MICHAEL MORRIS: These things that do happen when a country is in the vice-grip of the state
Jamal Khashoggi’s murder has been shrugged off by the Saudi foreign minister in the same way so many tragedies are unsurprising and expected in SA
The most breathtaking four words spoken last week — as the horrific sum of gathering revelations confirmed mild-mannered journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in Turkey — must be Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir’s fatalistic: “These things unfortunately happen.” His extraordinarily ill-chosen words prompted ABC’s North America correspondent, Conor Duffy, to wonder: “When was the last time a journalist was murdered inside a foreign consulate by rogue staff?” To say such things “unfortunately happen”, Duffy added, “was the kind of flippant description you’d give to a minor car crash or storm damage”. Whatever Jubeir had meant to convey — that the killing was a mishap, that an otherwise unremarkable roughing-up of a dissident went too far, or that rogue elements subverted a routine diplomatic encounter for their own perverse ends — what they reveal most acutely is the cost of a political culture of profound unfreedom. Khashoggi’s death is a corollary. The protean shifts in Riyadh’s ...
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