Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 33, 52

Special Report

Former U.S. Embassy Hostage Dialogues With a Tehran Student Hostage Taker

By Dr. Farid Mirbagheri

On July 31 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, almost two decades after militant Iranian students took a whole U.S. embassy full of American diplomats and their visitors as hostages in Tehran, a former hostage came face-to-face with one of his captors. The meeting, organized by the Center for World Dialogue based in Nicosia, Cyprus, came amidst speculation about the future of Iran-U.S. relations and how informal meetings of this kind may facilitate a formal rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran. The meeting thus attracted a flurry of reporters from the international media.

Former U.S. Embassy press attach’ Barry Rosen and Abbas Abdi, one of three leaders of the “Students Following the Line of Imam” who seized Rosen and his U.S. Embassy colleagues in 1979, each gave their views on the future course of Iran-U.S. relations. Both speakers stressed that they were meeting as private citizens and not as representatives of their governments.

At the outset, Mr. Abdi made it clear he had not come to apologize for his actions 20 years ago. Nor had he come to “prove the legitimacy” of those actions.

Rather, he said, he was meeting to explain how the “wall of mistrust” (a phrase used in Iranian President Mohammed Khatami’s ground-breaking interview with CNN earlier this year) had grown up between the two countries. Its origins went back to 1953, he said, when an American-backed coup in Iran toppled the short-lived democratic government of Dr. Mohamad Mosaddegh and restored Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi to power. Afterward, Abdi said, “the subsequent layers of this wall were also laid by the United States.”

In the aftermath of Iran’s 1979 revolution and in the light of the exiled shah’s admission into the U.S. for medical treatment, the seizure of the embassy was, according to Abdi, a natural and spontaneous development. Had it not taken place when it did, “armed groups would have attacked the embassy sooner or later, which would have resulted in the murder of several Americans,” he maintained.

For his part Rosen, now retired from the U.S. foreign service, talked of the unjustifiability of hostage-taking by the students. “No matter how they rationalize, they must face up to that wrong and admit, if only to themselves, that it was unjustified,” he said.

“But this platform is not for remembering only my pain, or blows to American honor alone,” Rosen continued. “Iranians also suffered deeply.” He speculated that meetings of the kind in which he was participating could help reconciliation between the two nations. “The essential nutrient will be a process of ‘humanizing’ each other, which must include acceptance that we both have viable points of view and grievances worthy of acknowledgement,” he said.

Both speeches dwelt on the degree of mistrust between the two countries, and the possibility of beginning a dialogue without any official involvement. “The current state of relations between the two countries appears tense and hostile to outside observers, many of whom maintain that such circumstances only harm the two nations and undermine the political stability of the Persian Gulf region and the greater Middle East,” Abdi said. “Accordingly, any endeavor to alleviate the existing tension is strongly welcomed.”

Similarly, Rosen said, “We can work toward a wiser, kinder time when our countries are able to agree to disagree, as in all good relationships, between nation states as well as people.”

Achieving this objective requires mutual recognition, an act which is long overdue from the U.S., Abdi said. “Iranians only observed signs of such recognition in the recent speech delivered by Secretary Albright.”

Questions asked by reporters about the actual act of hostage-taking 20 years ago were not particularly welcomed by either of the speakers. Instead, they stressed, attention should be focused on overcoming mistrust. Abdi also replied sharply, and evasively, to a question about his recent imprisonment by Iranian authorities. That, he said, was an internal matter that he would not talk about outside Iran.

Pressed by one reporter for a response on the moral aspects of hostage-taking, Abdi said that holding a nation hostage for 25 years (referring to the 1953-78 period during which the United States unreservedly supported the shah in the aftermath of the overthrow of Mosaddegh’s government) would seem far more painful than holding 52 individuals for 444 days. Abdi maintained that “taking the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was only the most natural response the people of Iran could possibly have given to the shah’s being granted permission to enter the USA. Seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was the most nonviolent possible measure that could be taken in Iran in response to what the United States had done.”

Notwithstanding Abdi’s justification for his actions, he said during the dialogue that he had not intended to hurt Rosen or his family. He had no personal grudge against them and was sorry for the pain they suffered.

The meeting was chaired by French journalist-diplomat Eric Rouleau, executive director of the Center for World Dialogue. During the question-and-answer period and the heated discussions it inspired, both Rosen and Abdi responded with a calm that belied emotions they must have felt two decades ago.

Admitting to a monumental miscalculation, Abdi let the world know for the first time that the original objective of the students had been to use the hostages to arouse American public opinion to force the U.S. administration to deport the shah back to Iran.

“The students speculated that American public opinion, which had ended the Vietnam War, could similarly help their cause,” Abdi said. “They predicted that this whole seizure of the embassy would last no more than a week and that the relations between the two countries would return to normal.”

Although there was criticism of Abdi in Tehran for participating in this year’s dialogue, international reaction to the meeting was, by and large, positive. Observers pointed out, however, that many outstanding issues remain to be resolved before diplomatic ties can be resumed between the two capitals.

When resolution of these issues begins depends upon answers to three questions: Can Washington afford to ignore indefinitely the role of the Islamic Republic in the security of the region? Can Tehran continue its infrastructural development and enjoy a peaceful and stable regional political climate while maintaining its antagonism to the only superpower in the world? Can Iran-U.S. relations start afresh within international parameters accepted by both sides?

An answer to the final question was suggested in the speech of Mr. Rosen, who is familiar with Iranian literature and who ended his talk with a quotation from the much-revered 13th century Persian poet, Sa’di:

“All men are parts of one another, for in creation they are of the same essence.”