It was quickly evident that Lukashenko’s regime intended to catch and silence Protesvich, whose reports featured the nationwide protests following the disputed presidential election of August 2020-during which the opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, was believed to have actually received the majority of the votes. After landing, Protasevich and Sapega were immediately apprehended by the authorities. However, when the flight flew through Belarusian airspace, Lukashenko government agents forced it to divert and land at Minsk Airport by fabricating an onboard bomb claim and deploying a fighter jet to follow the flight.ĭespite Protasevich’s pleas to the Ryanair crew not to land because of his fear of persecution, the flight diverted per the Lukashenko government’s order. The flight took off in Athens, Greece, and was initially set to land in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, where Protasevich was granted asylum. On May 23, a Ryanair flight carrying 26-year-old dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his Russian-national girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, was hijacked by Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. Just a month following Wang’s detention in Dubai, Belarus orchestrated an even more jaw-dropping abduction, this time of a fleeing journalist. By the same token, his arrest in Dubai one year later is widely believed to be a PRC intervention aimed at bringing him back into the country. Because Wang has been residing in Europe since 2019, this wanted notice officially turned him into an exile. Only a couple of minutes after he posted those comments, the police department of Chongqing City, Wang’s hometown, published a notice on the internet for his detention. In the comments, Wang criticized the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s provocations that incited a Sino-Indian border clash in June 2019 and questioned the authority’s tardy report of four Chinese soldiers’ deaths eight months after the clash. permanent resident, came onto the PRC’s wanted list in February 2020 after his comments on Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) went viral. Wang, a 19-year-old Chinese youth and U.S. If convicted, he would face possible extradition to the PRC. On April 6, during his stopover in Dubai en route to New York City, Wang was abruptly taken away and detained by Dubai police, who accused him of violating Blasphemy law. Given all these factors, I was terribly frightened when I first heard of Wang’s incident. Dissenting opinions are silenced, and the regimes’ political opponents can spend their lives behind bars for speaking up. Teenagers are forced to join national youth leagues and are shaped into dictators’ patriotic tools. As both are authoritarian states, their political atmospheres are suffocating. Coincidentally, the first twenty-one years of my life are tied to the PRC and Belarus, the former being where I grew up and the latter being where I received my college education. In May of this year, posts heavily concerned about the fates of Jingyu Wang and Roman Protasevich, two young political dissidents from the People’s Republic of China (PRC)* and the Republic of Belarus, respectively, flooded my Twitter timeline.
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