Tag: Saudi Arabia

Taking principled stand

Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun, an 18-year-old Saudi woman, was publicly welcomed to Canada Saturday. She had spent a week in a hotel in Thailand, asking for asylum in a Western country, saying that she did not want to return to her allegedly abusive family, whom she says have threatened to kill her.

Whether her family is indeed abusive has not been proven. But two factors make that issue somewhat moot. First, guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia require women to get permission from a father, husband, brother, son or other male relative in order to work, travel, marry, receive certain medical treatments and even to leave the house. This is codified inequality and abuse against about half the population of the country. In principle, that law alone should make all Saudi women eligible for refugee claims in democratic countries. Additionally, al-Qunun renounced Islam, which is an offence punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.

The teen’s arrival was a bit of a media festival, with Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland embracing al-Qunun at Toronto’s airport.

The ostentatious greeting was extra-weighted because Canada is in an ongoing diplomatic spat with the Saudis. After Freeland tweeted a criticism of Saudi arrests of civil and women’s rights activists last year, the Saudis threw Canada’s ambassador out of the country and threatened to withdraw thousands of Saudi medical students from Canada, among other responses. The public greeting of a now-prominent Saudi dissident by a senior Canadian government official will be seen as a provocation, and perhaps it was intended as such.

Some commentators note that al-Qunun jumped the queue, not only flown to Canada to make a refugee claim, but accepted immediately as a refugee. The global visibility of her case resulted in a country – ours – leaping to accept her, even while one percent of refugees are resettled in a given year.

Also, some diplomats with Saudi experience are warning that the young woman should not be used as a political football – both because that could put her safety at risk and because it could unnecessarily enflame existing tensions.

David Chatterson, a former Canadian ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told the CBC that he worried about precedents.

“What happens the next time a teenage girl or adult woman from Saudi Arabia flees her family and declares herself to no longer be a Muslim, does that mean automatic sanctuary?” he asked.

Of course, diplomatic idealism is always tempered by economic and other realities. The CBC obtained, through an Access to Information request, evidence that the federal government heard concerns from Canadian businesses about their interests being jeopardized when Freeland’s tweets to the Saudis raised the ire of the kingdom’s rulers. On the flip side, Canada does not have as many economic ties to the Saudis as many European and other democratic countries, and this might give us a little more freedom to criticize. The U.S. president has already stated explicitly that he will not endanger American economic interests by contesting Saudi treatment of dissidents – including the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi.

Of 149 countries rated by the World Economic Forum in its annual report on gender equality, Saudi Arabia came 141st. Canada cannot free every one of the 16 million or so Saudi women, but we can ensure freedom for this one.

Yes, al-Qunun did effectively “jump the queue.” But, at the moment when the whole world was watching, that queue-jumping allowed Canada to take a principled stand for gender equality and for the freedom of – and from – religion.

Pragmatic, dirty choices

Franklin Roosevelt famously replied to his secretary of state’s assessment of the Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Somoza Debayle – “Somoza’s a bastard!” – with the rejoinder “Yes, but he’s our bastard.”

Politics makes strange bedfellows. International relations perhaps even more so. The world today is an intricate puzzle of interlocking and disparate pieces. It was, frankly, cleaner and clearer in the days of FDR, when there was just “us” and “them.” Let it not be overlooked though, that when “them” meant the Nazis, Stalin was among those counted as “us.” Stalin was evil, but he helped defeat Nazism. Is the Western world soiled by our partnership with him? Certainly. Would we choose an alternative history had we the chance? What alternative?

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inherited from the Conservative government of Stephen Harper (among other things) a hot potato in the form of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

The previous Conservative government facilitated what is the largest single Canadian manufacturing-export deal ever. General Dynamics Land Systems of London, Ont., will provide light armored vehicles to the Saudi military – a military that helped crush Arab Spring-related uprisings in neighboring Bahrain and in the Shiite areas of eastern Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are also accused of indiscriminate killings in Yemen, where they are fighting Iran-backed Islamists.

It deserves to be said that Saudi Arabia relies on trade with customers like Canada because, despite being the world’s second largest oil-producing nation, the Saudis have failed to parlay that windfall into anything lasting. Canada still exports too many raw materials that could be processed at home and sold abroad at added value but, compared with Saudi Arabia, we are the model of a diversified economy. Since the Saudi oil boom began, the country has invested nearly nothing in anything else, unless exporting Wahhabism is a tertiary industry, which, actually, it seems to be.

Famous for publicly scything off the heads of political dissidents, adulterers and others who in the West would be described as next-door neighbors, Saudi Arabia is now pushing to step up executions of gay people because social media is “making too many homosexuals.”

Despite the cuckoo United Nations logic that says Israel is the world’s top human rights violator, Saudi Arabia is actually a perpetrator of some of the world’s most atrocious abuses of human rights, from the extreme (public beheadings) to the mundane (if you consider the right of women to drive cars or show their faces in public mundane).

Paraphrasing FDR, Saudi Arabia is a bastard.

This seems to be the general consensus and helps explain why the (comparatively) new Liberal government is awkward in its defence of the $15 billion arms deal.

Trudeau has said that annulling the deal would hurt Canada’s reputation and, indeed, a democratic government that reneges on the deals made by its predecessors is treading on ice. Future potential customers could well think twice if Canada had a reputation for backing out of major trade deals when the government changes.

On this side of the pragmatic divide, the deal also means about 3,000 jobs for 15 years in southwestern Ontario. So, the Liberal government has made little defence of its decision other than relying on economics and the decency of sticking with a signed deal.

In the National Post last week, Lawrence Solomon made a different case – a moral case – for sticking with the deal. He argues that Saudi Arabia, however repugnant its internal policies may be, is on the frontlines of combating terror in the form of ISIS, Iran and associated menaces and, therefore, deserves our support.

This is a comparatively novel idea. The Canadian government is taking refuge in excuses that the previous government made a deal, that Canadian jobs are at stake and that it has no option. A cartoon in the Toronto Star depicted Trudeau declaring, “My hands are tied” next to a blindfolded victim being led to his beheading, saying, “I know how you feel.”

Yet maybe Trudeau’s argument should have been more along the lines of Solomon’s. It is not impossible, using some creative logic as Solomon did, to make the case that selling military equipment to the Saudis is in our national interest. Do we wish it were not so? In an ideal world, all our allies would be righteous and all our enemies defeated. But, in a real world as fractured and dangerous as ours, choosing to support unsavory allies to defeat unsavory enemies may be something we need to learn to swallow.

The legendary FDR quote is held up as a model of foreign policy pragmatism, if not ruthlessness. Canadians – especially this lily-white new government – like to think of ourselves as above such sullying choices. If we want to have the impact in the world that Trudeau seemed to be referencing with his “Canada is back” sloganeering, he may have to admit that sometimes we need to get our hands dirty.

At the very least, tough choices should be confronted, not shirked. If it is immoral and wrong to sell military equipment to the Saudis, we shouldn’t do it, and damn the consequences. If it is justifiable on the grounds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then we should trade with the Saudis and make our moral case clearly. But we should not try to have it both ways, slapping down the Saudis with one hand while taking their money with the other.