This is today’s new world order. Journalists, dissidents and critics who reside in democracies can be rendered and disappeared at the orders of various authoritarian states. Whether it is Turkey kidnapping or targeting people in Europe, Iran ordering assassinations of dissidents in Europe, civilian airliners being shot down by Iran or rebels in the Donbas, or journalists being nabbed, there are fewer and fewer protections for journalists these days.
If once authoritarian regimes might have thought twice about abducting journalists and even released them to Western countries, it is now the opposite. Critics are hunted. People are not safe in Europe or even in the air. They can be poisoned on the streets of the UK, kidnapped by Turkey and disappear and stabbed or blown up on orders from Tehran.
There was no pretense that Ryanair Flight 4978 wouldn’t simply obey Belarus, even though it was on descent to its Lithuanian destination. It was diverted to Minsk with no explanation given. Passengers were taken off, and several disappeared.
During the 1976 Entebbe kidnapping, the heroic Air France crew had remained behind with the kidnapped hostages. In this case, the flight simply departed without the people who had been taken away. A statement by the airline didn’t mention any missing passengers.
Today you can disappear without a trace, and nothing will be done for you by democratic states. This is how it works today.
One man “said he could not be sure if Roman Protasevich’s companion, who took the laptop and phone, had also been detained in Minsk, but there appeared to be more empty seats on the final Minsk-Vilnius journey than when it took off from Athens,” Reuters reported.
Today, there are fewer people like Michel Bacos, the captain of hijacked Air France Flight 193. He stayed with the passengers who were forcibly taken off. He passed away in 2019. Airlines now let their passengers be seized without even mentioning it.
“Unless [there are] massive consequences for this RyanAir/Belarus deal, we will see copycats,” aviation expert Tyler Rogoway wrote in an online post. “Want to get your hands on a dissident or person of state propaganda value? If they ever pass over your airspace, you now have a way to grab them. This cannot stand.”
Most authoritarian regimes are watching the outcome of the Belarus grounding of the Ryanair flight – by using armed combat aircraft – to see what will happen. Democracies may now know that airlines flying from one democracy to another over dictatorships can have their flights diverted and passengers shaken down or taken away without question or repercussions.
The praise that has been issued from authoritarian countries generally reflects a belief that Western democracies won’t do much to protect people.
In addition, it raises questions about how and why foreign intelligence services are generally able to act so freely in democratic European states, following and tracking dissidents and maybe even getting a hold of passenger manifests on airlines.