Five years on, with no word on imprisoned dissident Raif Badawi, his family waits

“Our life is... all about waiting. We are waiting. And it's been a long time, with these five years passing by slowly for us,” says wife of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi

Today, 16th June, marks the five year anniversary of Saudi blogger Raif Badawi’s imprisonment. Arrested in 2012 for “insulting Islam through electronic channels,” in 2014, after appealing a seven year sentence, he was resentenced with a stiffer punishment: ten years in prison, 1000 lashes, and a fine of over £266,000 – making this the midway point in his incarceration.

Badawi is subject to two further penalties to be enforced upon his release: a ten-year travel ban, and a ten-year ban on engaging in electronic, visual and written media. This means he will spend another ten years apart from his family – his wife, Ensaf Haidar, and three children, who were granted political asylum in Canada in 2013.

“We are trying to live a sort of ordinary life as ordinary people. The children go to school, as they should. And I am like any other woman – a mum, doing things like ordering the house. But the peculiar thing about our life is that it's all about waiting. We are waiting. And it's been a long time, with these five years passing by slowly for us,” Haidar says. “Every day they say, ‘oh he has to come back – come back Raif.’”

On January 9 2015, Badawi endured the first round of lashes in a public square outside a mosque in his home city of Jeddah. Fifty further lashes were due to be administered every Friday for the proceeding 19 weeks – but following rounds have so far have been postponed because, Badawi relayed to his family, he was not deemed “fit enough to be whipped again.”

Badawi’s flogging was met with outcry because it came two days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, which the Saudi kingdom condemned in the strongest terms, calling it a “cowardly terrorist act”, “incompatible with Islam”. Many insisted on the inconsistency of such a position: the imprisonment and whipping of Badawi was its own form of violence against dissenting expression, this time at the hands of the state.

On his blog the Free Saudi Liberals, Badawi’s writings ranged from arguing for separation between state and religious institutions, for secularism as a “refuge”, to quoting Albert Camus’ saying that “the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

In these pieces, Badawi is often wry, acerbic. One moment, he holds up the virtues of an imagined liberalism against a searing account of the repression he knows too well; the next he launches a scorching critique of Saudi clerical authoritarianism, or praises the rebellion of those fighting in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, calling it “a revolution, led by students and the marginalised, a revolution in every sense of the word”.

Haidar’s calls for her husband’s release coincide with instability in the gulf region as Saudi Arabia, a key diplomatic ally to the US and the UK, along with the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain, attempt to place the peninsula of Qatar in a stranglehold in an effort to bring it into line with Saudi interests. The impending blockade threatens those in Qatar with severe food shortage and is breaking up families.

In Yemen, an ongoing war waged by a Saudi coalition has created famine a on terrible scale, with 7 million people facing acute food shortages, and 17 million more ‘food insecure’. Over 10,000 people have died.

Since the war in Yemen started, £3 billion worth of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia have been approved. The Saudi kingdom is the UK’s longest-standing customer and closest affiliate in arms-dealing. Indeed, the BBC has just revealed that BAE systems, the UK’s biggest arms dealer, has been selling sophisticated surveillance equipment to Saudi Arabia – no doubt a powerful tool in the arsenal of those seeking to quash opinions at variance with official versions.

In January this year, US President Trump’s short-lived Muslim ban drew criticism for – beyond the simple, indiscriminate cruelty of the ban itself – seeking to restrict the movement of people from seven Muslim-majority countries – but not from Saudi Arabia. In recent days Trump has also accused Qatar of funding terrorism while continuing to snuggle up to the Saudi kingdom.

In the only piece of Badawi’s writings translated into English, he explicitly connects the people who carried out the attacks on September 11th 2001 to their country of origin, and says that “as a citizen of that area which exported those terrorists,” he asks himself, ““what is this haughtiness to humanity?”.

Meanwhile, Haidar and her children wait. “The problem is that since 2015, the sentence hasn’t much changed. They haven’t stopped it or suspended it – I don’t know when [the lashings] might resume. So I live with the fear that it may resume at any time”.

Crackdowns on journalists and dissidents, such as those ongoing in Turkey or even the confinement of journalists by Theresa May during the UK’s recent general election, act as a weathervane for a country’s political climate and offer a metric for understanding how free citizens are, how corrupt their political class.

“Raif always wanted to work in this kind of domain – advocacy, human rights, freedom of speech – so I did this for him, it's like a gift for him, something to say: when you come back you have work in this, it will be your thing. And I wanted it to be a surprise for him, but of course it wasn't kept secret, it was a public thing,” Haidar tells me. “I am trying to get support for the foundation so I can expand my activities and start working more on it, so that it can become a name, a reference in the human rights domain in general, and for the support and help of journalists and activists.”

“And how are you?” I ask Haidar, finally. This, she says, is the most difficult question to answer, “because I never know what to say. There's no perfect response. I would lie if I said that I’m happy. I would also be lying if I said that life has been easy for me, or normal, like any other person. I would rather wait for Raif to get out to tell you exactly how I feel… But I am not the abandoning type – just because I am tired or not seeing any results. I will keep fighting.”

I ask Haidar what freedom means to her. She is reluctant to confine freedom, to give it a particular shape. In her wary, self-contained way, she smiles and says that it is different for all people, and can only be known properly by having something you dearly love taken away. “Freedom is life,” she tells me. “Freedom is the air”.