Refusing service to a private flight carrying a politically sensitive person is very different from hijacking a scheduled civilian airliner by threatening to shoot it down if it doesn't cooperate.
The recent incident is painted in exactly the same light by Belarus authorities. They say that the plane was diverted due to a terrorist threat. All passengers were safely evacuated, and once the threat was cleared, they were allowed to continue their trip. During their time in Belarusian soil, one passenger was detained, for completely unrelated reasons. Of course Belarusian police could not do otherwise than detain him, for they were already looking for that person.
As is evident, the whole thing is a bullshit excuse to claim plausible deniability. Exactly the same as with the Bolivian plane. The only difference is which official discourse you chose to repeat.
There is an important difference. The Bolivian plane was warned sufficiently in advance and had enough fuel to flight back to Russia at that point. The Ryanair flight was forced to land with a military jet leaving the pilots no choice but to comply.
But I agree that what Western Europe did to Bolivian flight backfires now badly.
It's not like Morales told why he was being barred entry to four different countries' air spaces.
In both cases the pilot was lied to to capture a dissident and in neither case were the passengers in danger.
Lukashenko's propaganda will get a boost from this. Indeed, it's possibly what emboldened him to try it, safe in the knowledge that Europe and the US could only condemn it hypocritically.
The West loses moral authority when it pulls this shit - not only in their own countries but in dictatorships rhey are trying to sway.
Morales-Shmorales. No-one cares about the games governments play with their private jets. This was an unprecedented attack on public scheduled intra-European passenger service that every regular person may end up using.
This is a whole different category and that's why the whataboutism isn't working this time and the standard "losing moral authority" talking points sound particularly shallow and unconvicing.
Perhaps not to you. I think they'll make effective use of whataboutism on Belarussian state TV and newspapers. The similarities make it almost too easy for them.
I wouldn't call that particularly effective. Everyone but the most braindead vatniks know that's bullshit. Lies, lies and further lies just like in the USSR.
No amount of propaganda can mask how shitty the life is. There's no reason whatsoever why Belarus couldn't be enjoying the same quality of life as their direct neighbours in the west, they were at the same starting point in 1991 after all. Limited travel is still possible and people know very well what life is like just across the border. Do the same job, get paid several times as much, and without getting molested by government thugs.
RT is already mocking the very same press secretary who justified doing this to get Snowden in 2013 for getting outraged now as she unconvincing deflects a question about it.
CNN won't show that on your TV but I'll bet Belarussians will get to see it.
This is not going to play out unfavorably for Lukashenko, especially if the US/Europe hits them with sanctions that bite.
>There's no reason whatsoever why Belarus couldn't be enjoying the same quality of life as their direct neighbours in the west
Realistically Ukraine is a closer model for how they'd end up if they rejected Russia and aligned more closely with the West. They are under no illusions that a quick change of allegiance will turn them into Luxembourg.
I'm not defending the callous behavior of Belarus. I'm just pointing that the UE/NATO criticism of it is shamefully hypocritical. Both are equally wrong in my eyes.
> the "Somebody else got away with it!" line is not a valid defense for anything.
It actually is, if you are tacitly saying "and we will let them them get away with it again, and again, and again…" but "these other guys you must help me stop".
Countries that refuse access to their airspace will generally send fighter jets if you violate it.
The implicit threat of something going badly wrong if they did not land was still there.
And, in both cases it was a dissident committing acts of public service they were after. It was NOT a terrorist.
Even if you manage to convince yourself that the two actions were in no way equivalent that's not how it will play in Belarus. Lukashenko knows that downing Morales plane gives him extra moral authority among his people ("this is standard even the US does it") which is probably why he risked it.
And yet permission to fly over their airspace wasn't revoked while they were in their airspace. If they had wanted to do so, they could have. They did not. So I don't see the sense in constructing this strawman of "oh but it meant they could've scrambled fighters".
If Lukashenko had done the same thing France had done, the plane wouldn't have been allowed to enter Belarusian airspace. That's not what he did. What he did was far more egregious and far more dangerous and threatening.
shrug The net result was the same - a plane was grounded through deception so a dissident could be arrested. Nobody was hurt by either action.
I don't think Belarussians are going to split these hairs. I suspect also that pro western politicians on Belarussian TV will be goaded into defending what the US did to Morales. They are now placed in an extremely awkward position.
If we then hit the country with sanctions over this ordinary Belarussians are going to be bitter about the hypocrisy (of which they'll be made fully aware) and it will play directly into Lukashenko's hands.
This claim is repeated again and again; yet the circumstances and the actual event (there was no forcing down) were very different; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27256946
How would the plane have gotten back to Russia from Austria, even if it did have enough fuel (according to the Wikipedia article, that was not clear to the crew)?
Why do you think Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, even Ukraine would not have similarly refused access if the crew had not landed in Austria of their own will?
A careful reading of the wikipedia page shows the truth. Whether you revoke airspace permits and force the plane down based on fuel reserves, or scramble fighter jets, the net effect is the same: the plane lands before when it was planning to, if it wants to do so in one piece.
Let’s not split hairs here when the precise same political motivation, and the precise same mechanism was used (the threat of fighters if the plane continues).
The fun part is that the whole ruse was an Assange trick, and without Snowden ever touching the aircraft, Assange got the US to tip their hand that they’re more than happy to engage in such shitty and underhanded techniques, even against a head of state.
> I'm only pointing out these two incidents aren't quite in the same category.
they are the same in motives and principles - in both cases a state pressure was applied to extract an undesirable to the regime citizen from a plane. Focusing on technicalities of the act doesn't resolve the issue with the nature of the act - the corrupt state acting as a bully to coerce its rightful citizen into submittance, with all available means. It shouldn't be a revelation that a scoundrel-of-a-state is ready to escalate the means to fighter jets sooner than later.
"in both cases a state pressure was applied to extract an undesirable to the regime citizen from a plane"
As I explained - in case of Snowden they would only have prevented him from getting to South America. They wouldn't have extracted him from the plane. If Snowden was on board, he'd simply be flown back to Russia - back to square one.
An analogy in this case would be Belarus merely prohibiting the RyanAir flight from entering their airspace.
> in case of Snowden they would only have prevented him from getting to South America.
And you know this how, were you working for the Austrian government at the time, and were you a member of the team who searched the plane?
Chances are that they would have at minimum detained him and allowed the US to start extradition proceedings. Whether they would have eventually extradited him, is not certain; but they would not have searched the plane (and sent the Austrian President to talk directly with Morales) if they were not minded to detain him.
You seem to have started writing your reply before (or instead of) reading my commment in full.
My point was that if Snowden actually was there, they wouldn't land in Austria to begin with. Unlike the RyanAir flight, the plane wasn't forcefully grounded (under a false pretense). It just wasn't let through any further, but returning was still an option.
Because of the constraints on fuel, there was no realistic alternative to going down. And again, once that happened, the fact the Austrian government sent a search party says it all, no matter how hard you want to spin it.
Look around in the various threads, this has been discussed and also in the past. The plane had barely enough range to make it back home with one refuelling stop on the way. NATO countries were closing airspace while it was in the air, even going back to Russia would have been a challenge having to fly back over the likes of Hungary - which by then could well have been closed too.
Look, ignoring moral standing, every countries have fugitives they want to capture. Talking about motive is meaningless. How that being carried out is important. Morales' entourage weren't in danger. They could have chosen to land in Vienna to send a message for all we know.
Belarus disregarded convention and put passengers in the harm way. Ryanair's flight didn't have a choice. Simple as that.
> Look, ignoring moral standing, every countries have fugitives they want to capture.
if you ignore moral standing, you ignore a code of values that, when applied to fugitives of all kinds, allows you to distinguish those on the good side from those on the bad side. Your effective position in that regard is that there are no principles by which people bear responsibility for their actions, which is a basis of the notion of fairness and the whole body of knowledge that we call justice. And if there's neither responsibility nor justice, there shouldn't be a concern about the incident in the first place, as everyone is in their own right to do whatever they want, including forcing a plane to land with a means of fighter jets.
Next, to the point of "Talking about motive is meaningless. How that being carried out is important". Observe that by this standard, in an alternative universe, a hitler would have been acquited if, instead of gas chambers and concentration camps, people were given "vitamins" that would silently kill them in their sleep at their homes.
It is possible to disagree with both actions; but it doesn't destroy "but you did it first" defense. The precedent[1] happened and was generally accepted, so unless you want to go the quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi route, it is supposed to be acceptable defense.
The principal way is to reject that defense for all cases, including the first one.
[1] And not just Morales' plane; this happened more often than that. Morales and Snowden were just high profile.
Yeah, the Snowden affaire should have been the impetus for a new convention on civil airspace. It would have been a good chance to also mop up some of the worst abuses post-9/11, and re-commit US and NATO to a respectful and democratic future. Sadly the chance was completely missed, even after the red rage for the leak had somewhat dissipated. And here we are.
I don't the think the thread was about defending Lukashenko's terrorist act, it was about reminding everyone that, shamefully, such acts are not limited to demented regimes like his.
We are all right to be outraged by what happened in Belarus. We should also be even more outraged when our own governments,which we nominally have some control over, do similar things.
If they were over Austria, are you sure the other countries on the way to Russia would have let them through? Or would they have suddenly also refused access over their air space?
We will never know of course, but the closeness of the situation is still alarming.
Evo Morales' plane? From what I gathered it wasn't forced down in Austria, it's just that they were refused entry into the airspaces of several countries and the pilots weren't sure about the remaining fuel levels.
Apparently the whole thing was a stunt by Julian Assange? Don't know how true that is
They could have also been refused access to the airspace of other countries sorrounding Austria if they had not chosen to land there. We don't know how the situation would have evolved.
And at "best", Assange could be the source of the (mis)information that Snowden may have been on board - the stunt itself was entirely pulled by the governments of France, Spain, Italy.
> that they were refused entry into the airspaces of several countries
Countries that minutes earlier they were cleared to fly through, and had planned to fly through. Had they ignored the refusal and proceeded as planned? Same ending: fighter jets.
Clearance to fly through and clearance to make an emergency landing due to doubts about the fuel gauge (we have the cockpit audio discussing the latter...) are not the same thing.
If there was really a dastardly plot to capture the guy that wasn't even on the aircraft, they'd have gone for fighter jets, not "don't land in our country, land in the country you're flying over where a diplomat will be mildly undiplomatic towards you [or fly back to Russia completely unmolested]"
One could argue that figher jets were not used at that time to keep the pretence of legitimacy of the entire episode. And that pretence is important, because when you publicly declare that the force is now the standard, the most unscrupulous bully wins over bullies with moral limits or political liabilities. Belarus, on the other hand, in its current political environment has no image to lose.
One could also argue fighter jets weren't used at the time because none of the states involved planned for Morales' pilot to identify an issue with his fuel gauge and request permission to land, which has the neat property of being consistent with the hard evidence as well as not involving the whole of Europe's ATC coming up with the clumsiest plot ever to detain someone who wasn't actually there, particularly significant to Europeans or any easier to arrest in Vienna than the originally scheduled stop in the Canary Islands
Very much NOT the same ending. Had this theoretical situation happened, and had fighter jets been scrambled, they would have escorted the plane out of their airspace. They would NOT have forced it to land and arrested any passengers.
That's just speculation. Chances are they would have actually grounded the plane instead, because nobody would want to risk the plane falling down because of lack of fuel while being escorted.
Let's be honest here: Putin and Lukashenko can get away with this sort of shit because "we" first showed that it's acceptable behaviour. This is the risk of breaking unwritten rules on the international stage: sooner or later a bad guy will do it too, and you won't have the moral high ground. This journalist, and all the others who will have to take airspace into consideration from now on, are paying for the sins of Obama.
You say "nobody would", but that is standard procedure when a plane enters an airspace it is not allowed into. I don't see why there would be an exception in this case, and you want to argue that, I think you will need to actually justify that.
All the Belarusian authorities need to do is to send the detained person on the next flight to Vilnius, as Ukrainian authorities have done, and this incident will be over, too.
