Frustrated by the lack of concrete punishment for 35-year-old Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 36-year-old Turkish former finance Hatice Cengiz of murdered 59-year-old Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi asked world governments for justice. When the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released a declassified intel report Feb. 27 linking Bin Salman to Khashoggi’s Oct. 2, 2018 murder at Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Cengiz thought 78-year-old U.S. President Joe Biden would announce sanctions on the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. “That it was said there would be no sanctions against the person who gave the order for the crime to be committed created a strange dilemma in everyone’s minds. But this could change in coming days,” said Cengiz. Whatever happened Oct. 2, 2018, the reluctance to sanction Bin Salman is purely related to doing business as usual.
No doubts Cengiz’s need for revenge but the world has other priorities than avenging the death of her late finance. Enough criticism in the U.S. and foreign press was leveled at 74-year-old former President Donald Trump for continuing business as usual with the Kingdom, including completing multibillion-dollar arms sales. Khahsoggi, a former Saudi national, was given a platform at the Washington Post from which to criticize the repressive practices of Bin Salman. Yet no matter what Khashoggi wrote in the Washington Post, it didn’t stop Bin Salman from implementing sweepting reforms in the Kingdom, including allowing women to drive. Whether Cengiz admits it or not, Bin Salman has done more to advance women’s rights than any leader in Saudi history. Women can drive cars, work in men’s jobs, travel without permission and go in public without full-face coverings.
Cengiz wants Bin Salman, whose reforms have revolutionized Saudi society, including codifying Saudi’s criminal justice system, sanctioned because he didn’t stop the murder of her late fiancé.” The process of seeking justice is a long process, sometimes it is no easy,” Cengiz admitted. But Cengiz doesn’t take into consideration that many foreign leaders order the extra-judicial assassinations of their enemies for whatever reason they see fit, including what happened with her late fiancé, Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s murder at the hands of a 15-member Saudi hit squad, who traveled to Istanbul under cover-of-darkness, infuriated the global journalistic community because Khasoggi was one of them. Had Bin Salman ordered the hit on a military or civilian person without ties to the press, no one would have paid attention. Khashoggi’s murder got disproportionate world attention because Khashoggi wrote disparaging columnns about Bin Salman.
Cengiz knows that the world press and most Western countries have shown incredible sympathy for her cause to seek justice. But the world press has singled out Bin Salman as guilty of participating or ordering in extra-judicial killing of Khasoggi, regardless of the recent U.S. intel report. Nothing has changed sine Oct. 2, 2018, the day Khashoggi disappeared inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, with Cengiz waiting patiently for his return that never happened. Cengiz wants justice but Bin Salman has received so much notoriety from Khashoggi’s Oct. 2, 2018 death, that his reputation has been permanently damaged, whether or not he stays Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader. Cengiz recently attended an absentia court hearing for the 26 Saudi officials charged in her late fiance’s death. She watched prosecutor Ali Ceylan ask that the declassified U.S. intel report be entered into the court record.
Since Khashoggi’s murder, Turkish officials have released secretly recorded audio hearing conversations detailing the nightmarish scenario in which Khashoggi was anaesthetized, strangled then dismembered with a bone saw. World journalists listened in horror to the gruesome events, eventually leading in a rift in Turkish and Saudi relations. Cengiz, in the court hearing, heard Edip Yilmaz, a driver for the Saudi consulate, say he was told by Saudi embassy security on the day of the murder to wait in the basement of the embassy for 20 minutes. Yilmaz confirmed, if nothing else, that something extraordinary took place upstairs in the embassy, confirming what the secret recordings confirmed, that Khashoggi was gruesomely murder by a 15-member hit squad, including a key member of Bin Salman’s inner circle Mohameed bi Sayef was present during Khashoggi’s actual murder.
Khashoggi’s fiancé Hatice Cengiz looks for justice but she doesn’t look at the big picture of what’s already happened to the 35-year-old Saudi leader. Biden resisted calls by the insatiable press to punish Bin Salman, deferring any direct sanctions on the de facto Saudi leader. Biden found out that King Salman no longer leads the Kingdom, forcing world leaders to accept Bin Salman as Saudi’s current leader. Turkey probably wishes they could restore normal trade relations with Riyadh, currently down around 90%. Cengiz has done plenty of damage to Bin Salman’s reputation, known as a courageous reformer in the Kingdom, not this despicable tyrant that order the gruesome murder of Jamal Khashoggi. “Those in power need to take action,” Cengiz said. “Otherwise they will build their polices in the short and medium term base on a relation with someone who is proved to be a murderer,” Cengiz said.
