The Belarus plane hijacking reflects appeasement of tyranny

Lukashenko hijacked a European civil aircraft because he thought he could get away with it. History shows he can. 

On May 23, the world watched as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko used his air force to intercept a civilian airliner on the pretext of a bogus bomb threat, grounded it in Minsk, and kidnapped prominent opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his fiancé before eventually freeing the other passengers. This incident – reminiscent of a spy thriller – was brazen, but not entirely unprecedented. It represents merely the latest event in a dangerous pattern of authoritarians going the distance to scare and silence voices of opposition. Lukashenko upped the ante by violating multiple international norms at once, but tyrants have a long history of suppressing dissent, both at home and far beyond their borders. And it is getting worse. The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 is the most notorious case to date of transnational repression, but there are countless more. In May 2017, Afgan Mukhtarli, an Azeri opposition journalist disappeared from the streets of Tbilisi only to resurface in neighbouring Azerbaijan facing criminal charges. In August 2020, exiled Rwandan opposition leader Paul Rusesabagina stepped onto a charter flight bound for Burundi but instead ended up in Rwanda, where he was arrested and charged with “terrorism”. A recent report by Freedom House catalogued 608 instances of transnational repression since 2014.