Help promote human rights in the Middle East and North Africa

Donate Today
Facebook-f Twitter Instagram Linkedin Youtube Envelope
Search
Close this search box.
  • English
  • العربية
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • What We Do
    • Who We Are
    • FAQs
    • Support Dawn
    • Work With Us
    • For the Media
  • Founder Jamal Khashoggi
    • Who Was Jamal Khashoggi?
    • Chronology of a Murder
    • UN Recommendations
    • International Reaction
    • In His Own Words
    • DAWN and Jamal
  • Countries
    • USA
    • Saudi Arabia
    • Egypt
    • UAE
    • Israel-Palestine
    • Jordan
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
  • Democracy In Exile
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines for Democracy in Exile
  • Advocacy
    • The Lobbyist Hall of Shame
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
    • Reforming Foreign Policy
      • Aid Conditionality
      • Human Rights Go to War
      • China
      • Yemen: Toward Sustainable Peace and Democracy
    • US Foreign Policy in MENA
    • Joint Advocacy
    • DAWN Foreign Policy Blueprint
  • Experts
  • Latest
Menu
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • What We Do
    • Who We Are
    • FAQs
    • Support Dawn
    • Work With Us
    • For the Media
  • Founder Jamal Khashoggi
    • Who Was Jamal Khashoggi?
    • Chronology of a Murder
    • UN Recommendations
    • International Reaction
    • In His Own Words
    • DAWN and Jamal
  • Countries
    • USA
    • Saudi Arabia
    • Egypt
    • UAE
    • Israel-Palestine
    • Jordan
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
  • Democracy In Exile
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines for Democracy in Exile
  • Advocacy
    • The Lobbyist Hall of Shame
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
    • Reforming Foreign Policy
      • Aid Conditionality
      • Human Rights Go to War
      • China
      • Yemen: Toward Sustainable Peace and Democracy
    • US Foreign Policy in MENA
    • Joint Advocacy
    • DAWN Foreign Policy Blueprint
  • Experts
  • Latest
Donate

A big step to amplify Jamal Khashoggi's vision

September 29, 2020
in Democracy In Exile
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Sarah Leah Whitson

Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now).

Published in Washington Post, September 29, 2020

Most countries in the Middle East and North Africa are either quasi-failed states or autocratic regimes seething with undercurrents of instability. Saudi journalist-in-exile Jamal Khashoggi recognized this wrenching reality, and he understood the solution. Two years ago, shortly before his savage murder in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, he created an organization called DAWN to promote democracy, human rights and the rule of law for the Arab world. Today, DAWN relaunches to amplify a thousandfold his vision for the region.

[Read this piece in Arabic.]

I came to know Jamal when I was Human Rights Watch's Middle East director and he was a spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington. In December 2016, after he had returned to Saudi Arabia and to his career as a journalist, Jamal told me that the then-deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, had banned him from public writing to punish him for tweeting critically about the incoming Trump administration.

[Read more pieces in this collection]

So I urged him to leave the country before the government banned him from travel and suffocated him even more. I had given this advice to many writers, activists and even government insiders from the region, who would one day wake up to find themselves targeted by their own governments. I knew of many Saudis who had discovered they were banned from travel at an airport passport line. A decade or more might pass before these bans would be lifted, as secretly and arbitrarily as they had been imposed.

When the travel bans in Saudi Arabia morphed into wide-scale arrests of scholars, writers and journalists later in 2017, Jamal saw the writing on the wall and fled. He came to the United States, where he became a columnist for The Post. From his new platform, Jamal championed freedom for the Arab world without regard to the wrath of Saudi rulers. Jamal thought he was safe outside his country. I thought he was safe, too. We were wrong.

While Khashoggi's murder has tarnished MBS's reputation, he has managed, so far, to elude significant consequences for his role in the murder. The United States and other Western governments have imposed sanctions on various Saudi officials implicated in the murder, but they have studiously avoided levying sanctions against MBS. Lucrative arms sales to Saudi Arabia have mostly continued without disruption. The upcoming virtual Group of 20 meeting in Riyadh will entail one more big collective push by global corporations and governments to help MBS sweep his bloodstained record under the rug so that business can return to usual.

Yet U.S. civil society organizations are upending the Saudi government's PR-fueled efforts at normalization, bringing lawsuits to compel the US government to disclose information about Jamal's murder, and organizing a boycott of MBS's planned G-20 pageant. In joining this struggle, DAWN will create a vibrant platform for political exiles from across the region to freely discuss, debate and promote their vision for freedom and democracy in the region.

Today, hundreds of thousands of people from the Arab world have been forced, like Jamal, to flee their countries for advocating reform, or even for participating in a single protest. We aim to bring their independent insights, analysis and recommendations, suppressed in their home countries, to the fore of global policymakers. As the people of Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Algeria recently have reminded us, the demands for just governance in the region have not gone away. They will continue to reemerge, from one country to the next, until fulfilled.

DAWN will also draw on in-country sources to develop detailed case files of political persecutions masquerading as judicial process, and expose the shadowy government agents — judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and interrogators — who operate the bureaucracy of repression, with nary a blemish to their reputations. Real justice and real accountability may well be elusive in all but the rarest of cases. But we will ensure that these otherwise comfortable culprits receive the notoriety they deserve. And we will certainly seek accountability right here in the United States for the murder of our founder.

Jamal had no illusions about the role of foreign governments, especially the U.S. government, in enabling the rule of the Arab world's autocrats. And he understood the United States' vital role in maintaining the Saudi monarchy's existence. As President Trump recently blurted out in a rare moment of candor, "They wouldn't last a week if we're not there, and they know it." DAWN will seek to influence the policy of the United States as well as other countries to stop harming the people of this region by supporting their abusive, illegitimate leaders.

Jamal believed most of all that democracy would be the only lasting answer for security, peace and dignity for the Middle East, and "the most effective way to tackle terror, stop bloodshed and political violence in Arab countries." We hope that DAWN's contribution to freedom and democratic governance in the Arab world will be his most lasting legacy.

Tags: Human rights abusershuman rights violationsJamal Khashoggi.KSAMBSSaudi ArabiaUS foreign policy
Previous Post

Ibrahim Metwally Hegazy: A Trip to Geneva Rerouted to Maximum Security Prison

Next Post

Egyptian Refugee: The Homeland has Become a Big Prison

Related Posts

Democracy In Exile

Derna's Man-Made Disaster and the Tragedy of Libya's Fate

It won’t just be nature’s fury that will haunt Derna’s residents, but the storm of negligence, manipulation and repression...

Emadeddin Badi
September 21, 2023
Democracy In Exile

After Morocco's Earthquake, Will Amazigh Life in the High Atlas Ever Be the Same?

Not all of the destruction from Morocco's devastating earthquake can be quantified in the country's rural, indigenous communities.

Brahim El Guabli
September 20, 2023
Democracy In Exile

The Regional Impact of Iran's Protests, One Year Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable

Has Iran’s repression of its protest movement reverberated beyond its borders?

Frederick Deknatel
September 18, 2023
TORONTO, ON - OCTOBER 2:  Lawrence Wright is seen behind his publisher's office in Toronto.
 In a region of ongoing violence and brutality, a 1978 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel has endured. Q&A with Pulitzer-winning Lawrence Wright on his new book Thirteen Days in September, which explains how it happened.
Democracy In Exile

Lawrence Wright on Why Domestic Terrorism Is America's 'Present Enemy'

Twenty-two years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the biggest threat to the United States is not al-Qaeda or...

Omid Memarian
September 14, 2023
Next Post

Egyptian Refugee: The Homeland has Become a Big Prison

UNITED STATES - MAY 26: Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., walks through the Senate subway in the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, May 26, 2021. (Photo by Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

U.S.: Suspend Military Aid to Egypt in Wake of Menendez Indictment for Corruption by Egyptian Government

September 23, 2023

Derna's Man-Made Disaster and the Tragedy of Libya's Fate

September 21, 2023

After Morocco's Earthquake, Will Amazigh Life in the High Atlas Ever Be the Same?

September 20, 2023

Categories

  • Advocacy
  • Aid Conditionality
  • Anonymous Interviews
  • Anonymous Interviews Egypt
  • Anonymous Interviews Saudi Arabia
  • Anonymous Interviews UAE
  • Cases
  • Cases Egypt
  • Cases Saudi Arabia
  • Cases UAE
  • China's Uyghur Repression
  • Countries
  • Culprits
  • Culprits Egypt
  • Culprits Israel
  • Culprits Saudi Arabia
  • Culprits UAE
  • DAWN
  • DAWN Foreign Policy Blueprint
  • Dawn's Advocacy
  • Democracy In Exile
  • Editor's Pick
  • Egypt
  • Feature
  • Fellows
  • Foreign Policy
  • Human Rights
  • Human Rights Go to War
  • International Actors
  • Israel-Palestine
  • Joint Letters
  • Jordan
  • Lobbyists
  • Lobbyists Israel Palestine
  • Palestine
  • Political prisoners
  • Press Release Egypt
  • Press Release Israel-Palestine
  • Press Release Jordan
  • Press Release Saudi Arabia
  • Press Release UAE
  • Press Releases
  • Saudi Arabia
  • UAE
  • Uncategorized
  • United Nations
  • US – Egypt
  • US – Saudi Arabia
  • US – UAE
  • USA
  • Yemen Conference

SUPPORT OUR MISSION

Donate Today

About Us

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) is a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy, the rule of law, and human rights for all of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Support Us

Donate Now

Newsletter

Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin Youtube

© DAWN All rights reserved. | Website Design by KRS Creative.

DONATE TODAY