On Saturday, Iran and Sweden exchanged prisoners. The swap had the looks of any two international locations engaged in diplomatic negotiations to free their residents. Households had been elated; governments had been relieved.
However the change was solely the most recent chapter in Iran’s lengthy historical past of what’s identified in world affairs as hostage diplomacy.
For greater than 4 many years, because the 1979 revolution that put in a conservative theocracy, the nation has made the detention of international and twin residents central to its international coverage. For Iran, the strategy has paid off. For the world, it has been a troubling development.
Iran’s calls for have advanced together with its techniques. In change for releasing foreigners it has requested for prisoners, assassins, money and frozen funds. It has engineered complicated offers involving a number of international locations. And on Saturday Iran gained the discharge of its most prized goal: the primary Iranian official to be convicted of crimes towards humanity.
Within the change, Sweden launched Hamid Nouri, a former judiciary official who was serving a life sentence in Sweden for his position within the mass execution of 5,000 dissidents in 1988.
In return, Iran freed two Swedish residents: Johan Floderus, a diplomat for the European Union, and Saeed Azizi, a dual-national Iranian. Left behind was a 3rd, a Swedish scientist who’s a twin citizen, Ahmadreza Djalali, who has been jailed in Iran and sentenced to execution on murky fees of treason.
“Iran is perfecting the artwork of hostage diplomacy and taking part in everybody,” stated Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen who lives in the USA and was a prisoner in Iran from 2015 to 2019. He’s the president of Hostage Help Worldwide, an advocacy group that helps safe the discharge of hostages. “The West is making it straightforward for them as a result of there is no such thing as a unified coverage towards hostage taking.”
The primary aim was political.
Iran’s hostage taking started virtually as quickly because the formation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, when a revolution toppled the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
A gaggle of scholars seized the American Embassy in Tehran and took greater than 50 Individuals hostage, a 444-day standoff that completely ruptured diplomatic relations between United States and Iran. The Iranians wished the USA to ship the deposed shah, who had superior most cancers, again to Iran. (The US didn’t do this, and the hostages had been lastly launched via negotiations mediated by Algeria.)
Within the many years that got here after, Iran would go on to arrest foreigners and twin nationals, together with students, journalists, businessmen, help staff and environmentalists. And with every arrest, it requested for and acquired extra in return.
Efforts to settle monetary disputes adopted.
In 2016, the Obama administration made a $400 million money fee to Iran. The fee, frozen Iranian belongings, coincided with the discharge of 4 Individuals, together with Jason Rezaian, a journalist for The Washington Publish.
In 2020, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British Australian tutorial detained in Iran for 2 years, was launched in a transnational swap that concerned three Iranians detained in Thailand on bomb plot fees.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an Iranian British help employee, was freed after serving six years in jail solely after Britain agreed to pay its $530 million debt to Iran. These negotiations prolonged over a number of British governments.
And final 12 months, in September, Iran launched a number of American Iranian twin residents, together with the businessmen Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Sharghi, in change for a number of jailed Iranians. Iran additionally obtained entry to $6 billion in frozen oil revenues with which it was allowed to make humanitarian purchases of issues like meals and medication.
“Iran has been consistently pushing the envelope and realized the right way to swindle governments to get what it desires,” stated Hadi Ghaemi, the director of the Middle for Human Rights in Iran, an unbiased rights advocacy and documentation group primarily based in New York. “The hazard is different authoritarian governments can study from Iran and make hostage taking the norm.”
Worrying implications.
The information of Saturday’s change was a intestine punch to victims of Iran’s human rights violations in addition to rights advocacy teams extra typically.
Many feared that Mr. Nouri’s trial, conviction and abrupt swap might have an effect on the prospects of accountability and justice for warfare crimes in locations like Russia, Syria and Sudan.
A information channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the highly effective elite unit in Iran’s armed forces, provided a brazen on-line evaluation of Saturday’s deal. Referring to the 2 Swedish residents exchanged for Mr. Nouri, it stated, “These two had been solely arrested for the aim of a swap.”
The put up, on the messaging app Telegram, went on to remark approvingly that Iran had managed the deal with out having to surrender the third Swedish detainee, Mr. Djalali, within the negotiations.
Mr. Zakka, of Hostage Help Worldwide, known as it “simply evil” for Sweden to depart Mr. Djalali behind, and stated his group had written to the Swedish prime minister about two weeks in the past urging the nation to safe his launch.
