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In reality, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would have wanted to put on the great show of the weekend: a magnificent opening ceremony, shaking hands with the world’s most important heads of government. Because Saudi Arabia will hold the G20 meeting, as the first Arab country in history.
The glamorous images should have whitewashed all the taboos of recent years: the insidious murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the abuse of women’s rights activists, the brutal course of the Yemen war. But Covid-19 thwarted the prince’s plans.
Chancellor Angela Merkel will be absent from the summit, as will French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump. The G20 summit in Saudi Arabia will only take place via video change due to Corona. A pandemic reinforces what human rights activists have been calling in vain: no one will come to Riyadh.
Financial issues at the center of this year’s G20 summit
No major decisions are expected from this year’s G20 summit. For Donald Trump it will be the last major international appearance as president. In reality, the meeting of the 19 richest countries in the world and the EU should have been about climate protection and migration. Now, thanks to Corona, the focus will be on debt relief for the poorest countries whose finances were precarious even before the pandemic.
By organizing the G20 summit, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia pursues two goals:
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In economic terms, he wants to present his kingdom as open and attractive to investors.. You need it urgently, because Covid-19 is jeopardizing your plans. To make the oil-dependent economy sustainable, he wanted to invest hundreds of billions. But the double shock caused by the crown crisis and falling oil prices meant that the Crown Prince had to cancel investments and increase the tax.
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too politically he wants to establish his country as a heavyweight. Even if Saudi Arabia is increasingly involved as a junior partner of the UAE in the Middle East and North Africa, it still does not have the regional supremacy that Mohammed bin Salman hopes for.
The Saudis are again blatantly threatening to develop their own nuclear weapons if Iran continues to develop its capabilities; With the help of China, Saudi Arabia has already secretly started building a civilian nuclear program. But the threats do little to mask Saudi Arabia’s weakness: There is still no real strategy against rival Iran. Last year, Tehran attacked Saudi Arabia’s oil production and exposed Riyadh. No help came from Washington.
“The dogs are coming back to the White House”
The change of power in the White House poses another problem for Mohammed bin Salman. Trump ignored Saudi Arabia’s taboos and erratic maneuvers, but future President Joe Biden has announced that he will focus more on cooperation with democracies. Some Saudi media were quick to comment on Biden’s election with the headline: “The dogs are returning to the White House,” apparently because of Biden’s main dogs and champions, but at the same time a serious insult in the Middle East that there shouldn’t be. unnoticed in Washington. . Soon after, the reports from Saudi Arabia disappeared again.
The G20 summit shows: Even if most countries, apart from Canada, have so far held back with blatant criticism, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has yet to be rehabilitated internationally. A meeting of the mayors of the world’s major cities should have taken place as part of the G20 summit. But New York, Paris and London boycotted, Berlin kept silent.
A so-called reformer who has actual reformers executed
Mohammed bin Salman remains trapped in an obvious contradiction, as the Bundestag Commission on Human Rights has just stated, from which the Crown Prince does not seem to find a way out: on the one hand, he wants to be portrayed and celebrated as a modernizer, on the other hand Let the real reformers of Saudi Arabia lock up, whip or execute.
The meeting hosted by Saudi Arabia reminds the world of the fate of 31-year-old Loujain Alhathloul and his colleagues: Saudi Arabia’s most famous women’s rights activists have been jailed for two years. Your crimes? Demands such as the right to drive a car, which was later presented by the Crown Prince himself. Loujain Alhathloul’s family has not been admitted or informed of his health for weeks; The UN recently described it as worrisome.
So far, the Saudi royal family appears to have reacted boldly to international criticism, as in 2018, when it wanted to pull its students and doctors out of Canada with great fanfare, only to row silently and in secret. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir has just described the German temporary arms export embargo against Saudi Arabia as “incorrect” and “illogical” and has threatened to buy elsewhere. The noise is not surprising at the moment: in the coming weeks, Berlin will have to decide whether the embargo will be extended again.
