, father, or husband, and must ask permission to travel freely.
One could rattle off a plethora of Saudi abuses, yet the biggest question remains: Why does the United States, the alleged beacon of liberty and freedom, maintain such close ties with such an oppressive regime?
More than anything else, U.S.-Saudi relations -- and the current summit -- are the materialization of a business agreement that turns a blind eye to the basic human rights of Saudi citizens in favor of lucrative political and military alliances. The U.S.-GCC summit forces us to call into question the priorities of U.S. foreign policy. The juxtaposition of the kingdom’s ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen and its extensive human rights abuses with a diplomatic meeting to promote the U.S.-Saudi relationship further exposes the flaws in the system.
It's a system in which Washington condemned the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, but lauded the leadership of the deceased Saudi king. It's a system in which the U.S. cites human rights abuses in Iran and North Korea as reasons why normalization is not possible, but provided Saudi Arabia with $90 billion worth of weapons contracts in four years, many of which are being used against civilians in Yemen. Ultimately, it's a system in which policymakers remain silent amidst human rights horrors and air strike terrors, all to preserve a delicate partnership that fills U.S. corporate bank accounts and arms Saudi monarchs.
The pattern is predictable: ignore the oppression, discuss more pressing issues of security in the Middle East, shake hands, smile, repeat. If only the U.S. government chose to be on the side of Raif Badawi, Yemeni civilians, and the repressed citizens of Saudi Arabia, then the U.S.-GCC goals of enhanced partnership and security would be more than just empty words.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the peace group CODEPINK and the human rights organization Global Exchange. Nalini Ramachandran is a student at Northeastern University studying International Affairs and Middle East Studies. She's currently working in the Washington, DC CODEPINK office.
WORLD | AFRICA | ASIA | EUROPE | LATIN AMERICA | MIDDLE EAST | UNITED STATES
Available at Amazon.com:
Inside Syria: The Backstory of Their Civil War and What the World Can Expect
- Prospects for a Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone in the Middle East
- Stephen Walt's Call to Adopt a Containment Policy Toward the Islamic State
- Kids Paying the Price for Yemen's War
- Turkey's AKP Doomed by Poverty, Growing Inequality and Its War on Trade Unions
- Multiculturalism Will Save Turkey
- Saudi Arabia Fixated on Iran When Sunni Extremists Are Real Threat
- The Dark Plot to Tip the Scales
- Deconstructing the Mainstream Narrative About the Saudi War on Yemen
- Syrian President Assad Using Islamic State to Defeat Other Rebel Factions
- The Islamic State Doesn't Want True Muslims
- Obama's Strategy in Iraq: Escalation
- Iraqi Army Overmatched Against Islamic State Fighters
- Islamic State May Not Be Worth a Strategy
- The Islamic State Needs to Be Stopped, But With Imagination, Not Intervention
- Seizures of Ramadi and Palmyra Suggest Islamic State, Despite Setbacks, Still on a Roll
- Bashar al-Assad: The Problem with Young Dictators
- A Fateful Triangle: the United States, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in Yemen
- The Islamic State's Crimes Against Islam
- DC's Dictator Summit
- Yemen's War Is Redrawing the Middle East's Fault Lines
- Identifying the West's Flaws in Logic When Discussing Islam
- The Islamic State's Strange Co-dependency With Syrian President Assad
- Chlorine: Assad's Double-Edged Sword
- Number of Atheists in the Arab World Rivals the West
- US-Saudi-Iran Rapprochement Needed Before Peace in Syria Can Happen
- How the U.S. Contributed to Yemen's Crisis
- Is Al Qaeda Waxing or Waning?
- Diplomacy Is the Only Plausible Solution to Syria and Yemen
- Will Israel 'Bounce the Rubble' in Gaza?
- Yemen and the Congress of Reaction
- Autocrats United Against Yemen
- The Clash of Civil Persuasions
- The Great Convergence with Iran
- Iran Deal: A Game-Changer for the Middle East
- Another Illegal War in the Middle East
- Jim Crow in the Holy Land
- Netanyahu's Victory Is Just as Bad as It Looks
- Why America Lacks Credibility in the Middle East
- America's Hydra Problem in the Middle East
- The Islamic State and Turkey's 'Precious Loneliness'
- Reviving the North Korea-Iran Axis?
- Authoritarian Symps
- Celebrating Wars & Destruction
- Healing or Harming? The Provision of Health Care by Peacekeepers
- Two-Track War Against ISIL
- The Need for a New Syrian Narrative
- Why ISIS Exists
- Why Are Women Joining the Islamic State?
- When Bibi Came to Town
- The Geopolitics of Speeches
- 10 Reasons I'm Praying for AIPAC's Decline
- Understanding Turkey's Tilt
- Some Good News from the Middle East
- ISIS Unites the World
- An Eritrean in Israel
- Global Warming Triggered Syria War
- Is Turkey Holding Up a Resolution in Syria?
- Does Syria See the U.S. as an Ally?
- Nationalism under Pressure: Islamic State, Iraq and Kurdistan
- Syria's Future and the War against ISIS
- The Syrian Labyrinth
- So, Islamic State, You Want to Rule a Caliphate
- Wanna-Be's Doing Islamic State's Bidding
- Is ISIS Capable of Nuclear Terrorism?
- Khomeini Drew the Line at Nukes
- Israel's Lack of Interest
- Recognizing Palestine
- Gaza: Bipartisan War on Human Rights
- Iraq Long Awash in Carnage
- Turkey's Dealings With ISIL
- In What World Are the Kurds as Dangerous as the Islamic State?
- Iran: Netanyahu UN Speech Baseless
- Without Iran, Coalition to Confront ISIS is Doomed
- Treat ISIS Like an Onion
More Middle East News & Current Events ...
WORLD | AFRICA | ASIA | EUROPE | LATIN AMERICA | MIDDLE EAST | UNITED STATES