Robert Fisk: As the UN jabs nervously at the truth about Khashoggi, remember how often journalists’ deaths are brushed aside
It’s encouraging to
hear that Agnes Callamard, the UN’s execution expert, is at last in Istanbul to lead
the “independent international inquiry” into the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.
Better late than never, perhaps, but the old UN donkey clip-clops upon the
world stage according to the politics and courage of the panjandrums beside the
East River in New York.
Thus Callamard arrived
all of four months after Khashoggi was butchered inside the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul. And she is now politely asking the Saudis themselves –
“respectfully”, she tells us – to give her access to the murder scene “at
some stage”. As we all know,
Khashoggi wrote the truth about Saudi Arabia, was
lured to his country’s consulate in Istanbul, got strangled, chopped up and
secretly buried. And if we’re going to come down hard on those who kill members
of our journalistic profession – alas, we’ll have to put aside for the moment
all those Turkish journos banged up in their own country – Callamard has made a
start.
As opposed to all those like the boss of the Morgan Stanley investment
bank, James Gorman, and the president of Switzerland, Ueli Maurer, who are keen
to get back to business with Saudi Arabia. “We have long since
dealt with the Khashoggi case”, Maurer has announced. Common sense, I suppose.
But then there’s very little chance that Gorman or Maurer will be lured to a
Saudi embassy, strangled, sawed into bits and dumped in an unknown grave.
But that’s not quite
my point. What I’m really asking is why the killing of one Arab journalist is
more equal than the killing of other Arab journalists? Why, for example, is the
fate of Jamal Khashoggi, a friend and colleague of many of us, of infinitely
more pressing importance than the fate of Yaser Murtaja? The first clue is that
Yaser Murtaja was killed in Gaza. The second is that he is one of 15 reporters
or camera crew, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, killed by
Israeli fire since 1992, two of them last year. Shooting at reporters in Gaza
has become so routine – four more were wounded by Israeli bullets between May
and September 2018 – that western newspapers and television scarcely bother to
record their suffering.
Just as the Saudis
talked of Khashoggi’s links with “terrorism” – they meant the Muslim
Brotherhood – so Israel talked of the dead Gaza journalist’s imaginary
links with “terrorism”. In Yaser Murtaja’s case, this was supposed to be
Hamas – which is close to the Muslim Brotherhood for whom Khashoggi worked in
the never-never land of Saudi imagination.... read more:
