Mohammed ben Salman: an embarrassing visit

The torpor of the summer did not prevent the spotlight on the visit to Paris of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Ben Salman (“MBS”), the first in the European Union since the assassination , in 2018, the journalist of the Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi. King Salman’s son is suspected by the American intelligence services for having commanded this particularly sordid murder, perpetrated inside the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul. The case ended in a parody of justice, from which “MBS” came out bleached.

After a visit by Athens, the crown prince was received on Thursday July 28 for a work dinner with Emmanuel Macron. The meeting provoked a concert of indignation on the part of human rights organizations, that the arguments of Realpolitik invoked by the Elysée in the middle of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict failed to cover.

Emmanuel Macron’s approach, however, is not a turnaround. Eight months ago, the French president was the first Western head of state to go to Saudi Arabia. Since then, the diplomatic rehabilitation process of “MBS” has continued 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 arrival in Paris of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed Ben Zayed Al Nahyane, and that of Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, two regimes where Human rights are regularly flouted. Once again, these meetings challenge, while the West tries to convince 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 on the part of 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, has nothing new. Resentment comes from afar. The lies, which justified the invasion of Iraq and then that of Libya, helped to demonstrate the word of Western democracies. The contrast is also striking between the emotion and the international mobilization that arouses the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the deafening silence which has accompanied, since 2015, the war that Saudi Arabia was led in Yemen.

Russian propaganda has not been deprived of instrumentalizing these episodes to cast doubt on Western intentions in Ukraine. This conflict is an opportunity to measure how much the Atlantic camp is struggling to mobilize against Russian ambitions, while this legitimate fight should arouse much wider membership. Dozens of countries in Africa and Asia, without taking the side of Vladimir Putin, have chosen a certain non-alignment, by the very fact of a loss of credibility of the Word. >

To regain confidence and persuade that democratic values ​​deserve to be defended with 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 that it is available according to circumstance alliances, it is difficult not to suggest that it is a vulgar instrument To be able to the well understood service of interest, in this case oil. The strength of our convictions on Russia requires the coherence that we will maintain with regimes which are hardly more recommendable.

/Media reports.