This ought to go without saying, but an American who is facing charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol could do a lot better than to seek asylum in a country whose president won a sixth term in office last year in an election that his opponents and Western governments say was fraudulent.
After all, weren’t the people who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol claiming that the American presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump? Weren’t they trying to prevent Congress from formally certifying the election of Joe Biden? Why hide out in a country that’s dealing with a very similar situation?
Nevertheless, a California resident, Evan Neumann, who faces four charges related to his presence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, left the United States in March. He went through four European countries before staying several months in Ukraine.
From there he crossed illegally into Belarus, where he has asked for political asylum, possibly because the former Soviet republic does not have an extradition treaty with the U.S.
The president of Belarus is big buddies with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Both leaders have said the U.S. prosecution of Jan. 6 protesters is proof of America’s double standard when it criticizes other countries for cracking down on anti-government protests.
However, any U.S. response to Jan. 6 pales in comparison to what’s been going on in Belarus. The 2020 announcement there that President Alexander Lukashenko had won a sixth term caused months of public protests.
“The government unleashed a violent crackdown on the protesters, arresting more than 35,000 people and badly beating thousands of them,” The Associated Press reported this past week in its story about Neumann. “The crackdown elicited widespread international outrage.”
As protest responses go, 35,000 arrests and bad beatings define a crackdown much more accurately than the U.S. government’s filing of charges, mostly misdemeanors, against 650 people at the Capitol on Jan. 6. And no one has accused the Capitol Police and other officers on the scene that day of beating anybody. In fact, their restraint against the people who entered the building illegally — some of whom assaulted officers — was admirable.
Neumann owns a handbag manufacturing business. Interviewed on Belarus television this week, he admitted being at the Capitol on Jan. 6 but said he does not believe he committed any crimes. Police body camera footage, however, identifies him in a group of people pushing a metal barricade into a line of officers. The video also indicates that Neumann punched two officers with his fist before hurling the barricade at them.
The Byelorussian TV anchors said Neumann’s stores were burned down by members of the Black Lives Matter movement, that he was seeking justice, asking inconvenient questions and is now being persecuted. Maybe so. But if history is any guide, Mr. Asylum one day may see what a real government crackdown looks like.
