Belarus Hijacking: Courses Interruptus.📌

Update: 8/2/21—Minsk nearly extended its strong arm grab again—this time at Japan’s Olympics. If not for Poland issuing her an emergency humanitarian visa, sprinter Krystina Timanovskaya, 24, would have been forcibly plucked from Belarus’s track team by Lukashenko security agents, then hustled off to the airport and Minsk, accused of criticizing her coaches. Fearing for her safety, she appealed to the International Olympic Committee for help, and local police secured her in a Tokyo hotel overnight. She is currently being sheltered in the Polish embassy there, offered safe passage to Poland. (MTC…)  

5/24/21—In the slipstream of major international airlines diverting from Ben Gurion Airport to avoid rocket attacks during the recent 11-day Israeli-Palestinian War comes the dubious bomb scare regarding Ryanair FR4978.

Belarus: The Unspeakable Happens.

Two cherished principles were hijacked this past weekend in the skies over Belarus. The Ryanair flight, en route from Athens, Greece to Vilnius, Lithuania with 171 aboard was nearing the Lithuanian border when it was ordered to divert and land in Minsk by Belarusian Air Traffic Control. Belarus authorities claim that they ordered the action due to reports of a security threat onboard the aircraft, enforcing the maneuver via a MiG-29 fighter jet escort.

Ryanair maintained “nothing untoward” was found explosives-wise during a search of the plane and baggage on the ground at Minsk Airport, and its flight was cleared to depart some five hours later. But FR4978 would be taking off at least two passengers lighter, because aboard the 737-800 had been journalist Roman Protasevich—who was detained with his Russian girlfriend, law student Sofia Sapega.

 Seems he was wanted by the Belarus government on criminal charges in absentia relating to his activities during the country’s 2020 presidential election.

As a news editor at (Poland-based) Nexta Media Network, Protasevich fed and led the opposition effort to unseat 66 year-old President Alexander Lukashenko, who has hard ruled Belarus since 1994. Protasevich is accused of attacking ‘Europe’s last Dictator’ on Nexta’s Twitter and You Tube on Telegraph channels throughout the blistering campaign. Nevertheless, Lukashenko declared victory in a presumably rigged election despite fervent street protests, then proceeded to label Protasevich a terrorist. Belarus’s state-owned news agency revealed that Lukashenko himself ordered the Ryanair jet to be rerouted to Minsk, well over 250 miles off course.

Once at the capital’s airport, Belarus authorities removed the 26-year-old dissident from the plane and shackled him off to pre-trial detention. A shocked fellow passenger said Protasevich—who had fled Belarus two years earlier and now faced a 12 year prison term and worse—told him that if the flight landed in Minsk, “…they’ll execute me here.” A preliminary ‘confession’ video indicates the beatings have already begun; no word yet on his lady friend’s jeopardy, but a later video shows her also being held in detention…

It’s the Sky, Jack.

So much for freedom of speech, freedom of the skies: Amid a world of outrage at this illegal act of ‘state-sponsored terrorism’, the European Union has voiced particular alarm at Belarus’ forced diversion of an EU member airline traveling between two EU capitals with a likely planeload of EU-based passengers. And with rumors that two Russian KGB agents may have been planted on the flight, echoes of the Ukrainian Malaysian Airline disaster ring to mind. Little wonder the US State Department also condemns the act.

This, while the Belarusian Regime forges a sort of tourist trap—weaponizing migration by shoveling subcontinent migrants through to Balkan nation borders as revenge against heavy EU sanctions.

But beyond Lukashenko’s piracy play, unsettling global issues and questions arise: Was this act illegal on the face of it, in actual fact? Are international treaties and standards of air transport primacy and freedom of navigation equal to the threats of today? In how much peril were FR4978’s panicked passengers and crew—or all civilian flights and fliers, much less journalists and critics of other authoritarian regimes? Can we board a plane any longer without fearing that we or our seat mates might get plucked by some raiding uniforms? Does this unprecedented outlandish act set a new, dire precedent? Or does the Belarusian skyjacking just foreshadow the fatal 1970s takeover dramas all over again?

5/31/21—On that count, another Ryanair flight, this one from Dublin bound for Poland, was since diverted Sunday to Berlin’s airport after a ‘potential security threat onboard’ was transmitted to the crew by German air traffic control. Passengers on Flight FR901 were removed and security checked before being transferred to a spare Ryanair plane seven hours later for continuation on to Krakow. Copy that, or copycat?

Ramifications…and Redress?

5/26/21—Whatever, no doubt this skyjacking, said to be set in motion by those onboard KGB operatives fraudulently crying bomb scare to the Ryanair flight crew, was in violation of a network of treaties governing air travel between subscribing nations worldwide (including Belarus). Specifically it contravenes the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation and 1971 Montreal Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Civil Aviation. Since the Montreal accord includes Article 1(1)(e), which stipulates as an international crime when someone unlawfully and intentionally “communicates information (he/she) knows to be false, thereby endangering the safety of an aircraft in flight.” Moreover its Article 10 requires a state to be “in accordance with international and national law, endeavour to take all practicable measures for the purpose of preventing the offenses mentioned in Article 1.”

Lukashenko’s cynical ‘piracy’ action also breached the Chicago Convention’s Article 3bis(b)—providing that a state can only ground an aircraft transiting in its airspace by employing “appropriate means consistent with relevant rules of international law.” Further, as per a 1928 international justice ruling, “(Belarus) must, as far as possible, wipe out all the consequences of the illegal act and reestablish the situation which would, in all probability…have existed if that had not been committed.” In other words, Protasevich and Sapega must be released from Belarusian custody and allowed to continue to Vilnius as though the skyjacking never occurred.

Now whether any EU Commission and International Court of Justice (ICI) rulings prove to be enforceable and remedial is yet another question—as are the fates of the abducted journalist (a Belarus citizen) and his 23-year-old Russian companion. The EU, NATO and world leaders are already calling for and/or applying stiffer sanctions, asset seizures, travel red flags and bans on all EU carriers from entering Belarus air space or receiving flights leaving that country. Tit for tat: Belarus ally, Russia has since banned Air France and Austrian Airlines flights from landing in Moscow.

So we’ll see if such restrictions, judicial redress and growing global ire will pressure a desperate, isolated despot like Alexander Lukashenko to change his thuggish ways. (MTC…)