Fifteen sailors and marines from the British naval ship HMS Cornwall were captured by the Iranian authorities on March23, 2007, after they had searched a boat in the Gulf, off the coast of Iraq, which they suspected was smuggling cars. The Iranian authorities alleged that the British personnel were in Iranian waters when they were seized, but the British Prime Minister,Mr Tony Blair, has strongly denied this. He has stated that the group was in Iraqi waters under a UN mandate.
However, Brigadier-General Hakim Jassim, commander of Iraq's territorial waters, has been quoted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as saying as follows: : "Usually there is no presence of British forces in that area, so we were surprised and we wondered whether the British forces were inside Iraqi waters or inside Iranian regional waters."
According to the BBC, the hostages are being held at an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps base in Teheran. British consular officials have not so far been able to see them. On March27, 2007, the British Defence Secretary Des Browne chaired a meeting of Ministers andofficials--under the auspices of thegovernment's "civil contingencies committee" known as Cobra-- to discuss the situation. It is similar to the Crisis Management Group of thegovernment of India chaired by the Cabinet Secretary. British spokesmen described the purpose of the Cobra meeting as to ensure inter-departmental co-ordination in handling the crisis.
The British foreign secretary, Ms. Margaret Beckett, who was on a visit to Turkey, is reported to have spoken over telephone to Iran's Foreign Minister,Mr Manouchehr Mottaki, to demand immediate consular access to thedetainees. The Associated Press news agency reported that Iranian officials had repeated assurances that the British diplomats would get access to the detainees once their inquiry into the incident was complete.
Mr Blair was quoted as warning of a "different phase" if diplomacy failed to secure their release. This gave rise to some speculation that he might be hinting at the possibility of military means to rescue the detainees if diplomacy failed to make Teheran see reason. However, the British authorities have sought to play down the implications of this remark by suggesting thatMr Blair was talking of a different phase of diplomacy. They are trying to give the impression that the British would continue to try to get them released through diplomacy, but the diplomatic tactics might change.
This crisis, which has erupted at a time when Mr Blair has been reduced to a lame-duck Prime Minister getting ready to quit as Prime Minister in summer this year due to the widespread disenchantment over his handling of the Iraq issue, brings to mind the American hostage crisis of 1979-81.From November 4, 1979, to January 20,1981, members of the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, a group of militant university students who were supported by the Islamic regime, held 63 American diplomats posted in Teheran and three additional U.S.citizens hostage inside the American diplomatic mission inTeheran. They released several captives, but 52 hostages remained until the conclusion of the crisis. During the crisis, the US attempted a rescue operation code-named Operation Eagle Claw. The operation ended in a disaster and resulted in the deaths of eight American Marines. The perceived inept handling of the crisis by Jimmy Carter, the then US President, contributed to his defeat by Ronald Reagan in the Presidential elections of November,1980. On January 20,1981, the Iranians released the hostages shortly after Reagan had taken his oath of office.
There is a common thread between the hostage crisis of 1979-81 and the presentone-- the role of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was a radical youth leader in 1979 and who is a radical President now. In an article titledDark Horse written in June, 2005, I had stated as follows:
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"Following the success of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the 49-year-old Ahmadinejad, who holds a doctorate in engineering from the Iran University of Science & Technology , became a member of the Office for Strengthening Unity (OSU) and reportedly supported the decision of its Central Committee to storm the US Embassy in Teheran and take the American diplomats hostage. In fact, it is said that he wanted that the students should raid the then Soviet Embassy too, but the Central Committee did not agree to it.
"He subsequently became an officer of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards and rose to be a senior commander. His responsibilities in the Revolutionary Guards reportedly included countering the activities of political dissidents in Iran and those of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which had started a terrorist movement against the Islamic Government from sanctuaries in France and Iraq. He was considered a leading counter-terrorism expert of the Revolutionary Guards. Sources in the Iranian exiles community in the West allege that he was also given the responsibility for the execution of the fatwa for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British author. The execution of the fatwa has since been suspended."
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In 2004, when Ahmadinejad had not yet become the President, the Iranians had captured a smaller detachment of British forces in the same waters, but they were quick to release the captured personnel after extracting "apologies" and marching them, blindfolded, before the TV cameras.
Presuming that the British contention that the personnel captured on March 23, 2007, were not in Iranian waters is correct, the question arises as to whether this was a rogue operation by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards without the prior knowledge of Ahmadinejad or was it a staged operation with his consent, if not on his orders. The possibility of a rogue operation by subordinate elements is remote. Such rogue operations do not take place in Iran. There is a greater possibility that it was an operation carefully controlled from above.
Why? One explanation given by some analysts is that this was meant to counter the US allegations of the clandestine operations of Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard agents in Iraq against US personnel and interests. Since they could not pick up Americans, they picked up the British, their closest allies. This explanation does not sound very convincing.
Well-informed Iranian political exiles view this as connected to the current crisis on the question of Iran's suspected military nuclear plans and speculation about the possibility of the US resorting to military means to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities at Natanz and Ispahan. They see this as a confrontational situation deliberately provoked by the Ahmadinejad regime to test American and British nerves and to see whether they have the political will for a military confrontation with Iran at a time when they are preoccupied in Iraq and Afghanistan. They say that the moderate elements in Teheran, which have been unhappy for some time over the confrontational style of Ahmadinejad, are trying to persuade him to cool it and release the Britishdetainees.
B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India,New Delhi, and presently, Director, Institue for Topical Studies, Chennai.
