Lhe sluggish summer did not prevent the spotlight from being shone on the visit to Paris of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Ben Salman (“MBS”), the first within the European Union since the assassination in 2018 , from the journalist of Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi. The son of King Salman is suspected by the American intelligence services of having ordered this particularly sordid murder, perpetrated inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. The case ended in a travesty of justice, from which “MBS” came out cleared.
After passing through Athens, the crown prince was received on Thursday July 28 for a working dinner with Emmanuel Macron. The meeting provoked a chorus of indignation on the part of human rights organizations, which the realpolitik arguments invoked by the Elysée in the midst of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict failed to cover.
Emmanuel Macron’s approach is not, however, a reversal. Eight months ago, the French president was the first Western head of state to visit Saudi Arabia. Since then, the process of diplomatic rehabilitation of “MBS” has not ceased to continue, after the visit to Riyadh, in March, of the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and especially that, two weeks ago, of the American President, Joe Biden.
The visit of “MBS” comes only a few days after the visit to Paris of the Head of State of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed Ben Zayed Al Nahyan, and that of the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah Al-Sissi, two regimes where the rights of man are regularly flouted. Once again, these meetings challenge, while the West tries to convince of the merits of its opposition to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, in the name of the values of democracy and human rights.
Two-speed indignation
The denunciation by a growing number of countries of the hypocrisy of Western discourse, based on two-speed indignation, depending on whether it is our friends or our geopolitical enemies, is nothing new. . Resentment comes from afar. The lies, which justified the invasion of Iraq and then that of Libya, contributed to demonetizing the words of Western democracies. The contrast is also striking between the emotion and international mobilization aroused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the deafening silence that has accompanied, since 2015, the war waged by Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
Russian propaganda has not hesitated to use these episodes to cast doubt on Western intentions in Ukraine. This conflict is an opportunity to measure the extent to which the Atlanticist camp struggles to mobilize against Russian ambitions, while this legitimate fight should arouse much wider support. Dozens of countries in Africa and Asia, without taking Vladimir Putin’s side, have opted for a certain non-alignment, due to the very fact of a loss of credibility in the word of the West.
To regain confidence and persuade that democratic values deserve to be defended fiercely, the West must reflect on the image it projects on the rest of the planet. When the discourse on the defense of human rights is no longer systematic, but is declined according to alliances of circumstance, it is difficult not to let people think that it is a vulgar instrument of power at the service of well-understood interests, in this case the oil companies. The strength of our convictions on Russia depends on the consistency that we will be able to maintain with regimes that are hardly more recommendable.