Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

What happened here was the de facto hijacking of a Ryanair flight by Belarusian intelligence operatives to arrest a political dissident. It is very clear, despite the attempted obfuscation by the regime, that that is precisely what took place. These are the actions of a desperate dictator. Lukashenko has been in power for 27 years. They are actions that People Before Profit absolutely condemns. Lukashenko is a man who is under pressure from a mass movement from below to end his rule. He thinks he can get away with these kind of actions in pursuit of his dictatorial agenda of repression. We should raise our voices to demand that all political prisoners be immediately released. The actions of Lukashenko in targeting Roman Protasevich are aimed not just at him and his partner or the right-wing opposition in Belarus, of which they are probably a part, but also at the wider opposition movement, including the hundreds of thousands of workers who engage in general strike action against Lukashenko.

The immediate history to the current situation in Belarus is the supposed elections in August of last year, where Lukashenko claimed and was widely ridiculed for it to have won more than 80% of the vote. That provoked mass protests and mass movements from below from workers who were opposed to the robbing of an election, the repressive policies of the regime within Belarus and the agenda of privatisation that is being implemented within Belarus. The response by the regime to those protests has been one of repression. More than 30,000 activists have been arrested. Many people have been forced to leave the country and there have been widespread police and intelligence agency brutality against protesters, causing significant injuries. This is a horrendous regime and, although we as socialists have political differences with Roman Protasevich, we defend his right to fly and not have his flight downed by the Belarusian regime or not to be jailed for his political views. We support the movement against Lukashenko. We call for the privatisation programmes to be stopped and for the Lukashenko regime to be overthrown and a system based on a workers' democracy to be put in place.

One point I would make to the movement in Belarus, if people happen to be watching, is to be careful not to be allowed to be used by the forces of western imperialism. They have no interest in the actual democratic rights of the ordinary people in Belarus or the economic living standards of working-class people and are looking to engage in a new cold war between western imperialism and Russian imperialism, neither side of which represents the interests of ordinary working-class people anywhere in the world.

That brings me to the final point I want to make, which is the hypocrisy that is present in the righteous condemnation - a correct condemnation - of the actions of the Lukashenko regime. Nobody is asking the question of where Lukashenko got the idea that he could down a flight. Could the Government answer that question? Is it a coincidence that the Austrian Government downed a flight in an act of international piracy, just the same as the Lukashenko regime? In that case it involved the elected Head of State of Bolivia, Evo Morales, because it thought that Edward Snowden was on board. It is an incredibly similar action of international piracy with no condemnation by the EU or the Government. Instead of offering asylum to the likes of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, who has been mentioned, the Government bows its head and only lifts a finger against Russia or states seen to be aligned to it whenever the major powers in Europe and the US tell it to. That is because the Government is subservient to the interests of US and western imperialism and is completely unwilling to take a principled, moral and political stand against the actions taken by those governments and those states that are allied to them. It is a Government that lets a foreign military power, the United States, use our infrastructure on its way to carry out its global campaign of war and terror.

The point about double standards applies. Again, to be clear, this is not whataboutery because I am 100% on record, and have been for years, in opposition to the Lukashenko regime. In the European Parliament, I spoke out about the Lukashenko regime and I support a revolution against Lukashenko. However, I ask why a Government that, correctly, is able to condemn those attacks on democratic rights, those repressive actions, is not willing to do it when it comes to the likes of the US Government? We made the point in the House about the US Government brutally oppressing indigenous people at Standing Rock. We called on the then Fine Gael Government to take action, to refuse to provide legitimacy to that regime and to show clear and unconditional support for the indigenous people, but it did not. The same happened in terms of the Black Lives Matter Movement, when we had police repression on the streets of the US, injuring thousands, in that we called for a statement of opposition and to expel the US ambassador. We look at what is taking place in Guantanamo Bay. The US has more than its fair share of political prisoners yet this Government would not be caught dead taking a stand.

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