THE TURKISH President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said yesterday that all those behind the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi should be brought to justice, and stand trial in Istanbul.
Erdogan also noted that ‘all those who played a role in the murder’ have to face punishment. The ‘very savage murder’ had been ‘planned’ days in advance and there was a roadmap to perpetrate the killing. However, the exposure of the Saudi feudal state cannot just be limited to Erdogan’s attempts to gain some advantage from it for the Turkish ruling class.
The crisis caused by the butchering of Khashoggi at the behest of the Saudi Crown Prince has been a source of great embarrassment to the imperialist powers, especially to the US and the UK, who have armed, equipped and trained Saudi forces, making billions in profits in the process. The present Saudi feudal monarchy couldn’t exist without them.
The Saudi Crown Prince is their man. His role is to fight Iran, and Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, for the benefit of the US and UK imperialists. The Saudi regime has sought to destroy Hezbollah in the Lebanon, it spent billions financing terrorists in a failed attempt to overthrow the Assad government in Syria, and is in a constant conspiracy to aid Israel against the Palestinian people.
It is currently working with President Trump and his Middle East front man, Jared Kushner, to try to establish that Palestinians are not refugees but citizens of the countries that they are residing in – there is no need therefore for a Palestinian state! The Saudi feudal ruling class are an indispensable agency of imperialism that deserves not just to be embarrassed but destroyed, along with their backers, the imperialist powers.
In fact, the exposure of the murder in Istanbul by President Erdogan, while welcome, must be just the start of the struggle to overthrow the Saudi feudal regime, to ending the war in the Yemen, and to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli occupation and the founding of the independent Palestinian state.
This is why the imperialist powers must not be allowed to escape their responsibility for the carnage in Palestine, Syria and now the Yemen. Yemen is the current centre for massive Saudi attacks on the Arab people, aided by massive firepower supplied by the US and the UK.
The United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mark Lowcock, has just said that the war on Yemen has left as many as 8.4 million people in the Arab world’s poorest nation in need of urgent food aid. He said that three million Yemenis are malnourished, including 1.1 million pregnant women, ‘and that there are more than 400,000 severely, acutely malnourished children.’
Humanitarian officials estimate ‘that 3.5 million to four million more people could become severely food insecure in the months ahead,’ the UN report noted. If current trends continue, food needs could increase ‘by as much as 62 per cent.’
More than 15,000 people have died since Saudi Arabia led many of its allies into the war on Yemen to reinstall the country’s former Riyadh-allied officials. The simulated shock and horror that the US and UK regimes have offered as their response to the Istanbul Consulate murder is entirely pretend.
Meanwhile, the arms sales go on, as does the presence of US and UK advisers on the ground helping the operations of the Saudi murder machine. Workers in the UK and the US must reject the simulated shock and horror of the ruling classes to the murders being carried out by the Saudi feudal regime.
They must take action to bring down the May and Trump regimes and to stop the supply of weapons of mass destruction to Saudi Arabia. The May government must be replaced by a workers government that will stop arming Saudi Arabia, rush food aid to the Yemen and support the struggle of the Lebanese and Palestinian people in any way that is requested.
This is the only way to really avenge the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, by taking action to overthrow the imperialist ruling classes to go forward to world socialism!
Come to our News Line Anniversary Rally on Sunday November 4th where these issues will be fully discussed.
