The article in this newspaper last Saturday by the Guardian journalist Kathy Evans about the two British nurses sentenced for the murder of an Australian nurse provided an interesting insight into journalistic standards. It is the first time that I have read of two convicted murderers (found guilty by a Saudi preliminary court) being referred to by first name, as if the article were in a girls' school mag.
In the vast body of material written about this case, the most invisible person of all is the murdered Australian, whose death appears to be an inconvenient obstacle in the way of an entirely virtuous frenzy about Saudi justice.
To remind you: this woman was beaten, knifed and suffocated to death in her flat. The two women held by the Saudi authorities were found using her bank cards. All three were nurses together in the men's renal unit of the King Fahd Military Medical Complex in Dahran. The allegation is that the two British women - Deborah Parry and Lucille McLauchlan - had a fight with the Australian, Yvonne Gilford (who was having an affair with Parry), and, in the nursely heat of the moment, stabbed, beat and suffocated her.
Tones of indignation
The two women were interrogated, during which they later said they were sexually molested and were threatened, before they confessed, without recourse to defence counsel. This has been reported in Britain and Ireland in barely suppressed tones of indignation, as if nobody is ever threatened or compelled to confess (without counsel) to crimes they did not commit in either jurisdiction. Let the words Kelly, Guildford, Birmingham, Bridgewater linger in your ears, if you please.
It is true that the nature of the evidence, the privacy in which it is heard, the use of blood money in atonement to the family of the victim, and the truly astonishing punishments inflicted on those found guilty are unique to the Saudi system of justice. Barbarous, we all agree. Public beheading and the lash - such as faced by the two nurses - should remain where they belong, in the Middle Ages.
Good. The last lawful public beheading in Europe occurred before thousands of spectators in Paris in 1939, well within the lifetime of the present Saudi king. The last beheading in Europe was in France in 1977, and the victim then was an Arab, Hamida Djandoubi. And last June we passed - though nobody noticed - the 25th anniversary of the last legal flogging in Britain. So much for the superiority of European judicial and penal culture over that of the Arabs.
Now, I do not know whether either of the two British nurses is guilty or innocent, though I am aware that an Australian nurse is dead. Had the victim been British, and the alleged killer a Saudi male, I doubt very much whether we would have heard quite so much about the poor accused and the ordeal he had gone through, and rather more about the victim; and we would have heard nothing whatever about the deficiencies in Saudi justice.
Bartered their rights
What is actually far more relevant is that all three women bartered their ordinary human rights to work in Saudi Arabia. They did this knowingly and freely, just as TT racers embark upon their mad, life-shortening circuits of the motorcycle track freely, for fun, adventure and money. You takes your risks. . . As the Saudi ambassador to London, Lujain Al-Iman, recently wrote: "Every guest-worker who is accepted for a job in Saudi Arabia is well apprised of its laws and customs before he or she goes, and so must be prepared to live them. British citizens would expect no less of those who live and work [in Britain] as guests."
The three women (and their hundreds of Irish co-workers) went to a country which so far this year (with three months still to go) has executed 110 people. Western workers in Saudi Arabia become volunteer-accomplices to the regime which uses the executioner's sword as an instrument of state. They make a great deal of money by choosing to live and work in a country which beheads and behands (for the most part) native males - who did not choose to live there - and which radically circumcises all native women - who also did not choose to live there - so that they are almost without sexual sensation. Saudi women are transformed into vessels in which men can relieve themselves; and nurses who go there become auxiliaries to a medical system in which the sexual mutilation of girls is universal. The nurses do it freely and for money. The girls do not.
There is no obvious way out of the dilemma set by the West's closest friend in the Arab world. Islam and democracy are incompatible. Islam does not even begin to perceive the legitimacy of the secular state with secular law. And, disagreeable though Saudi law might be to us, we might remember that the main opposition in Saudi does not come from pro-democrats but from Islamic fundamentalists who regard the Saudi regime as being wimpish and effete, and who look to the sterling, manly example being set by their coreligionists in Iran, Afghanistan and Algeria.
Powerhouse of capitalism
Happily, no Irish nurses face public execution in Chop Square, or we might face excruciatingly embarrassing demands for a boycott of Saudi goods. The Saudis wouldn't notice. We would. We sell about £150 million worth of goods to them; they sell just £2 million to us. And that is part of the problem. Saudi Arabia is the powerhouse of capitalism upon which the prosperity of the world - not just the multinational oil companies - depends.
It is a truly bizarre society whose norms - including the sacerdotal use of the blade and the ritual removal of human flesh - are beyond our understanding. But nobody is obliged to go there. Nobody absolutely has to submit to the vagaries of Saudi law. And nobody is compelled to break those laws once they get there. My sympathy for the maimed or even dead TT motorcyclist is limited: he made his choice; and ditto the Western guest-workers of Saudi.