Evo Morales: I was "being held hostage" in unplanned Vienna stop

[JDPriestly]

65. The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported on Evo Morales' stay in the Vienna Schwechat airport

Last edited Wed Jul 3, 2013, 05:40 PM - Edit history (1)

live and with lots of photos. In one picture, Morales appeared to be looking at a cell phone or small computer-type device and smiling, but his foreign minister looked furious.

According to Der Standard, the Bolivian diplomatic mission including Morales complained that the life of the President, Morales, had been threatened by not allowing Morales to proceed as his trip was planned, and Morales was claiming diplomatic immunity and threatening to call in someone from The Hague.

OK. I read German. Most people don't. Der Standard is a pretty reliable news source.

The Austrian Minister of the Interior stated that her country awards asylum to people, but they have to identify themselves and undergo an interview as required by law. (Edited. I inaccurately typed that the German Minister made that statement. It was the Austrian Minister of the Interior. Sorry.)

Austria has granted asylum to many political refugees from all over the world.

The Interior Minister stated that she understands that many citizens are upset about the surveillance and that Germany (Merkel) and Austria have compiled a list of questions that they are submitting to Obama about the program and that they are awaiting a speedy response to it.

I posted my translation of the article on DU last night around midnight, Pacific Time.

Conduit and Bing have stolen my computer for the moment. (Joking maybe. I'm a computer Klutz and probably did something wrong.) And I am having trouble finding Der Standard. The article I found last night has, of course, been replaced. But things got pretty tense in Vienna last night judging from the pictures, the articles and the "live" coverage.

Everyone will have their own opinion. Was Morales free to go? Did he stay for some reason? Part of it was definitely diplomatic. And if Der Standard reported correctly (and I believe they did), then the Bolivian foreign minister was pretty upset. I would also say he was upset from the pictures of him that I saw in Der Standard. Someone put Morales' life in danger, the foreign minister of Bolivia was reported to have said.

Snowden had better be pretty important because it is not just Bolivia and South America that are upset about this.

I warned that Germany and Austria would not like this at all.

The Germans and Austrians bore the brunt of most of the Cold War. They were on the edge. They lived with the Iron Curtain to their East. The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia killed many dreams as well as some decent people.

I was on a vacation in a campground in Munich the day the Russians entered Czechoslovakia. I will never forget it. We had just been traveling in then Yugoslavia visiting with family. At one point we had stayed in a campsite, lovely place filled with olive trees. We made friends with a vacationing family from Czechoslovakia who had a teenaged son with them. They were so happy about the Prague Spring -- so excited about the future. We drove up to Munich and there we got the news of the Soviet invasion. I was so sad, and when I think of it, I still am.

This surveillance thing is no joke. It is serious. We think we are not the Soviets, and of course we aren't. But the problem is that we are human. We feel fear. We over-react. The people in the NSA and our government are also human. They want to protect our nation. And because I know that their wish to protect is motivated by compassion and love most likely, I understand that. But the extent of the surveillance that they apparently have in place and the potential for abuse of the system in the future is too great. This system of surveillance is a greater threat in my view than anything it could prevent.

Freedom is a precious thing, as I learned that summer in the Munich campground.

The faces on the Czechs who were visiting Munich, some of them for the first time in the West, were utterly devastating. They were staying in tents, had their cars and all or some of their family with them and in one single day they had to decide whether to leave their whole life, the rest of their families, their jobs, their homes, their family heirlooms, their language, everything. In a matter of hours, they had to decide, the West and hopefully freedom or the East and the Soviet repression, poverty and misery.

I assure you that if the DUers who are rah-rahing for this surveillance program on DU had been with me at those campgrounds in the then Yugoslavia and in then in Munich, Germany, they would be opposing this unfettered surveillance and the exaggerated spying as I am.

Freedom is precious. Most of us Americans don't realize how precious it really is.

This is my first Fourth of July post.

Thank you to the brave Americans who fought our revolution and gave us our Constitution.

Let's don't let them down. And let's don't let down the many people in the world who look to us for an example of how to live in harmony as a truly free society. We have to do better. End the massive surveillance.