Person of the week: Neymar comes – and bin Salman has refugees shot

person of the week
Neymar comes – and bin Salman has refugees shot

By Wolfram Weimer
08/22/2023 11:57 am

Saudi Arabia wanted to make positive world headlines with Brazilian soccer star Neymar’s spectacularly decadent presentation. At the same time, however, it became known that migrants from Africa, including children, were being systematically shot at the border.

Saudi Arabia bought soccer superstar Neymar to make positive world headlines. Critics speak of “sportswashing” when a dictatorship wants to improve its image with popular athletes. In any case, Neymar is worth an annual salary of 150 million dollars to the Al-Hilal club from Riyadh, in which the Saudi state fund PIF holds 75 percent of the shares. Fund Chairman: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, de facto ruler in Saudi Arabia.

In addition to the abnormal salary, the regime around bin Salman makes the athlete happy with an imposing 25-room villa with a 40 by 10 meter pool and three private saunas. Neymar will also be gifted his own fleet of vehicles, which includes a Bentley Continental GT, an Aston Martin DBX and a Lamborghini Huracán.

All expenses for hotels, restaurants and club visits are paid. Not to forget his private plane. The Saudi royal family is hoping for an image boost from the grotesquely decadent recruitment of the Brazilian. That’s why Neymar is being rewarded separately for his social media presence, where he’s being paid a whopping €500,000 for every post promoting Saudi Arabia.

Of course, Neymar should find that difficult, because at the same time as his presentation in front of 70,000 fans at the King Fahd Stadium in Riyadh, completely different news made negative headlines. According to reports from the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, Saudi border guards have killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers, including children, on the border with Yemen. It is said that people were shot at close range. Explosive weapons were also used. It is about systematic massacres, survivors report “mountains of corpses”.

The contrast could hardly be greater – the money-glittering sports spectacle on the one hand and the mass murder on the other. The Saudi government clans, bin Salman, are responsible for both. As early as October 2022, a United Nations communiqué on the shocking killings of African refugees caused a stir. Accordingly, 430 dead and 650 injured refugees were counted in the months of January to April 2022 alone. They were bombed, shot, massacred.

Human rights organizations are now publishing many more details of Saudi Arabia’s brutal violence against refugees. This mainly affects Ethiopians who want to flee to Saudi Arabia via the Gulf of Aden and the civil war country Yemen. About 750,000 Ethiopians already live and work in Saudi Arabia, but their escape route to the ultra-rich oil state is extremely dangerous.

after the Reports of the “Mixed Migration Center” (MMC) and from “Human Rights Watch (HRW) “mass murder” is being committed against the poorest. According to MMC, at least 794 people were killed and more than 1,700 injured at the border in 2022, a third of them women and seven percent children. The actual numbers are likely to be significantly higher, as witnesses report makeshift burials along the escape routes. Dead bodies were eaten by wild dogs.

Megastar and mass killings

The Saudi officials are said to be systematically shooting at refugees with machine guns and grenades at the border. “We’re talking about at least 655 cases, but it’s probably thousands,” says human rights activist Nadia Hardman. “We’re basically talking about mass killings,” said the lead author of the HRW report.

Terrified survivors reported “killing fields,” places completely littered with dead human bodies. Hundreds of graves, bodies and seriously injured people can be seen on satellite images along the routes that refugees use to reach Saudi Arabia.

20-year-old Munira reports on a cruel attack. The Saudis carted her to the border in a bus with 19 other refugees and then drove her into the desert. After about a kilometer, the group sat down to rest. Then the Saudis fired at the group with mortar shells. “The gun looked like a six-barreled rocket launcher and was mounted on a car, and it fired several shells at once,” Munira says. “Some of the shells hit the rocks and the shrapnel hit us. Only ten people from our group survived.”

The report of 14-year-old Hamdiya also sounds shocking: “They kept firing at us. I saw people being killed in unimaginable ways. I hid under a rock and slept. I thought there were others around me People are sleeping. When I woke up, I saw that they were all dead. I was alone.” According to MMC research, there is a secret cemetery in the Yemeni border town of Al Khals where the bodies of up to 10,000 migrants are said to lie.

The reports are explosive for the federal government, because Germany of all places is training Saudi border officials. The training and advisory mission started in 2009 and was justified with foreign and security policy interests and the fight against terrorism in the region. It was briefly suspended after the contract killing of journalist Jamal Kashoggi in 2018, but resumed in 2020.

The Greens wanted the mission back in 2011 end by resolution of the Bundestag and – still in the opposition at the time – criticized the training program in 2020, accusing the German government of having no qualms about “continuing to support authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia on security issues.” In 2022, the new federal government, now with the participation of the Greens, approved deliveries of armaments worth 44.2 million euros – more than since 2018.

No comment from Baerbock

And even now, after the massacre became known, the Green-led foreign ministry is holding back on criticism. There was no comment from Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a spokeswoman diplomatically dismissed it: “We are very concerned about the massive allegations made there.” However, one has no own knowledge of the events.

Clara Bünger, a left-wing member of the Bundestag, is outraged: “Anyone who claims that feminist foreign policy is important is losing their credibility by supporting states like Saudi Arabia with weapons that barbarically shoot people at their borders.”

And Neymar? He didn’t have to fight his way through the hail of bullets from the border guards, he came in the world’s most expensive private plane – on a golden throne in the middle of the machine. Glamor and cruelty go hand in hand in Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, the Al Safah inner-city execution site is on the same street as the Al Hilal football stadium. Neymar would certainly not get 500,000 euros for this post.