Sergei Kuznetsov reports on the hijacking in Why the Belarusian journalist was snatched from the Ryanair flight Politico EU 05/24/2021:
Both [Roman] Protasevich and a female companion, Sofia Sapega, were reportedly arrested during the enforced stopover — an incident denounced by leaders around the world as a “hijacking.” Ryanair called the forced landing an “act of aviation piracy.”Snyder in his column gives this background:
The measures to seize Protasevich were extraordinary, and they now expose Belarus to the fury of the EU and U.S. and to potential sanctions, but for Alexander Lukashenko, the longtime leader of Belarus, the threat posed by Protasevich and other bloggers and journalists is extraordinary as well.
Protasevich, 26, is among a group of inventive journalists who have detailed the violence used by forces loyal to Lukashenko to help him hang on to power. They’ve also covered the mass protests sparked by the August presidential elections — widely considered to have been stolen by Lukashenko — and also actively coordinated them. [my emphasis]
Protasevich is important because he told the truth about his own country. Last August the Belarusian dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, sought to stage yet another fake electoral victory. His usual tactic of disqualifying and arresting opponents was not working. The wife of one of his opponents ran against him, and almost certainly won. After Lukashenko announced a victory anyway, Belarusians protested peacefully in very large numbers for months. Protasevich at the time worked for NEXTA, a Telegram channel that provided Belarusians with the facts about what was happening in their own country. [my emphasis]This kind of action - having a jet fighter force down a civil aircraft legally passing through national airspace on what was apparently a false pretence that there was some kind of terrorist danger to the plane, then arresting two people on the flight - is definitely not any kind of normal procedure. Austrian political scientist Martin Malek in the discussion referenced just below called it "a very unusual hijacking of an aircraft."
And while people in many parts of the world may assume that news from Belarus is about some inscrutable event in a mysterious eastern European country. But air piracy is something that in itself has worldwide implications. And in this case, it was a national government committing the piracy. Molly Olmstead explains in How Much Will the Belarus Flight Incident Mess Up Air Travel? Slate 05/25/2021 asks Ian Petchenik of Flightradar24:
How big of a deal is this?The Institute for Human Sciences (IHS) in Vienna held a Zoom discussion organized by Snyder on the incident, The Hijack: Europe, Belarus, and the Abduction of Roman Protasevich 25 May 2021:
It’s a huge deal. There’s very specific conventions in international law that relate to the operation of international air traffic. And this is really one of those things where it’s very clear that you’re not supposed to do this. This could have ended so badly, beyond the current situation, which ended terribly. What happens if that pilot misinterprets what the Ryanair aircraft is doing? What happens if they can’t communicate clearly? There’s so many things that could have gone wrong from 39,000 feet, when they met each other.
Then, on top of all of that, what happens now, in a real situation, where there is possibly a bomb on a plane? Does the pilot believe the air traffic controller who’s relaying that message? If there are all of a sudden fighter jets escorting the aircraft, is there a second thought there? One of the rules is if a fighter jet comes up on your wing, you should listen to that person, because if you are under threat, they have your safety in mind. So now do I second guess all that? Question if it’s false information about an emergency?
Belarus is a former Soviet republic which briefly had democratic elections after its independence. The office of President was established in 1994 and Alexander Lukashenko was elected to the office, which he has filled ever since. Professor Viktoras Bachmetjevas of Lithuania argues that the 1994 election was a legitimate democratic one. But Lukashenko has become increasing authoritarian. And after the election of August 2020 which the public widely regarded as fraudulent, protests against his regime became widespread.
Bachmetjevas points out that much of the industry in Belarus is still state-owned, a legacy of the Soviet era. Belarus has a formal unity agreement with Russia. But Belarus under Lukashenko the last 27 years has tried to strike a balance between the EU and Russia. Fiona Hill said in the conference that the Belarus-Russia union treaty was mainly symbolic, but has become more substantive a relationship over time.
A big consideration is how the EU sees the relationship between Belarus and Russia and how they assess the risks involved. Hill argues that if Lukashenko had been successfully voted out in 2020, Putin would have been concerned that would endanger his own plans for a Russia renewal in combination with Belarus. So Lukashenko is now strongly aligned with Moscow. She thinks he is trying to suppress the opposition to make him seem more valuable to Putin.
She recounts how in 2018, Lukashenko was in a phase of tilting more toward Europe, trying to get more European and American investors, in order to get some distance from Russia with a neoliberal/technocratic approach, hoping the move would help him in the 2020 election.
She also makes the important point that Belarus is the only land link to Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg). Although even then, direct land access would also have to be granted by Poland or Lithuania.
In that same discussion, Sławomir Sierakowski, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna, talks about NEXTA, the Telegram channel for which Protasevich wrote. He describes how young organizers were able to coordinate the massive post-election protests in Belarus. He thinks Lukaschnko's motives in the Ryanair hijacking include (1) revenge; (2) context - to squeeze Protasevich for information about other organizers (3) and, state terror, to scare other dissidents. Sierakowski stressed that Protasevich is in real danger now.
The IHS discussion highlights a number of issues in EU response to this incident. On the one hand, the issue really is important, both because of the human rights dangers to the two people kidnapped and the broader implications for air safety and international cooperation against real terrorist threats. But, as in most international sanctions against nations, the pressure on the leaders has to be considered along with the effects on the population and what implications that might have on Belarus' political system and international alignments. Despite the talk for the last couple of decades about "smart sanctions," any sanctions that are tough enough to push a country's leaders to change policy are almost certain to have significant detrimental effects on the people of the country.
It's also important in this and other situations to remember that the legitimate interest of political actors in one country in human rights and democracy in another country function on a continuum from democratic internationalism and international civil society interactions, on one end, to governments meddling in other countries' internal politics. The fact that a country or a party or a national leader may view any external criticism or any cooperation by people in other countries with dissidents from their own country as subversion or a hostile intelligence operation doesn't mean that they aren't legitimate civil society interactions between people of different countries. It also doesn't mean that that such accusations are always wrong. Because governments do meddle in each others internal politics and intelligence agencies do sometimes carry out hostile operations in other countries, even in peacetime. (Ask anyone from Latin America about how that works.)
So whenever we try to understand situations like the one in Belarus including this recent act of air piracy, we have to be able to walk and talk at the same time. And to remember some cynical truisms like, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."
In that same discussion, Sławomir Sierakowski, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Polish journal Krytyka Polityczna, talks about NEXTA, the Telegram channel for which Protasevich wrote. He describes how young organizers were able to coordinate the massive post-election protests in Belarus. He thinks Lukaschnko's motives in the Ryanair hijacking include (1) revenge; (2) context - to squeeze Protasevich for information about other organizers (3) and, state terror, to scare other dissidents. Sierakowski stressed that Protasevich is in real danger now.
The IHS discussion highlights a number of issues in EU response to this incident. On the one hand, the issue really is important, both because of the human rights dangers to the two people kidnapped and the broader implications for air safety and international cooperation against real terrorist threats. But, as in most international sanctions against nations, the pressure on the leaders has to be considered along with the effects on the population and what implications that might have on Belarus' political system and international alignments. Despite the talk for the last couple of decades about "smart sanctions," any sanctions that are tough enough to push a country's leaders to change policy are almost certain to have significant detrimental effects on the people of the country.
It's also important in this and other situations to remember that the legitimate interest of political actors in one country in human rights and democracy in another country function on a continuum from democratic internationalism and international civil society interactions, on one end, to governments meddling in other countries' internal politics. The fact that a country or a party or a national leader may view any external criticism or any cooperation by people in other countries with dissidents from their own country as subversion or a hostile intelligence operation doesn't mean that they aren't legitimate civil society interactions between people of different countries. It also doesn't mean that that such accusations are always wrong. Because governments do meddle in each others internal politics and intelligence agencies do sometimes carry out hostile operations in other countries, even in peacetime. (Ask anyone from Latin America about how that works.)
So whenever we try to understand situations like the one in Belarus including this recent act of air piracy, we have to be able to walk and talk at the same time. And to remember some cynical truisms like, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."
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