Monday, November 12, 2018
Author: Meg Skinner
The Khashoggi assassination has gotten under my skin and dominated my sleepless moments for more than a month. Perhaps it is because I have printer’s ink for blood, as my father was a newspaper editor, and my son has been an investigative journalist for the last 15 years, that I find his killing so appalling. I have been reading obsessively the accounts in the New York Times, and on-line in the Washington Post. The lurid details leaked to Turkish media, including the report that his fingers were cut off before he was beheaded brought back images of the killing 45 years ago by the Pinochet regime of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara, whose fingers were stomped on and smashed with a rifle butt, then told he would never play his guitar again. His body, when found, was riddled with 44 bullet holes. I wondered if Khashoggi’s Saudi tormentors told him he would never again type another column for the Washington Post.
In the Author’s note which begins his 2008 book A Crime So Monstrous – Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery, my son E. Benjamin Skinner wrote that Stalin, who knew something about the subject, had supposedly maintained “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men is a statistic.” Ben used this quote to explain his modus operandi in personalizing the stories of individuals enslaved from Haiti to southern Sudan, northern India and Romania/Moldova. The Netherlands and the US, rather than attempt to quantify those enslaved.
But what Khashoggi’s brutal murder has done for me is to highlight what the Saudi regime is doing elsewhere in the world, and seemingly with impunity. Again because of family connections – my late husband was a British Administrative Officer in the Aden Protectorate of what is now Yemen after the 2nd World War, and my son studied Arabic in Yemen on a State Department approved program in more peaceful times – I have been following the Saudi coalition’s war with the Iranian backed Houthi rebels in Yemen for nearly four years with increasing alarm.
The UN Secretary General has declared Yemen to be the “World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis”. Some 14 million Yemenis are faced with death by starvation and cholera within several months if food and medical supplies are prevented from reaching vulnerable populations by the Coalition’s blockade of the port of Hudaydah, and the Houthi checkpoints on the roads.
What galls me most is that my taxpayer dollars are supporting that unconstitutional war by providing arms, intelligence, and drone/air cover to the Saudi Coalition. Under the cover of preventing Iranian hegemony of the region, the Saudis and their coalition allies have ruthlessly sought to destroy the Houthis irrespective of the civilian collateral damage caused by relentless air attacks. In fact, a film shown at Union South recently, The New Barbarians, detailed how both coalition and Houthi forces have systematically targeted hospitals and healthcare facilities, in violation of the Geneva Accords, and war-time norms for generations. The same is happening in Syria as well, resulting in a new normal for civilian casualties.
The BBC, Newshour, and Christiane Amanpour & Company footage of starving children, obtained by the few western journalists – mostly women – brave enough to cover themselves head to toe to get by Houthi checkpoints, are one source of my nightmares. Not since the Biafran War and the famine in the Horn of Africa have I seen such horrific images, compounded by the worst outbreak of cholera in history. And although Yemen has for generations been the poorest country in the region, the cholera outbreak and starvation are entirely man-made, a result of the on-going conflict, aerial bombardment of infrastructure, medical facilities, and civilian homes and the blockade of Hudaydah, through which 70% of the country’s vital relief aid and medical supplies have come in the past.
Trump declared that the deal he negotiated to sell $110 billion in arms to the Saudis is non-negotiable, as it would hurt arms manufacturers and jobs in the US. Since when have we monetized morality and human rights to this extent? There is some small chance that invoking the Global Magnitsky Act, which authorizes the government to penalize human rights offenders, would limit this sale. But I have more hopes for H. Con. Res. 134 to end the unconstitutional US backing of the Saudi War in Yemen, sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna and our own representative Mark Pocan and the companion Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution SJ Res.54 in the Senate.
The only good that can possibly be expected to come from the killing of this one crusading journalist is the increased scrutiny by Congress and the American public of our foreign policy objectives in the region, and the reliability of those we chose to associate with in the furtherance of those goals. The assassination has exposed the ruthlessness of our coalition partner Saudi Arabia. It is unfortunate that our president has no moral compass with which to see this. One can only hope that the mid-term elections have stiffened the spines of Congress.
It took 45 years, until July of this year, for eight retired soldiers to be convicted of the death of Victor Jara, and sentenced to 15 years in jail. Will we have to wait that long before justice is done in this case, and the US government realizes that Saudi Arabia is not a trusted partner? And how many Yemenis will die in the meantime, with some of their blood on our hands?
Meg Skinner
Author: Meg Skinner
The Khashoggi assassination has gotten under my skin and dominated my sleepless moments for more than a month. Perhaps it is because I have printer’s ink for blood, as my father was a newspaper editor, and my son has been an investigative journalist for the last 15 years, that I find his killing so appalling. I have been reading obsessively the accounts in the New York Times, and on-line in the Washington Post. The lurid details leaked to Turkish media, including the report that his fingers were cut off before he was beheaded brought back images of the killing 45 years ago by the Pinochet regime of Chilean folksinger Victor Jara, whose fingers were stomped on and smashed with a rifle butt, then told he would never play his guitar again. His body, when found, was riddled with 44 bullet holes. I wondered if Khashoggi’s Saudi tormentors told him he would never again type another column for the Washington Post.
In the Author’s note which begins his 2008 book A Crime So Monstrous – Face to Face with Modern-Day Slavery, my son E. Benjamin Skinner wrote that Stalin, who knew something about the subject, had supposedly maintained “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men is a statistic.” Ben used this quote to explain his modus operandi in personalizing the stories of individuals enslaved from Haiti to southern Sudan, northern India and Romania/Moldova. The Netherlands and the US, rather than attempt to quantify those enslaved.
But what Khashoggi’s brutal murder has done for me is to highlight what the Saudi regime is doing elsewhere in the world, and seemingly with impunity. Again because of family connections – my late husband was a British Administrative Officer in the Aden Protectorate of what is now Yemen after the 2nd World War, and my son studied Arabic in Yemen on a State Department approved program in more peaceful times – I have been following the Saudi coalition’s war with the Iranian backed Houthi rebels in Yemen for nearly four years with increasing alarm.
The UN Secretary General has declared Yemen to be the “World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis”. Some 14 million Yemenis are faced with death by starvation and cholera within several months if food and medical supplies are prevented from reaching vulnerable populations by the Coalition’s blockade of the port of Hudaydah, and the Houthi checkpoints on the roads.
What galls me most is that my taxpayer dollars are supporting that unconstitutional war by providing arms, intelligence, and drone/air cover to the Saudi Coalition. Under the cover of preventing Iranian hegemony of the region, the Saudis and their coalition allies have ruthlessly sought to destroy the Houthis irrespective of the civilian collateral damage caused by relentless air attacks. In fact, a film shown at Union South recently, The New Barbarians, detailed how both coalition and Houthi forces have systematically targeted hospitals and healthcare facilities, in violation of the Geneva Accords, and war-time norms for generations. The same is happening in Syria as well, resulting in a new normal for civilian casualties.
The BBC, Newshour, and Christiane Amanpour & Company footage of starving children, obtained by the few western journalists – mostly women – brave enough to cover themselves head to toe to get by Houthi checkpoints, are one source of my nightmares. Not since the Biafran War and the famine in the Horn of Africa have I seen such horrific images, compounded by the worst outbreak of cholera in history. And although Yemen has for generations been the poorest country in the region, the cholera outbreak and starvation are entirely man-made, a result of the on-going conflict, aerial bombardment of infrastructure, medical facilities, and civilian homes and the blockade of Hudaydah, through which 70% of the country’s vital relief aid and medical supplies have come in the past.
Trump declared that the deal he negotiated to sell $110 billion in arms to the Saudis is non-negotiable, as it would hurt arms manufacturers and jobs in the US. Since when have we monetized morality and human rights to this extent? There is some small chance that invoking the Global Magnitsky Act, which authorizes the government to penalize human rights offenders, would limit this sale. But I have more hopes for H. Con. Res. 134 to end the unconstitutional US backing of the Saudi War in Yemen, sponsored by Rep. Ro Khanna and our own representative Mark Pocan and the companion Sanders-Lee-Murphy resolution SJ Res.54 in the Senate.
The only good that can possibly be expected to come from the killing of this one crusading journalist is the increased scrutiny by Congress and the American public of our foreign policy objectives in the region, and the reliability of those we chose to associate with in the furtherance of those goals. The assassination has exposed the ruthlessness of our coalition partner Saudi Arabia. It is unfortunate that our president has no moral compass with which to see this. One can only hope that the mid-term elections have stiffened the spines of Congress.
It took 45 years, until July of this year, for eight retired soldiers to be convicted of the death of Victor Jara, and sentenced to 15 years in jail. Will we have to wait that long before justice is done in this case, and the US government realizes that Saudi Arabia is not a trusted partner? And how many Yemenis will die in the meantime, with some of their blood on our hands?
Meg Skinner