Emmanuel Macron welcomed Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for talks and dinner at the Élysée Palace on Thursday, the latest in a series of meetings the French president has held this month with world dictators and autocrats.
On July 18th, he hosted a visit to France by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), who was made the guest of honour at a dinner held at the Grand Trianon, in the former royal estate of Versailles.
Sheikh Mohamed, also known as “MBZ”, who was from 2014 de facto leader of the UAE and Abu Dhabi until he was formally appointed as ruler of both in May this year, has been regularly denounced by rights NGOs, including Amnesty International, for heading a regime of a brutal despotism, one which is often glossed over by the presentations of Dubai and Abu Dhabi as fiscal and tourist paradises.
Bilateral relations with France, which has three military bases in the UAE, are on a high; last December, MBZ inked a deal to buy 80 French-built Rafale fighter aircraft, the largest international purchase of the planes.
Just days after MBZ’s visit to France, on July 22nd, Macron welcomed Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for talks at the Élysée Palace. In December 2020, during a state visit to France by Sisi, Macron awarded the Egyptian president the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, the highest French order of merit, a gesture that appeared indifferent to the around 60,000 political prisoners estimated to be languishing in the jails of the regime. Like his ally and protector MBZ, Sisi is also a major client of the French arms industry, having placed orders for 54 Rafale jets and a quantity of other French weaponry.
This Thursday, after returning to Paris from a three-day visit to Africa, during which he was given an amiable reception by Cameroon’s president Paul Biya , who in November will celebrate four decades of uninterrupted power as head of the central African country, Macron welcomed the Saudi ruler who Amnesty International secretary general Agnès Callamard has called “the murderous prince”.
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Arriving in France after a two-day visit to Greece, Saudi Arabia’s strongman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was making his first visit to Europe, and a comeback on the international scene, following his diplomatic isolation over the assassination of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi on October 2nd 2018, carried out in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Thanks notably to a 100-page report on the findings of a six-month investigation into Kashoggi’s killing, which was led by Agnès Callamard in her then capacity as the UN Human rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, and which was published in June 2019, we now know how the Saudi journalist was murdered inside the consulate, his corpse subsequently dismembered with a bone saw, after which his body parts, which have never been discovered, were disposed of, most likely dissolved in acid.
The assassination was carried out by a team sent from Saudi Arabia, most of whose members were from the crown prince’s personal security personnel and his royal guard. As for his own responsibility, the UN report said: “The Special Rapporteur has determined that there is credible evidence, warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi officials’ individual liability, including the Crown Prince’s.”
According to a CIA report, which was declassified after US President Joe Biden took office, the assassination operation could only have taken place with the approval of the Saudi crown prince, who has strict control over the kingdom’s security services. That no doubt largely explained why Biden initially decided to refuse to have any contact with “MBS”.
Biden changed that stance during his visit to the Middle East earlier this month, when he accepted to meet with “MBS” in Saudi Arabia, when the two men publicly “fist tapped” – the Covid pandemic-induced replacement of a handshake.
Macron’s staff have been keen to invoke the precedent of that meeting between Biden and the “murderous Prince”. But it remains a fact that Macron did not wait for the US president’s gesture of détente before showing himself to be far more tolerant of the Saudi leader than other Western leaders. The French president waited almost two months after the abominable killing of Khashoggi before finally displaying his disapproval, in the wake of Washington, London and Berlin, by banning 18 Saudi nationals implicated in the assassination from entering France.
At the time, Macron even described then German chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision, taken soon after Khashoggi’s murder, to place an embargo on German arms exports to Saudi Arabia, as “pure demagogy”.
Last December, Macron was the first Western leader, following Khashoggi’s killing, to travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with the crown prince. That was two months before the Ukrainian crisis erupted and the tensions that then ensued over the price of oil, and which have become a major preoccupation for purchasing countries. The prosperity of oil-producing countries and the inflationary spiral that now threatens their clients have changed the order of things both from a strategic and energy perspective.
Today, both Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil producer, and the UAE have doubts over the capacity of the US to maintain its role as the guardian of security in their region. They also appreciated the support they received from Russia when it recently abstained during the UN vote on two resolutions concerning the war the Saudis and the UAE are waging in Yemen. Which explains their refusal to align themselves with the West over the war in Ukraine.
At the same time, the Gulf region’s oil monarchies have opened dialogue, or at least re-established relations little by little, with the two other regional players that are Turkey and Iran. Even Riyadh and Tehran are now talking, via Iraqi mediation. The region’s economic partnerships are diversifying, developing ties with China, Japan, South Korea and India. Otherwise put, the West, and the US in particular, has ever-fewer convincing arguments with which to negotiate.
Macron, like Joe Biden, would like to see Saudi Arabia and the UAE increase their daily oil production by 2 million barrels in order to bring down energy costs. But will the French president succeed in this by helping to rehabilitate MBS as a figure one can keep company with? Or by protecting the prince against legal proceedings now engaged against him in France by two NGOs who have filed a complaint for “complicity in acts of torture and forced disappearance”?
The answer does not depend only on the Saudi prince; on August 3rd, members of the OPEC+ alliance are due to meet, bringing together the 13 OPEC cartel member countries, which include Saudi Arabia, and ten other associated oil-producing countries, which include Russia. For the moment, they have no plans to introduce an increase in production of anything above 650,000 barrels per day. If that remains the case, Macron’s efforts will have above all benefited “the murderous prince”.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse