An academic says hostage diplomacy is a well-known tactic of the Iranian regime and New Zealanders should not go to the country.

Topher Richwhite and Bridget Thackwray are understood to have been detained for months after entering Iran.

The New Zealand government negotiated for the safe release of the pair but has remained tight-lipped about the details.

A senior lecturer from Massey University who was born and raised in Iran, Dr Negar Partow, said there was a pattern of this kind of action in Iran.

However, she told RNZ Morning Report it was not necessarily naive for the couple to visit the country.

When they arrived in July it was much quieter than what it became when the unrest started in September after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was detained by morality police for allegedly not covering her hair properly.

However, travelling in a Jeep — a US brand — might have created suspicions, she said.

NZ not especially targeted
The move against the New Zealanders was not especially targeted at this country, she said, with as many as 70 nations having citizens in Iranian prisons.

“The fact that Iran entered a revolutionary phase complicated the situation and gave the Islamic Republic the opportunity to use them and to create a hostage diplomacy. This is not particular to Aotearoa. They do it all around the world,” she said.

People with dual citizenship, diplomats, activists, and human rights and environmental advocates were especially vulnerable to attention from Iranian authorities.

If the couple had been focusing on environmental concerns that may have made them a target, she said.

“As the Islamic Republic becomes more and more challenged and de-legitimised by this revolution, these hostage crises will increase and they will use any opportunity as a bargaining chip.”

There have been conflicting reports on now the couple were detained.

Dr Partow said Iran used different models, including imprisonment or being detained in a safe house and not being allowed to communicate.

Richwhite and Thackwray would have had their passports confiscated and their cellphones removed with their Instagram posts stopping in July.

She believed they were not put in prison.

Tepid resoponse by NZ
Asked about the tepid response by the New Zealand government to the unrest in Iran, she said the government was trying to do a delicate balancing act while the couple were being detained.

Many Western governments had to resort to hostage diplomacy with Iran.

While Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta has warned against visiting Iran due to the potential for violence, Dr Partow said it was important to remember the violence was being perpetrated by the security agencies not the protesters.

She said now that the couple had been freed, she was hopeful Aotearoa would take a stronger stance.

“Yes we have been too kind but I’m hoping that as we come out of this period and everybody’s back to normal diplomacy we will take stronger action against the Islamic republic,” she said.

“As the prime minister mentioned as well, this was a delicate diplomatic situation … we did have two New Zealanders inside Iran detained and I think that [strong criticism of Iran] would create more complications.”

Expulsion of ambassador
The expulsion of the ambassador, campaigning for oil embargoes, speaking out publicly to support the rights of Iranian women and human rights lobbying at the United Nations were among measures New Zealand should be considering.

“Now that we have been the victim of hostage crisis in the Islamic Republic that should give us much more importance into the project and we should actually work on it,” she said.

As for advice for potential visitors, she said: “Definitely not. Iran is in the middle of a revolution.”

Ordinary citizens were not in a position to offer help to foreign tourists and it was far better that they stayed away.

She said as the revolution approached the six-week mark, the response from authorities to the demonstrations was becoming even more violent and oppressive.

Asked about Act’s move to block a motion calling for a unified condemnation of Iran’s oppression of women’s rights unless Greens MP Golriz Ghahraman apologised for interrupting a speech made by party leader David Seymour in the House, she said it should be remembered that the Iranian government was now killing children and this was a more important consideration.

Deputy PM pleased couple released
The government is remaining tight lipped about what it took to secure the release of the couple.

Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson said Iran was a dangerous place and New Zealanders should obey the travel warnings not to go there.

Consular officials around the world did not judge New Zealanders who got into trouble —  instead they got on with the job of helping them regain their freedom.

“I’m just pleased we’ve been able to get them out.”

Robertson told RNZ First Up he could not comment specifically on the couple’s case — but he said it was important to understand the customs and rules of other countries — and to understand whether you should be there at all.

He said no doubt the pair would reflect on what they have been through.

Call for NZ govt to take strong stand
An Iranian-Kurdish journalist now living in New Zealand said the government needed to do more regarding the actions of Iran’s government.

Behrouz Boochani, who was granted refugee status in New Zealand in July 2020, said New Zealand should speak out loudly against the Iranian regime.

He said the current unrest was a revolution and was a call for regime change in Iran.

While there had been mass protests in the past, this year felt different because it involved more people and more cities.

He said he was delighted the couple had been freed. However, the Iranian community in New Zealand had been disappointed in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s response to the unrest in Iran to this point.

He said since Mahsa Amini’s death another 250 people had been killed, including more than 20 children.

“So we expect the New Zealand government to strongly condemn this violence and strongly support the protesters on the street and the people of Iran.”

The US and Australia have criticised the Iranian government’s actions and it was time New Zealand followed suit.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As protests in Iran drag on into their fourth week over the violent death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, there are two central questions.

The first is whether these protests involving women and girls across Iran are different from upheavals in the past, or will simply end the same way with the regime stifling a popular uprising.

The second question is what can, and should, the outside world do about extraordinarily brave demonstrations against an ageing and ruthless regime that has shown itself to be unwilling, and possibly unable, to allow greater freedoms?

The symbolic issue for Iran’s protest movement is a requirement, imposed by morality police, that women and girls wear the hijab, or headscarf. In reality, these protests are the result of a much wider revolt against discrimination and prejudice.

Put simply, women are fed up with a regime that has sought to impose rigid rules on what is, and is not, permissible for women in a theocratic society whose guidelines are little changed since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979.

Women are serving multi-year jail sentences for simply refusing to wear the hijab.

Two other issues are also at play. One is the economic deprivation suffered by Iranians under the weight of persistent sanctions, rampant inflation and the continuing catastrophic decline in the value of the Iranian riyal.

The other issue is the fact Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old whose death sparked the protests, was a Kurd.

The Kurds, who constitute about 10 percent of Iran’s 84 million population, feel themselves to be a persecuted minority. Tensions between the central government in Tehran and Kurds in their homeland on the boundaries of Iraq, Syria and Turkey are endemic.

A BBC report  on the Mahsa Amini protests.

Another important question is where all this leaves negotiations on the revival of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA had been aimed at freezing Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

Former President Donald Trump recklessly abandoned the 2015 agreement in 2018.

The Biden administration, along with its United Nations Security Council partners plus Germany, had been making progress in those negotiations, but those efforts are now stalled, if not frozen.

The spectacle of Iranian security forces violently putting down demonstrations in cities, towns and villages across Iran will make it virtually impossible in the short term for the US and its negotiating partners to negotiate a revised JCPOA with Tehran.

Russia’s use of Iranian-supplied “kamikaze” drones against Ukrainian targets will have further soured the atmosphere.

How will the US and its allies respond?
So will the US and its allies continue to tighten Iranian sanctions? And to what extent will the West seek to encourage and support protesters on the ground in Iran?

One initiative that is already underway is helping the protest movement to circumvent regime attempts to shut down electronic communications.

Elon Musk has announced he is activating his Starlink satellites to provide a vehicle for social media communications in Iran. Musk did the same thing in Ukraine to get around Russian attempts to shut down Ukrainian communications by taking out a European satellite system.

However, amid the spectacle of women and girls being shot and tear-gassed on Iranian streets, the moral dilemma for the outside world is this: how far the West is prepared to go in its backing for the protesters.

It is one thing to express sympathy; it is another to take concrete steps to support the widespread agitation. This was also the conundrum during the Arab Spring of 2010 that brought down regimes in US-friendly countries like Egypt and Tunisia.

It should not be forgotten, in light of contemporary events, that Iran and Russia propped up Syria’s Assad regime during the Arab Spring, saving it from a near certain end.

In this latest period, the Middle East may not be on fire, as it was a decade or so ago, but it remains highly unstable. Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, is effectively without a government after months of violent agitation.

The war in Yemen is threatening to spark up again, adding to uncertainties in the Gulf.

In a geopolitical sense, Washington has to reckon with inroads Moscow has been making in relations with Gulf States, including, notably Saudi Arabia.

The recent OPEC Plus decision to limit oil production constituted a slap to the US ahead of the mid-term elections in which fuel prices will be a potent issue.

In other words, Washington’s ability to influence events in the Middle East is eroding, partly as a consequence of a disastrous attempt to remake the region by going to war in Iraq in 2003.

A volatile region
Among the consequences of that misjudgement is the empowerment of Iran in conjunction with a Shia majority in Iraq. This should have been foreseen.

So quite apart from the waves of protest in Iran, the region is a tinderbox with multiple unresolved conflicts.

In Afghanistan, on the fringes of the Middle East, women protesters have taken the lead in recent days from their Iranian sisters and have been protesting against conservative dress codes and limitations on access to education under the Taliban.

This returns us to the moral issue of the extent to which the outside world should support the protests. In this, the experience of the “green” rebellion of 2009 on Iran’s streets is relevant.

Then, the Obama administration, after initially giving encouragement to the demonstrations, pulled back on the grounds it did not wish to jeopardise negotiations on a nuclear deal with Iran or undermine the protests by attaching US support.

Officials involved in the administration, who are now back in the Biden White House, believe that approach was a mistake. However, that begs the question as to what practically the US and its allies can do to stop Iran’s assault on its own women and girls.

What if, as a consequence of Western encouragement to the demonstrators, many hundreds more die or are incarcerated?

What is the end result, beyond indulging in the usual rhetorical exercises such as expressing “concern” and threatening to ramp up sanctions that hurt individual Iranians more than the regime itself?

The bottom line is that irrespective of what might be the desired outcome, Iran’s regime is unlikely to crumble.

It might be shaken, it might entertain concerns that its own revolution that replaced the Shah is in danger of being replicated, but it would be naïve to believe that a rotting 43-year-old edifice would be anything but utterly ruthless in putting an end to the demonstrations.

This includes unrest in the oil industry, in which workers are expressing solidarity with the demonstrators. The oil worker protest will be concerning the regime, given the centrality of oil production to Iran’s economy.

However, a powerful women’s movement has been unleashed in Iran. Over time, this movement may well force a theocratic regime to loosen restrictions on women and their participation in the political life of the country. That is the hope, but as history has shown, a ruthless regime will stop at little to re-assert its control.

Dr Tony Walker is a vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz