Hostage-Takings Speak Volumes About Iranian Diplomacy

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Blackmail has long been the Islamic Republic’s preferred language with the West: do what we want, or we and our friends will hurt you and your friends, whether by building nuclear weapons or deploying terrorist groups and proxy militias. The regime routinely addresses its own people with a variant of this vernacular: do what the theocrats want, or face imprisonment, torture and murder.

Listen carefully, you can pick up three distinct diplomatic dialects as the regime in Tehran feels the pressure of American economic sanctions.

One expresses the menace to the Middle East, implied in Tehran’s decision to ratchet up uranium enrichment. Remove the sanctions, the regime is saying, or we’ll frighten our neighbors. This has always been the main purpose of Iran’s nuclear program.

Another speaks to the threat to the global economy, delivered in the form of attacks on neutral shipping and Saudi oil installations. The message: Remove the sanctions, or we’ll disrupt hydrocarbon supplies to the world.

And finally, there’s the crudest tongue of all, the sinister idiom of the hostage-taker. When Iranian authorities imprison American or European citizens, they’re saying: Give us what we want, or we’ll do to your people what we do to ours.

Iran sent that message to France and Britain this week. On Tuesday, a regime spokesman confirmed the arrest of Fariba Adelkhah, a French-Iranian anthropologist. The announcement coincided with the news that prison authorities in Tehran have moved a British-Iranian hostage, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, to a psychiatric ward.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe, an employee of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, has been jailed for five years on secret charges, apparently including plotting against the Iranian regime. It would seem that the same risible accusation is being leveled against Adelkhah, a researcher with Sciences Po.

The timing of the announcements in Tehran leave little doubt about their true purpose. The Islamic Republic has a long history of using—and celebrating the use of—hostages as leverage, a commodity it desperately needs right now. The regime has been trying to ward off pressure from European governments to honor the uranium-enrichment limits agreed in the 2015 nuclear deal. It has, in turn, been pressing the Europeans to deliver the economic benefits promised in the deal.

With Zaghari-Ratcliffe, there may be yet another consideration. Her transfer to the psych ward comes just after British marines seized an Iranian tanker off Gibraltar; it was apparently carrying oil to Syria. Iranian officials have been demanding the ship be released, calling the seizure “piracy, pure and simple.”

It is entirely in character for the regime to lash out brazenly when caught in wrong-doing. In Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case, a senior foreign ministry official accused her husband of “blackmail” for staging a recent hunger strike to draw attention to the case. The official then went on to demand 400 million pounds Iran claims it is owed by Britain for a cancelled 1970s military contract. Subtlety is not the regime’s strongest suit.

The timing of Adelkhah’s arrest is interesting, too. French President Emmanuel Macron has recently taken the lead in European diplomacy with Iran, sending a top advisor to Tehran only last week, to persuade the regime to return to the agreed enrichment limits. Macron now has his answer.

This is not the first time Iran has taken a French hostage. In 2009, it detained Clotilde Reiss, another academic. She was released the following year, two days before French authorities freed the Iranian murderer of the Shah of Iran’s last prime minister. Both sides claimed, improbably, that there was no quid pro quo. 

Macron says he has received “no explanations” from the Iranians for Adelkhah’s arrest. But for anyone familiar with the parlance of Iranian diplomacy, the message is clear enough.  

To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Bobby Ghosh is a columnist and member of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board. He writes on foreign affairs, with a special focus on the Middle East and the wider Islamic world.

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