Jamal Khashoggi: What’s Worse? Foreign Policy Edition.

What’s worse (it’s easy until you think about it):

(i)  Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, has been living in self-imposed exile for the last year, while writing articles critical of the Saudi government for, among others, The Washington Post.   On October 2, he enters the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and is killed at some point thereafter, while in the embassy, by people connected with the Saudi government.

(ii)  Between October 2015 and December 2015, five employees of Causeway Bay Books, a bookseller in Hong Kong, disappear.  At least two of them disappear while in the People’s Republic of China, one while he is in Thailand, and another in Hong Kong itself.  All five are later confirmed to be in the PRC in connection with an alleged investigation of an old traffic incident involving one of them.  Causeway Bay Books sold political books, banned in China, that were critical of the Chinese government.

(iii)  Russia not only annexes Crimea from Ukraine, but also invades eastern Ukraine (its troops are allegedly “on vacation”) in aid of rebels in eastern Ukraine.  Plus, a Russia anti-aircraft missile, perhaps on loan from Russia to rebel forces in eastern Ukraine, shoots down a Malaysia Airlines plane on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 people on board.

(iv)  China puts over 1,000,000 Uighurs in re-education camps in Xinjiang province