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Politics

Send Your Terrorists to Europe, Oman’s Sultan Will Mediate

May 30, 2023
Faramarz Davar
6 min read
Oman’s ruler Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in the Omani capital, Muscat
Oman’s ruler Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said meets with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in the Omani capital, Muscat
Five years after his arrest in Belgium on terrorism-related charges, Asadollah Assadi, the third secretary of the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Austria, was released in a prisoner swap mediated by Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said
Five years after his arrest in Belgium on terrorism-related charges, Asadollah Assadi, the third secretary of the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Austria, was released in a prisoner swap mediated by Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said
Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani with late Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, the first Omani monarch who took the of mediator for the Islamic Republic
Former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani with late Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said, the first Omani monarch who took the of mediator for the Islamic Republic

The release of Asadollah Assadi, the former third secretary of the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Austria who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2021 on terrorism-related charges by a Belgian court was somehow expected, but what came as a surprise was that Haitham bin Tariq Al Said, the sultan of Oman, mediated to secure his release.

***

In 2022, while the Islamic Republic was at its lowest level of legitimacy both inside and outside the country, it succeeded in forcing Belgium to sign a prisoner swap agreement after the arrest of Olivier Vandecasteele, a Belgian aid worker fluent in Persian and Dari. The treaty, of course, was specifically aimed at securing the release of Asadollah Assadi, a diplomat assigned to the Islamic Republic’s embassy in Austria who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his part in a bomb plot targeting Iranian dissidents in France.

The prisoner-swap agreement was signed in Brussels on March 11, 2022, between Daniel Fleur of the Belgian ministry of justice and Gholamhossein Dehghani, the Islamic Republic’s ambassador to Belgium and the European Union who earlier had been deputy foreign minister on legal affairs under Mohammad Javad Zarif. The agreement was approved by the Belgian parliament in July 2022.

Because of the existence of the death penalty in Iran, the Islamic Republic and European countries that have abolished the death penalty had no prisoner swap agreement, and the deal between Tehran and Brussels was the only option offered to Belgium to secure the release of Vandecasteele from Tehran’s Evin Prison.

When the servers of the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Ministry were hacked in early May, it emerged that a special working group had been created in the ministry to secure Assadi’s release. This working group, which reported to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, had proposed “an agreement between Iran and Belgium to exchange convicts.” The former Iranian ambassador to Belgium was a member of this working group.

The prisoner swap agreement faced opposition in the parliament of Belgium, where its critics took their complaint to the Belgian constitutional court. Human rights organizations, lawyers and victims of Islamic Republic’s bloody terrorist operations in Europe also seriously opposed the deal.

There were two main reasons behind this opposition. The first was that releasing Assadi would mean he would not pay for masterminding a deadly bombing. The second reason was that, once again, the Islamic Republic would succeed in carrying on its inhuman policies of hostage taking. There can be little doubt that now taking European citizens and dual nationals hostage has become a staple of the Islamic Republic foreign policy, and the Iranian government views it as a tried-and-true solution.

Iranian officials care neither about the innocence of their captives nor about their own laws or their own highly blemished international prestige. And this attitude has not been limited to certain periods or administrations and has nothing to do with the misleading classification of the Islamic Republic’s politicians into hard-liners, principalists and reformists.

During the administration of President Hassan Rouhani from 2013 to 2021, his Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi announced that dual nationals were arrested to force the United State to pay compensation for frozen Iranian assets. And it was in the same period that dual Iranian-British national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested and remained in prison or under house arrest with an ankle monitor until Britain agreed to pay back the money for the military equipment that Mohammad Reza Shah had purchased from the UK before the revolution but were not delivered to Iran.

In 2016, Chines-American schilar Xiyue Wang was arrested in Iran after the Iranian scientist Massoud Soleimani was arrested in the US for violating sanctions against the Islamic Republic and faced a federal trial. Wang was sentenced to 10 years in prison for allegedly “infiltrating” the country and sending confidential material abroad. Wang was arrested while conducting research on the Qajar dynasty. Eventually, the two were traded for each other on the tarmac of Zurich airport in Switzerland in December 2019.

The same thing happened to an Australian citizen and a scholar in Islamic studies, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was arrested in 2018 and sentenced to 10 years in prison on spying charges. She was released in November 2020 in exchange for three Iranian “businessmen” who were involved in a plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. The plot failed and one of those arrested lost parts of both of his legs in the explosion. The three men arrived at Tehran’s airport and were greeted by Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Now, the Islamic Republic has once again been successful in its hostage-taking policy, but what seems strange is the involvement of Oman’s Sultan Haitham bin Tariq Al Said because the agreement to secure the release of Assadi from prison in Belgium and to exchange him for Vandecasteele had already been signed.

Efforts by the sultan of Oman and then by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir of Qatar, to secure the release of Iranian-American dual nationals from Iranian prisons have been unsuccessful so far. Traditionally, Oman has been the main mediator between Iran and Western countries, but its mediating role has been challenged by Qatar and now by China.

In exchange for releasing dual Iranian-American citizens, the Islamic Republic has demanded the release of billions of dollars of oil revenues that were blocked by US sanctions. The United States has so far refused, and mediation efforts by Oman and Qatar in this regard have not been successful.

In almost all hostage-takings of European and dual nationals by the Islamic Republic, Oman has inadvertently helped Tehran to reach its goals. Beyond mediation, Oman has also paid the cost of transporting the prisoners by plane, and, considering the number of hostages taken by the Islamic Republic, the costs must have amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars by now. But the mediation aimed at securing the release of Assadi was a different matter.

Assadi planned a bomb attack in Paris by abusing his diplomatic immunity. He was convicted on terrorism-related charges by an impartial court, and Omani officials are well aware that the Islamic Republic has dispatched such individuals in the guise of diplomats, even to Oman itself.

In an entry in his diary on June 18, 1995, President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wrote that the special envoy of Sultan Qaboos, the monarch of Oman at the time, complained to him that an Iranian diplomat based in the Omani capital of Muscat was planning to assassinate an official guest of the government of Oman. Rafsanjani's tone in the diary suggests such assassination plots were not shocking or even particularly questionable at the time. He did not deny the plot in his diary.

Oman could have expelled that diplomat but it did not, although his identity was known to Omani officials. That diplomat was recalled to Tehran and it is quite possible that he was sent on another, perhaps similar, mission elsewhere. 

In his first visit to Iran on May 28, Sultan Haitham probably will try to remind the Islamic Republic that even though Oman has been unsuccessful in convincing the United States to unblock Iranian assets in exchange for releasing American nationals, it did succeed in mediating Assadi’s release. Most probably, the Islamic Republic could have secured Assadi’s release by itself after the Belgian parliament passed the prisoner swap agreement, but now it owes Oman for yet another mediation effort.

Of course, with this action, Oman cannot escape some unintended consequences. Now Tehran can send others like Assadi on similar missions with more peace of mind because the sultan has shown that he would mediate. And the Islamic Republic is now more confident that other European governments would also yield to its practice of hostage-taking, just as Belgium has done.

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