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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 552
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WCL 552 April 2007
Huffing and puffing: Iran and sailors
It has long been the custom of sovereign states to use pretexts of various sorts to make or pursue disputes with rivals. The numbers in history are legion. Despite numerous agreements to settle such disputes by arbitration or negotiation or by legal action in international court, the old instincts of bullying and intimidation usually prevail. Much of what then goes on is a matter of charades, played out for the benefit or the mystification of the subjects of the states concerned. One current example involves the British and the Iranians.
Seventeen British sailors in waters next to Iran have been seized, supposedly for infringing Iranian territory. If correctly charged they have broken international law, although perhaps not very seriously. Investigation may show that they did so under orders, which could put their superior officers in the wrong. The Iranians, by parading them on television, on the other hand, have committed a clear breach of the Geneva Conventions. Perhaps it is time for Tony Blair and the Iranian president to temper their language and settle the matter by quiet discussion.
The 17 sailors have been held, apparently in very tolerable custody for a week or so. Perhaps up to 200 man(or woman)-days. At the same time, a British resident has been released from a harsh, degrading and unlawful imprisonment in the American camp at Guantanamo Bay for a total of some 1,500 man-days. Not only was he, in contradistinction to the British sailors, tortured and held in solitary confinement, but he has not been hailed as a victim of arbitrary detention or of outrageous treatment. The government that is so up in arms about the sailors accused of an infringement of Iranian sovereignty was silent about the much grosser mistreatment of a British resident accused of nothing yet held illegally for nearly five years.
Behind this affair, and whipped up by a government eager to pile criticism upon an unfavoured and generally hostile state, the British press has done its best to stir up the hostility. Very little has been said about the British and American subversion of the first Iranian attempt at democracy in 1951. Nothing is mentioned about support given to Saddam Hussein during his unprovoked aggression against Iran and the eight years war that ensued. Altogether the media has been showing just how easy it is to divert attention from the crimes of its own government when it has the opportunity to expand upon those of opponents.
Furthermore, the Iranians are rightly still hostile to the presence of British warships taking part in an aggressive action with the Americans that began against Iraq five years ago. Not surprisingly, they do not accept that British and American warships should be patrolling waters so close to their own country. With their knowledge of the devastation caused to Iraq and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians there they are unwilling to excuse the British or other foreign military personnel parading locally and perhaps obtruding into their own spheres of action. Why should they?
John Roberts
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