International Public
Opinion Sides with Snowden
Yohannan Chemarapally
EDWARD
Snowden’s travails
may be ongoing but it is clear that he now has the support
of the international
community and many governments. The whistleblower, whose
revelations have exposed
the American double standards on issues relating to civil
rights and
international law in an unprecedented way, has asked for
political asylum in Ecuador.
Other
governments have also said that they would consider requests
for asylum favourably.
The president of Venezuela,
Nicolas Maduro, while on a visit to Haiti
in the last week of June,
said that Snowden required “humanitarian protection” from
the international
community. He revealed that Snowden had not approached Venezuela with a request
for asylum but
indicated that if such a request materialised, his
government would “evaluate”
it in a manner similar to that being adopted by Ecuador.
“This
guy, Edward Snowden,
deserves humanitarian protection,” said Maduro. He pointed
out that if a
“humble country like Venezuela
was caught spying on the rest of the world, all the
organisations including the
UN Security Council would come down on Venezuela
straight away.” Maduro
compared Snowden’s situation with that of Nelson Mandela
during the Apartheid
era. He reminded the international community that Mandela
was also branded “as
a most wanted terrorist by the United States
government.” On the other hand, he
pointed out, the United States
allows well known terrorists like
Luis Posada Carriles sanctuary on its own territory. Posada
Carrriles was the
man responsible for the downing of a Cuban passenger plane
over the Caribbean. More
than 70 people on board that plane were
killed. Maduro said that Ecuador
was expeditiously looking into the asylum request by
Snowden.
US ARMTWISTING
LATINO COUNTRIES
The
Obama administration
has been trying to armtwist the small Latin American country
into denying entry
for the whistleblower. The Wall Street
Journal reported that Washington
had warned the Latin American countries against facilitating
the passage of
Snowden through their territories. In the specific case of Ecuador,
the
Obama administration had threatened to scrap the
preferential trade agreements
it had with that country and the withdrawal of its
ambassador. On June 27, in a
retaliatory move, the Ecuadorian government announced that
it had decided to
waive its preferential trade rights with Washington.
And to add insult to injury, Ecuador
also announced a donation of 23 million dollars for human
rights training in
the US.
Ecuador
wants this money to
be used for issues relating to torture and illegal
executions in the US.
“Ecuador does not accept
pressure or threats from
anyone, nor does it trade with principles or submit them to
mercantile
interests, however important they may be,” Ecuador’s
communications secretary, Fernando Alvarado said in Ecuador’s
capital, Quito.
The United States
is the
main trading partner of Ecuador,
buying 40 per cent of the country’s exports worth nine
billion dollars per
year. The preferential trade agreement was set to expire on
July 31 this year. One
may recall that President Correa had expelled the Americans
from their military
base in the country in 2009 and last year he gave asylum to
Julian Assange, the
Wikileaks founder, in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
It is unlikely that he would turn his
back on Snowden. The Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo
Patino, had said in
last week of June that the Ecuadorian authorities were in
consultation with their
Russian counterparts on the issue.
The
Obama administration
had made the asylum request more complicated by revoking
Snowden’s American
passport as he was flying from Hong Kong to Moscow.
The Ecuadorian president, Rafael
Correa, has said that Snowden has to physically present
himself in an Ecuadorian
embassy or enter the country if asylum was to be granted.
“Would he be allowed
to arrive on Ecuadorian territory? This is something in
principle that we have
not considered,” President Correa said in the last week of
June. Correa
revealed on June 30 that the American vice president, Joseph
Biden, had
personally spoken to him requesting the denial of asylum for
Snowden.
THREAT
TO RUSSIA
As of
now, Snowden remains
confined to a transit lounge in one of Moscow’s
international airports and lacks the necessary travel papers
to do so. The
Russian authorities have also said that the cancellation of
Snowden’s passport
has complicated the situation for the whistleblower.
President
Vladimir Putin
described Snowden as a “free man” waiting to leave for a
third country. He
reiterated that there was no question of Moscow
handing over Snowden to the US
authorities, but the Russian president indicated that he
would be happy to see
Snowden out of the country. “The sooner he selects his final
destination the
better it is for us and for him,” Putin told the media
during his recent visit
to Finland.
Putin noted that Russia
does
not have an extradition treaty with the US
and that Snowden had not
committed any crime on Russian territory. According to
reports, high level
talks are going on behind the scenes between Washington
and Moscow
to
make Snowden leave the airport premises. The US
deputy secretary of state, William Burns, is said to have
visited Moscow
to convince the
Russian government to hand over Snowden to American custody.
President Obama is
scheduled to visit Moscow
in October. The Russian side does not want the Snowden issue
to derail the
visit.
The US secretary of state, John
Kerry, during his
recent visit to Delhi had
warned Moscow
that “there would
be consequences without doubt” if Russian authorities do not
give up Snowden.
“They are on notice with respect to our desires. It would be
deeply
disappointing if he was wilfully allowed to board a plane,”
Kerry said while in
Delhi.
Kerry
described Snowden as a “convicted felon” and appealed to Russia “to live by the
standards of the law,”
choosing to conveniently gloss over the gross violation of
international law that
the US
has committed, as illustrated by the Snowden expose.
The
Indian government also
sought to play down the Snowden issue. The Indian external
affairs minister,
Salman Khurshid, while addressing a joint press conference
with Kerry, seemed
to be supporting the American position, saying that the
widespread American
surveillance of the world’s internet traffic helped to save
lives and thwart
terror attacks on Indian targets.
CHINA, EU GOVT’S
INFURIATED
Most
of the US
anger was reserved for China. Washington has accused Beijing
of allowing Snowden to leave Hong Kong.
A White
House spokesman said that China’s
“deliberate” action to release “a fugitive despite a valid
arrest warrant”
would have a negative impact on the US-China relationship.
The People’s Daily,
reflecting the views of China’s
leadership, strongly rebutted Washington. The
newspaper said that the decision to allow Snowden to leave Hong Kong was “consistent with the
law and entirely defensible,” and
urged the Obama administration to stop “the hypocrisy of the
thief shouting
‘stop thief.’ ” Much of the US National Security Agency’s
(NSA) hacking was
directed at Chinese computer networks. China’s
defence ministry issued a statement saying that Snowden’s
disclosures on US
surveillance
showed that their country was a victim, not a perpetrator,
of cyber spying and
hacking
But
as President Obama was
preparing to leave on his tour of three African countries at
the end of June,
there was a noticeable attempt to cool down the rhetoric on
Snowden at the
highest levels in Washington.
In his first statement on Snowden, President Obama chose to
describe the
whistleblower as a “29 year old hacker” and hinted that
Moscow and Beijing’s
refusal to hand him over should not be allowed to derail
relations with the two
countries. He went on to add that the Snowden affair was
merely a routine legal
case to be dealt with by the competent law enforcement
authorities in various
countries. Speaking to the media in Dakar, at the beginning
of his African tour,
the US president said that he would neither be speaking to
the Chinese and
Russian presidents on the issue or for that matter scramble
US air force jets
to intercept the plane carrying Snowden to a third country.
In a
related development,
Lonnie Snowden, the whistleblower’s father, told an American
television network
on June 28 that he believed his son would be willing to
voluntarily return to
the US
if the government gives an assurance that he would not be
arrested before being
tried and not subject him to a gag order. Snowden,
ironically, has been charged
under the Espionage Act by a government which has been
routinely spying on all
the major governments of the world. The senior Snowden said
that he has not
spoken to his son since April but went on to claim that the
Wikileaks organisation
was misleading his son by giving him wrong advice.
Snowden’s
revelations have
begun to have a tangible impact in US politics, despite
influential sections of
the media and the establishment standing behind the Obama
administration’s
routine collection of private data on a gargantuan scale.
Now, the news that
the NSA was spying on the European Union (EU) has further
infuriated the Obama
administration’s influential European allies like Germany.
The German magazine, Der
Spiegel, reported on June 29 that it
had seen NSA documents marked “top secret” that Snowden had
with him on the NSA
bugging EU offices and spying on its internal computer
network. Leading
European politicians are already describing the latest
revelations as a “huge
scandal” that would adversely impact on relations with Washington.
CONCERNS FOR
CIVIL LIBERTIES
In
the last week of June, 26
US
senators asked the NSA chief to release more information of
the government’s
bulk collection of data relating to American citizens.
American law makers were
not consulted or informed about the widespread snooping
activities of the NSA. Senator
Ron Wyden, one of the senators demanding accountability from
the Obama
administration, admitted that the American government’s
reliance on secret laws
“raises civil liberty concerns and all but removes the
public from an informed
national security and civil liberty debate.” Since the
Snowden affair hit the
headlines, President Obama has been spending a lot of his
time assuring his
fellow Americans that their government is not spying on
them. At the same time,
he and senior administration officials are arguing that the
NSA’s massive
surveillance programmes helped foil more than 50 terror
plots. But the Obama
administration has not been very forthcoming with the
alleged plots that the
NSA is claimed to have thwarted.
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