Dramatic Arrest of Journalist by Belarus Highlights US Targeting of Snowden in 2013

While the dramatic arrest of dissident journalist Roman Protasevich by the Belarusian government over the weekend was fiercely condemned worldwide, press freedom advocates on Monday not only called for the reporter’s release but also highlighted how the actions taken by Belarus were eerily similar to an effort in 2013 by the U.S. and other Western governments to capture NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

 “Downing aircraft to pursue the arrest of dissidents has always been outrageous… and should be opposed no matter the flag under which it occurs.”
—Edward Snowden

Protasevich, a well-known critic of Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, was taken into custody after the plane that he and 122 other passengers were traveling on—en route from Athens, Greece to Vilnius, Lithuania, where Protasevich lives in exile—was forced to land. 

Although they readily admitted that Lukashenko’s government had violated international treaties governing airspace and was deserving of condemnation, critics of the corporate media and U.S. foreign policy were eager to point out that Belarus’ behavior was not unprecedented; in fact, they said, some of the same Western officials denouncing Belarus’ arrest of Protasevich were complicit in the 2013 plot to intercept Snowden.

“For anyone shocked at the Belarus plane grounding, remember, the U.S. did the same thing to the president of Bolivia in an attempt to kidnap Edward Snowden,” journalist Alan MacLeod said Monday.

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In 2013, the plane carrying then-Bolivian President Evo Morales from Russia was rerouted to and stuck in Vienna for 13 hours at the suspected behest of the U.S., which believed that Morales, who was returning to Bolivia following a summit in Moscow, had clandestinely helped Snowden, then stranded at the city’s international airport, on board.

The whistleblower—who has lived in Russia for almost eight years since being granted temporary asylum, followed by permanent residency last October—was not found on the flight.

Snowden on Monday weighed in on the parallels between the repressive scheme that the U.S. and key European Union states used in their failed attempt to capture him and Belarus’ recent hunt for Protasevich, arguing that “downing aircraft to pursue the arrest of dissidents has always been outrageous… and should be opposed no matter the flag under which it occurs.”

The hypocrisy of Western officials—including Jen Psaki, now the White House press secretary but in 2013 the spokesperson for the Obama State Department who admitted that the U.S. had been in contact with multiple countries in an effort to track down Snowden—was the subject of an essay published Monday by journalist Glenn Greenwald, who famously reported on materials leaked to him by Snowden and shed light on the Obama administration’s persecution of the whistleblower.

“News accounts in the West which are depicting [Belarus’ arrest of Protasevich] as some sort of unprecedented assault on legal conventions governing air travel and basic decency observed by law-abiding nations are whitewashing history,” Greenwald wrote.

“No journalist, especially Western ones, should be publishing articles or broadcasting stories falsely depicting Sunday’s incident as an unprecedented assault that could be perpetrated only by a Russian-allied autocrat,” he added. “The tactic was pioneered by the very countries who today are most vocally condemning what happened.”