Report: Journalists Held Arbitrarily in Saudi Crackdown

Report: Journalists Held Arbitrarily in Saudi Crackdown

Report: Journalists Held Arbitrarily in Saudi Crackdown

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This article was originally posted by Reporters Without Borders here on 09/02/2018.]

Al-Shehi’s arrest was not official until yesterday’s announcement of his sentence, which includes a five-year ban on leaving the country on completion of the jail term. His disappearance was reported on social networks in January but he stopped writing his column in the Al-Watan newspaper in mid-December.

He accused the royal court of involvement in corruption and nepotism during an appearance on a Dubai-based Saudi TV channel on 8 December after making similar allegations in anarticle in November.

According to RSF’s information, he is one of at least 15 journalists and citizen-journalists to have been detained in a wave of arrests that began in September although none of these arrests or the existence of charges had been officially confirmed until yesterday’s announcement of Al-Shehi’s sentence.

Harassment of journalists has increased since last June. Some journalists who were abroad have preferred to stay there. Some have been forced to resign from what are regarded as “enemy” media. Others, according to our information, have chosen to censor themselves or to withdraw altogether from what was the only space left for free speech – social networks.

The information obtained by RSF from various sources indicates that these “missing” journalists are being held arbitrarily by the Saudi regime. But it is still very difficult to say exactly how many are being held because of the secrecy with which the authorities have acted and because some of the families refuse to talk for fear of reprisals.

For security reasons, RSF cannot reveal all the names it has obtained. But we can report that the victims are mainly being questioned about what they have written in the press and on social networks (Twitter and Snapchat) and about their TV appearances. The authorities reportedly accuse them of disloyalty towards current Saudi policy.

“We are concerned about this wave of secret arrests,” RSF said. “Nothing in Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical situation justifies treating either professional or non-professional journalists as dangers to state security and arresting them without clear grounds.

“We regret that, despite the openness and modernity of his discourse, Mohammad bin Salman’s appointment as Crown Prince last June has led to the additional persecution of journalists. We all for the immediate release of all these journalists, who are being held arbitrarily.”

 

Wave of arrests

Those detained include Essam Al Zamil, an economist and businessman who is well known as a citizen-journalist on social networks. He was reportedly arrested in September on his return from an official visit to the United States with a Saudi delegation.

According to the information obtained by RSF, he is being held in the eastern city of Dammam and has been interrogated about tweetssince 2011, in particular, his tweets about the future sale of the Saudi company Aramco, which he has opposed. He has reportedly been charge with incitement against the state and inciting sedition in these tweets.

Those detained also include Jamal Farsi – a citizen-journalist and journalist with several Saudi media outlets as well as a liberal, pro-reform businessman – who was reportedly also arrested in September. According to some sources, it was his tweets and videos cautioning against VAT and the sale of state companies that got him into trouble.

Mustafa Al-Hassan, a blogger who is well known on Twitter and as the founder of a pan-Gulf forum that encourages civil society development, went “missing” in September. He is also a journalist with the daily Sahifat al YoumSahifat al Youm, and a university academic and researcher.Two years ago, he began writing about literature and taking less interest in politics because of the political climate and health problems.

satirical and critical blogger known by the blog name of Al Banakhihas reportedly been detained since December.

 

Repressive arsenal reinforced

Imprisoning journalists is not new in Saudi Arabia. At least three journalists and seven citizen-journalists are currently serving jail sentences in connecting with their reporting. Turad Al Amri, a famous journalist and commentator, is said to have been arrested in November 2016 although the authorities have never confirmed this.

Harassment of journalists has increased since last June. Some journalists who were abroad have preferred to stay there. Some have been forced to resign from what are regarded as “enemy” media. Others, according to our information, have chosen to censor themselves or to withdraw altogether from what was the only space left for free speech – social networks.

Many journalists and citizen-journalists have been the targets of campaigns of insults and intimidation on Twitter, carried out at the behest of the crown prince’s advisers. The deployment of these troll armies recalls the operations by “King Salman’s electronic army” in 2015 and 2016.

In December 2017, the Saudi media were urged to display more patriotism, although the regime has tolerated no media freedom for years and has always taken great care of its international image. Activists and journalists can easily be prosecuted under a new terrorism law adopted in November, which has been criticized by the United Nations and international human rights NGOs.

Writing prohibitions are common. One was imposed on Ahmed Adnan, a Saudi journalist in Lebanon, at the end of last month. The journalist Jamal Al Khashoggi was banned in late 2016 and was banned again in 2017, after which he opted for self-imposed exile in the United States.

 Saudi Arabia is ranked 168th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412