IRANIAN REGIME’S HOSTAGE DIPLOMACY MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO TRIUMPH

In mid-September, President Joe Biden’s release of five Iranian felons, in a prisoner-swap deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, took the theocratic regime’s policy of hostage diplomacy to a new criminal level. It was the latest, disgraceful incidence of Western governments surrendering to the mullahs’ gangster blackmail tactics. The five Iranians were exchanged for four innocent US and one British citizen who had been held hostage in Iran, charged with trumped-up claims of spying. 

The prisoner swap, ironically, took place on the first anniversary of the murder of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish girl beaten to death by the mullahs’ morality police in Tehran. As thousands of expat Iranians joined mass demonstrations in cities around the world to commemorate her death, President Biden’s shocking act of appeasement came as a blow to those who have sought justice for Mahsa Amini. Her brutal killing sparked a massive insurrection that engulfed the whole country. 

The mullahs killed 750 of the protesters and jailed over 30,000. Indeed, in a frenzy of killings aimed at terrifying the unruly population, the theocratic regime has hanged 600 people so far this year. But fearless Iranians have continued the uprising, demanding the overthrow of the clerical and misogynist dictatorship. 

Political leaders around the world have called for Iran’s Supreme Leader – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and its President Ebrahim Raisi, to be indicted for crimes against humanity and brought to trial in the international courts. Instead, the Americans invited Raisi to address the UN General Assembly, held in New York on 19^th September. Dubbed ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his notorious role as an executioner during the 1988 massacre of over 30,000 political prisoners, Raisi has flaunted his invitation to New York as a diplomatic coup. The majority of those executed were members or supporters of the main democratic opposition movement – the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI). They were mostly young, well-educated, Iranian men and women. Indeed, in a further bizarre twist, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran is now calling for an investigation into the 1988 massacre with the aim of prosecuting those found responsible, certainly including Raisi. 

The Biden administration’s doleful act of appeasement was compounded by the release of $6bn of frozen assets, returned to the clerical regime via a bank in Qatar. With the Iranian economy in freefall as a result of tough Western sanctions and decades of corruption, maladministration, and financing proxy wars across the Middle East, the majority of the 85 million Iranian population is now struggling to survive on incomes below the international poverty line. But it is quite certain that none of the $6bn will be used to alleviate their suffering. Despite assurances from the mullahs that the money will only be used for humanitarian purposes, it will inevitably find its way to funding Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war in Syria, the Houthi rebels in Yemen, the brutal Shi’ia militias in Iraq, and the terrorist organisations Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. It will also bolster the financing of the regime’s ongoing clandestine nuclear programme and their sponsorship of domestic oppression and international terrorism, through the auspices of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the regime’s Gestapo.

Biden’s prisoner-swap deal followed hot on the heels of a similar act of hostage diplomacy in Brussels in August. Assadollah Assadi, a convicted Iranian terrorist, was sent back to Tehran to a hero’s welcome from Raisi, in exchange for a young Belgian charity worker held hostage by the mullahs. Assadi was a senior officer of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) who functioned under the guise of a registered diplomat in the Iranian embassy in Austria. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a Belgium court, for the crime of directing the bombing of an Iranian opposition rally in Paris in June 2018, a rally which I attended. Indeed, I was a plaintiff at his trial.

The Iranian regime tried to secure Assadi’s release claiming diplomatic immunity and when this failed, they simply seized an innocent Belgian charity worker, Olivier Vandecasteele and sentenced him to 40 years imprisonment, 74 lashes and $1m fine. They then blackmailed the spineless Belgian government into signing a prisoner swap deal. This was a shameful humiliation for Europe and a serious blow to Europe’s system of justice, undermining the security services and the courts. Predictably, when Assadi was arrested, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, said nothing. When Assadi was sentenced for terrorism, he said nothing. When he was released and sent home to a hero’s welcome, he said nothing. Neither did Charles Michel, the President of the European Council. Borrell and Michel are arch Western appeasers of the theocratic regime. Now, the mullahs know that they can act with impunity. They know they can secure the release of any convicted Iranian terrorist or criminal simply by seizing Western hostages. 

Flushed with success, the mullahs have now escalated their system of criminal blackmail.  In July last year a Swedish court passed a sentence of life imprisonment on Hamid Noury, an Iranian executioner. It was a severe blow to the mullah’s theocratic regime. It was the first time, under universal jurisdiction, an official of the regime had been sentenced for his involvement in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners. Amir Abdollahian, the Iranian regime’s foreign minister, declared the court in Stockholm was not competent to issue the sentence and called for Hamid Noury’s immediate release! Then, in an attempt to blackmail the Swedish government, the theocratic regime announced that an Iranian-Swedish dual national, Dr Ahmad Reza Jalali, would be executed. Jalali, a Swedish-Iranian physician, was arrested in 2016 and sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Court in 2017 on the usual trumped-up charges of spying for Israel. His imprisonment and sentence have been widely condemned by human rights organizations. 

The EU, UK, US and UN must not stand for such outrageous provocation. Hostage diplomacy must never be allowed to triumph. The focus of the west must now be on supporting the Iranian people in their bid to overthrow this delinquent regime.