Iran and Sweden exchanged prisoners on Saturday. The exchange looked like any two countries engaging in diplomatic negotiations to free their citizens. The family is very happy. Governments breathed a sigh of relief.
But the exchange is just the latest chapter in Iran’s long history of hostage diplomacy.
The country has made the detention of foreign and dual citizens a centerpiece of its foreign policy for more than four decades, since the 1979 revolution established a conservative theocracy. For Iran, this approach has paid off. This is a disturbing trend for the world.
Iran’s demands have changed as its tactics have changed. In exchange for the release of foreigners, it demanded prisoners, assassins, cash and frozen funds. It orchestrated complex transactions involving multiple countries. On Saturday, Iran released its most important target: the first Iranian official convicted of crimes against humanity.
In the exchange, Sweden freed former judicial official Hamid Nouri, who was serving a life sentence in Sweden for the 1988 mass execution of 5,000 dissidents.
In return, Iran released two Swedish citizens: EU diplomat John Florderus and dual Iranian Said Aziz. The third person is Swedish scientist Ahmadreza Djalali, a dual national who was imprisoned in Iran and sentenced to death for treason.
“Iran is perfecting the art of hostage diplomacy and playing with everyone,” said Nizar Zakka, a Lebanese citizen living in the United States who was imprisoned in Iran from 2015 to 2019. Chairman of Hostage Assistance Global, which helps secure the release of hostages. “The West makes it easy for them because there is no unified policy on hostage-taking.”
The first goal is a political goal.
Hostage-taking in Iran began almost as soon as the Islamic Republic was founded in 1979, when a revolution overthrew the monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
A group of students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took more than 50 Americans hostage in a 444-day standoff that permanently broke diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Iran. Iranians want the United States to return the deposed king, who has terminal cancer, to Iran. (The United States did not do this, and the hostages were eventually released through Algerian-mediated negotiations.)
Over the following decades, Iran continued to arrest foreigners and dual nationals, including academics, journalists, businessmen, aid workers, and environmentalists. With every arrest, it demands and gets more in return.
Efforts to resolve financial disputes followed.
In 2016, the Obama administration paid $400 million in cash to Iran. The payment froze Iranian assets and freed four Americans, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian.
In 2020, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a British-Australian academic detained in Iran for two years, was freed in a cross-border exchange involving three Iranians detained in Thailand over a bomb plot people.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British aid worker in Iran, was released from prison after serving six years in prison after Britain agreed to repay a $530 million debt to Iran. These negotiations involved various UK governments.
Last September, Iran released several dual U.S.-Iranian citizens, including businessmen Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz and Emad Shaghhi , in exchange for several imprisoned Iranians. Iran has also received $6 billion in frozen oil revenue, which can be used to purchase humanitarian supplies such as food and medicine.
“Iran has continued to push the envelope and learned how to deceive the government to get what it wants,” said Hadi Ghaami, director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent rights advocacy and documentation organization based in New 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 Iran’s human rights abuses and to the broader rights advocacy community.
Many worry that Nouri’s trial, conviction and sudden transfer could affect the prospects for accountability and justice for war crimes in Russia, Syria and Sudan.
A news channel affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the powerful elite force of Iran’s armed forces, gave a brazen online assessment of Saturday’s deal. Referring to the two Swedish citizens exchanged with Mr Nouri, it said: “These two individuals were arrested solely for the purpose of exchange.”
The post on the messaging app Telegram went on to comment approvingly that Iran completed the deal without giving up a third Swedish detainee, Djalali, in the negotiations.
Global Hostage Assistance’s Zaka called Sweden’s abandonment of Djalali “evil” and said his group had written to Sweden’s prime minister about two weeks ago urging the country to secure his release.
