EU did the same thing in 2013 by forcing the Bolivian president's plane to land in an effort to catch Snowden. They have no moral or legal standing here whatsoever.
Those EU countries didn’t allow the plane into their airspace, encouraging it to land in a third country to refuel.
Belarus called in a fake bomb threat and used their fighter jets to force a passenger flight to land in their territory, not to mention the KGB officers on board making a scene.
Outcome might be similar, but it’s specifically the tactics used which make this unacceptable.
Seems like a trivial difference. Denying access to your airspace comes with the implicit threat of fighter interception.
The Morales jet was warned ahead of time in a legal way, not intercepted and forced to land in an unintended destination.
No persons from the Morales jet were detained.
One is an lawful act (perhaps imoral in some way) , and one is an arbitrary act outside of any lawful framework . I hope this clears the confusion.
It's not that Belarus' actions are admissable. It's that the West is acting in a hypocritical way.
If Belarus had as much power as the US, they surely would have followed the same route and forced all the surrounding nations to close their airspace. The end result would be the same.
The stark difference between the way the West does it is that you have a choice whenever to comply or pick an alternative, whereas Belarus left no choice.
EU, as a matter of routine, forbids certain persons from entering their airspace, has refused entry countless times to planes (some of them airborne) based on passenger manifests. Nobody would have batted an eye if Belarus would have done the same.
Pointing a gun (armed MiG fighter) at a civilian airplane based on who is a passenger using a deceptive pretext, outside laws and regulations, is several orders of magnitudes worse than lawful application of rules. If you fail to see why, read about habeas corpus.
And I'm hindsight Austria probably regrets they didn't deny access too, because then the potato wouldn't have landed on their soil.
It's not very bold to say: "pass don't involve me", but it's not necessarily a conspiracy to intercept a plane. That would have to involve a lot of people, and would probably leak..
All this whataboutism isn't really bringing much to the discussion here...
What next, the West can't complain about human rights violations in HK or Mongolia just because US police shot some dude (again)?
* It generally has no context. Yes, the West did something similar. It does not follow that the West will engage in the same type of systemic evil, that argument must be made on its own.
* Whataboutism often implies that naughty behavior is ok; that the hypocrisy of the West is justification for some further evil. One is at best making the argument that everyone is evil so just do it
* It consistently assumes the ignorance of particularly Americans - that if you just tell the dumb American that his government did something bad too, the scales will fall from their eyes, they will accept everything is evil and meaningless, and they will stop criticizing you
* the West is just plain better, on the historical record, at admitting and correcting hypocrisy. It’s a kind of meta-hypocrisy for these countries that never actually implement a liberal system to do such a great job of helping us improve ours, by pointing out flaws we’re secure enough to fix and they’re not.
Moreover, whataboutism does not prove that only power exists. Much the opposite: it proves that, at least in the West, moral norms can have force. Else why would Easterners bother with it?