Advertisement 1

Dyer: Unhappy landing may help democracy take off in Belarus

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki condemned the “hijacking” of the Ryanair jet on the orders of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko Sunday, accusing him of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism.”

Article content

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateus Morawiecki condemned the “hijacking” of the Ryanair jet on the orders of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko Sunday, accusing him of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism.”

Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content

Dominic Raab, the British foreign secretary, agreed, warning “this outlandish act by Lukashenko will have serious implications.”

And U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken strongly condemned the flight diversion and “the Lukashenko regime’s ongoing harassment and arbitrary detention of journalists.” (Opposition journalist Roman Protasevich, who had been living in exile, was removed from the plane in Minsk and arrested before the plane was allowed to continue to Lithuania eight hours later.)

Article content

This chorus of condemnation was in welcome contrast to the silence or mumbled doubts that greeted the last such outrage in 2013. The target then was whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and its perpetrator was then-president Barack Obama.

Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content

Snowden had spilled the beans on the U.S. National Security Agency’s secret electronic surveillance of millions of people (including foreign leaders like Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel), and was fleeing Washington’s vengeance.

Washington knew Snowden had been trapped in the transit lounge of Moscow airport while trying to get to Ecuador. (The U.S. cancelled his passport.) It suspected Evo Morales, the Bolivian president and longstanding critic of U.S. policy, who was in Moscow for a conference, would try to smuggle Snowden out.

Morales’s plane (which did not actually have Snowden aboard) was forced down in Vienna, but Washington’s spooks are less crude and clumsy than their countrerparts in Minsk. No lies like “Hamas has put a bomb aboard and you must divert to Belarus”; just a bunch of America’s European NATO allies refusing to let Morales’s plane overfly their territory on its way home.

Advertisement 4
Story continues below
Article content

France, Spain, Portugal and Italy only let Morales’s pilot know he couldn’t overfly them when he was more than an hour out from Moscow. Lacking the fuel for the huge detour he’d now have to make, he had to land in neutral Austria to take on more. American agents were waiting.

U.S. agents confirmed Snowden was not aboard while Austria’s president took Morales to breakfast, then Morales went on his way. The American behaviour showed a lot more finesse than Lukashenko’s action, but it was equally arbitrary, arrogant, and arguably criminal.

Or am I guilty of moral equivalence for even suggesting such a thing?

Moral equivalence is a term Western governments used during the Cold War to attack anybody suggesting Soviet human rights abuses could ever be compared to those of Western countries. Communist actions were evil beyond measure; similar Western actions were innocent mistakes or simply didn’t happen, and anybody saying otherwise was a traitor.

Advertisement 5
Story continues below
Article content

It continues to this day. Western media devote 20 times more space to China’s persecution of Muslims in Xinjiang than they do to India’s repression of Muslims in Kashmir. Russia’s bombing of Syrian civilians is endlessly condemned, while the Western-backed bombing of Yemeni civilians by Saudi Arabia gets little attention.

Alexander Lukashenko is a stupid, brutal dictator who richly deserves condemnation, and the Russians, who aren’t stupid, are undoubtedly furious with him. But using Lukashenko to make anti-Russian propaganda and putting Moscow on the defensive about this would be extremely counter-productive.

Lukashenko’s claim to have won the last election is a blatant lie, and he only got protesters off the streets late last year by violence (abetted by the harsh Belarusian winter). The arrival of spring, and Lukashenko’s new status as international skunk, may enable the democratic opposition to revive.

Belarusians are basically well disposed to Russians, and it is imaginable (if unlikely) Putin could tolerate a democratic Belarus. To give Belarusians their best chance, the West should focus on the illegality of Lukashenko’s actions, not meddle in the broader domestic political struggle.

Leave that to the locals. They know best.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England

Article content
Comments
You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments.
Join the Conversation

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.

News Near Sudbury
    This Week in Flyers