World Views | Don’t let Iran get away with hostage-taking

One year ago today, I was released from Iran as an American hostage in a prisoner swap. I went to Tehran in 2016 with little knowledge of its contemporary political reality. After a 40-month ordeal in the notorious Evin Prison, I left the country with the hard-learned knowledge that the Iranian regime is obdurately hostile toward the West, especially the U.S., and loathes diplomacy.
This year, as Thanksgiving approached, I could not help thinking of other hostages still held in Iran — at least 11 foreign nationals whose names are known to the public. Eight of them are in prison and three others are under house arrest.
Two days before Thanksgiving, I learned that the death sentence of my fellow inmate, Iranian-Swedish academic Ahmad Reza Djalali, has been reactivated, ostensibly a gambit against Europe ahead of the trial of an Iranian diplomat implicated in a thwarted attack in 2018. The Iranian judiciary informed Djalali’s lawyer that the sentence would be carried out very soon.
On Thanksgiving eve, Iran’s release of Australian scholar Kylie Moore-Gilbert made international headlines. News footage showed that three Iranian convicts of a botched assassination attempt in Thailand arrived in Tehran, receiving a hero’s welcome by Iranian officials in the airport as Moore-Gilbert departed. Australian media lauded her release as a “diplomatic feat well done.”
The scene of Moore-Gilbert waiting in the VIP lounge of Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport reminded me about how I myself anxiously awaited my departure from the country in that very place. While I am elated to see her returning home, a somber question looms large against the backdrop of Djalali’s imminent sentence: Why does the Iranian regime keep taking foreigners hostage as political leverage?
The simple answer is that this tactic always works. Starting from the U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in 1979, the regime has inevitably got something in return for releasing captive foreigners, be it some form of financial gain, repatriation of Iranian prisoners detained overseas or other political concessions from foreign governments. Inevitably, too, these swaps have been described as “diplomacy.”
But when the old hostages are sent home, the regime simply arrests new ones to replenish its stock of political pawns. The vicious circle is repeated.
The irony here is that the regime’s hostage-taking is in fact a manifestation of its anti-diplomacy orientation. The Islamic Republic, from its formation in 1979, has consistently defied international norms, and frequently rejected the use of diplomacy and dialog as means of mitigating its differences with other countries.
This is because of its revolutionary outlook and a unique, divine-sanctioned sense of hubris. No other state actor in the contemporary world has so frequently encouraged or tolerated the seizure and ransacking of foreign diplomatic representations. These are gross violations of the most basic diplomatic principles, but they are perfectly justifiable in the regime’s rhetoric of “revolution” and “quashing the global arrogance.”
Iran’s refusal to come to terms with the West and its neighbors have brought upon itself ever-increasing sanctions and economic isolation. To survive, the regime routinely recruits collaborators, offering handsome financial rewards for laundering money and circumventing sanctions. It also sends operatives abroad to assassinate political dissidents and foreign foes, and to carry out terrorist attacks.
The regime is committed to repatriate the perpetrators of these illicit activities detained overseas, to ensure the confidence and loyalty of current and would-be collaborators and operatives. The Iranian returnees in recent prisoner swaps have for the most part fallen into this category. My interrogators at Evin Prison made it clear that I was a pawn for prisoner exchange: “To get our brothers back, we will do anything!” Wang Xiyue, MDT/Bloomberg
[Abridged]