Khashoggi's spirit will not leave his killers in peace: Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN)

Two years have passed since Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi Arabian Consulate General in Istanbul. On 2 October this terrible event will be remembered once more, and many events and meetings in memory of Khashoggi will be held in many parts of the world. For instance, at the Zurich Film Festival, Academy Award-winning American director Bryan Fogel's film Insident, which deals with Khashoggi and the murder, will be screened. The film will also be presented in the US in December. In the same days it will premiere and be released in Turkey as well. At the presentation in Zurich, Khashoggi's fiancée Hatice Cengiz and his friends will also give speeches.

The most meaningful event for Khashoggi, however, is that the association he founded in America before he was killed, Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), will officially begin its activities as of 2 October. Khashoggi cared greatly about this association and was determined to devote the rest of his life entirely to the activities it stands for.

Although Khashoggi had maintained good relations with the royal family for years, the problems that arose in recent times were never personal. Even in the periods when his relations were good, Khashoggi was aware that he was operating within a monarchical structure, and his hopes and demands regarding his country were never maximalist. Lately he had even lost hope for freedom of expression, and had fallen back to the point of asking for, at the very least, the freedom not to speak. Yet for the crown prince, who disregarded even all the monarchical rules of his own country, there was not even a freedom not to speak. Everyone would have to offer praise for what he did.

Seeing that from this point on being non-maximalist in his demands brought no benefit, Khashoggi had now openly settled on the conclusion that it was time for democracy, both for his own country and for the whole Arab world.

Indeed, he thought that the process had to pass especially and first of all through the transformation of his own country, because he saw that the strongest center of resistance to democracy in the Arab world was his own country. Saudi Arabia is, unfortunately, the greatest cause of the Arab world's failure to democratize, of its human rights violations, its coups and its dictatorships. It supported the coup that dragged Egypt into the darkest, most irrational days of its history, and it has continued to support the coup regime that subsequently emerged. The coup it had carried out against the dialogue environment that had somehow been achieved in Yemen, and whose continuation would have truly revived Yemen, brought with it the dragging of Yemen into a chaos from which it has become very hard to emerge. We are not even counting its roles in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Libya.

In no country do either Saudi Arabia or its biggest ally today, the United Arab Emirates, have any founding, constructive, or restorative pursuit or work. They are running quickly toward paying the final price of this policy, which works by creating only destruction and a constant order of chaos. One immediately visible price of this policy, which has become thoroughly notorious, is that they have become objects of complete hatred and antipathy among the peoples of the Islamic world.

Because of these policies, the Arab world has today become unlivable for its own citizens. The countries that arm themselves the most in the world, the countries that channel the most resources into weapons, are Arab countries, yet they never use these weapons against non-Arabs. Because of these weapons they use against one another, Arabs keep dying.

Arab peoples have no part in this arms buildup or in these wars. The decision is made entirely by the rulers, and they wage the fight at the expense of their own peoples' lives, honor and comfort. Precisely for this reason, there is a constant flow of refugees from Arab countries that have become unlivable toward non-Arab regions. In essence, even this fact alone should be a cause of shame for the rulers of the Arab countries and for the Arab League. Every refugee who takes shelter in Turkey or in European countries brings along with him the question of the legitimacy of the rulers of the country he fled.

At present, tens of thousands of people are held in the dungeons of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates because of their thoughts or political positions, under the harshest conditions, subjected to ill-treatment that is subject to no oversight whatsoever.

Khashoggi felt the sufferings of the Arab world to his very bones and was trying to find a remedy for them. He saw very well that the remedy lay in liberating the will of the peoples, that is, in democracy. For this reason, it is very important that the association he founded with a group of friends shortly before his death be put into operation in the second year of his death, in order to make his mission more meaningful.

To this end, yesterday the association announced the start of its activities with a meeting attended by the association's director Sarah Leah Whitson, Abdullah al-Awdah, son of Salman al-Awdah, one of the scholars detained in Saudi Arabia, and Senator Chris Coons (D-Delaware), a member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The association will compile comprehensive documentation of human rights violations in Arab countries and serve as a resource for researchers, academics, activists and politicians.

In addition, it will reveal the identities of government officials who make their governments' abuses possible but are unknown to the international community: guards, interrogators, torturers, prosecutors, judges.

Whatever Khashoggi was killed for, with his death both his strength and his influence, and the harm he does to those who killed him, have only increased. We said it before: Khashoggi's spirit does not leave his killers at peace, and it will not.