On Saturday, Iran and Sweden exchanged prisoners. The exchange had the appearance of two countries engaged in diplomatic negotiations to free their citizens. The families were elated; The governments were relieved.
But the exchange was just the latest chapter in Iran’s long history of what is known in world affairs as hostage diplomacy.
For more than four decades, since the 1979 revolution that installed a conservative theocracy, the country has made the detention of foreign and dual nationals a central element of its foreign policy. For Iran, the approach has paid off. For the world, it has been a worrying trend.
Iran’s demands have evolved along with its tactics. In exchange for freeing the foreigners, he has asked for prisoners, murderers, cash and frozen funds. He has designed complex agreements involving multiple countries. And on Saturday, Iran achieved the release of its most prized target: the first Iranian official convicted of crimes against humanity.
In the exchange, Sweden freed Hamid Nouri, a former judicial official who was serving a life sentence in Sweden for his role in the mass execution of 5,000 dissidents in 1988.
In exchange, Iran released two Swedish citizens: Johan Floderus, a European Union diplomat, and Saeed Azizi, an Iranian dual national. Left behind was a third, a Swedish scientist with dual citizenship, Ahmadreza Djalali, who has been imprisoned in Iran and sentenced to execution on murky charges of treason.
“Iran is perfecting the art of hostage diplomacy and playing with everyone,” said Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen who lives in the United States and was imprisoned in Iran from 2015 to 2019. He is the president of Hostage Aid Worldwide, a group of defending. which helps secure the release of the hostages. “The West is making it easy for them because there is no unified policy against taking hostages.”
The first objective was political.
Hostage-taking in Iran began almost as soon as the Islamic Republic was formed in 1979, when a revolution overthrew the monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
A group of students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage, a 444-day standoff that permanently severed diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran. The Iranians wanted the United States to send the deposed shah, who had advanced cancer, back to Iran. (The United States did not do that and the hostages were eventually freed through negotiations mediated by Algeria.)
In the decades that followed, Iran would arrest foreigners and dual nationals, including academics, journalists, businessmen, aid workers, and environmentalists. And with each arrest he asked for and received more in return.
Efforts to resolve financial disputes followed.
In 2016, the Obama administration made a $400 million cash payment to Iran. The payment, which froze Iranian assets, coincided with the release of four Americans, including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian.
In 2020, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian academic detained in Iran for two years, was freed in a transnational exchange involving three Iranians detained in Thailand accused of plotting a bomb.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British Iranian aid worker, was freed after serving six years in prison only after Britain agreed to pay its $530 million debt to Iran. Those negotiations extended to multiple British governments.
And last year in September, Iran released several Iranian-Americans with dual citizenship, including businessmen Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Sharghi, in exchange for several imprisoned Iranians. Iran also gained access to $6 billion in frozen oil revenues, allowing it to make humanitarian purchases of things like food and medicine.
“Iran has been constantly pushing the boundaries and has learned how to defraud governments to get what it wants,” said Hadi Ghaemi, director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent rights and documentation organization based in New York. York. “The danger is that other authoritarian governments could learn from Iran and make hostage-taking the norm.”
Worrying implications.
News of Saturday’s exchange was a blow to victims of human rights violations in Iran, as well as rights groups in general.
Many feared that Nouri’s trial, conviction and abrupt exchange could affect the prospects for accountability and justice for war crimes in places like Russia, Syria and Sudan.
A news channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the powerful elite unit of Iran’s armed forces, offered a cheeky online assessment of Saturday’s deal. Referring to the two Swedish citizens exchanged by Mr. Nouri, he said: “These two were only arrested for the purpose of an exchange.”
The post, on the Telegram messaging app, went on to comment approvingly that Iran had achieved the deal without having to hand over the third Swedish detainee, Djalali, in the negotiations.
Hostage Aid Worldwide’s Zakka called it “simply evil” for Sweden to leave Djalali behind and said his group had written to the Swedish prime minister about two weeks ago urging the country to secure his release.
