Hostage Diplomacy Is Hostage Taking

 If anything tells you that China is, like Iran ....

State Hostage Taking - Practised By Both China And Iran

..... now a serial state hostage taker, aka 'hostage diplomacy', and not subject to the internationally recognised rule of law, then its the sudden release on the 25th of September 2021, of not one, but two Canadian citizens.

Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig (both falsely accused of espionage by China on trumped up charges), were released immediately, after the charges against the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, were dealt with via her plea deal with the US justice department, and she was released from her gilded cage house arrest, by a Canadian court.

China of course denied detaining the Canadians in retaliation (the Chinese government insisted over and over, that the two cases were not linked. "Different in nature"), for Ms Meng's arrest, but both were detained within days of her arrest in Canada .... they both refused to admit any guilt to the espionage charges, while Ms Meng (the daughter of Ren Zhengfei, the billionaire founder of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei), eventually admitted misleading US investigators about Huawei's business dealings and payments in Iran. In China a court had sentenced Mr Spavor to 11 years in prison for espionage. There had been no decision in Mr Kovrig's case, while Ms Meng had still been fighting extradition to the USA, but finally did a deal with US prosecutors over the fraud charges against her.

In 2019, the US imposed sanctions on Huawei over suspicions that the Chinese authorities could use its equipment for espionage (which it denies), and placed it on an export blacklist, denying it access to some key communication technologies. The UK, Sweden, Australia and Japan have also banned Huawei, while other countries including France and India have adopted measures stopping short of an outright ban.

In 2021, Lithuania’s National Cyber Security Centre tested 5G mobiles from Chinese manufacturers and reported that claimed that one Xiaomi phone, the flagship Mi 10T 5G phone had built-in censorship tools (search terms such as free Tibet, or Tianamen square etc amongst more than 449 terms that could be censored by the Xiaomi phone's system apps, including the default internet browser), while another Huawei model, the P40 5G phone, had security flaws. It reported that the official Huawei application store AppGallery, actually directs users to third-party e-stores, where some of the applications have been assessed by anti-virus programs, as "malicious or infected with viruses". 

Huawei said that no user data is sent externally, and that security checks stop malicious apps being downloaded, and Xiaomi said that it does not censor communications as in Europe, this capability had been switched off on these models (but the report argued it could be remotely activated at any time, as well the fact that the Xiaomi device was transferring encrypted phone usage data to a server in Singapore). 

There are also concerns that Huawei now uses its own 'harmony' operating system (which is actually a branch of Android), in place of Android on its tablets, and some smartphones (after it lost access to Google Apps), but its likely to diverge more in the future, and obviously the chances for security issues would become greater.

The US justice department has said that it is continuing to prepare for a trial against Huawei despite Ms Mengs release. Another Canadian, Robert Schellenberg, a convicted drug smuggler (methamphetamine with a net weight of just over 222 kg - 489 lb - from China to Australia) was originally given a 15 year sentence in China, but upon appeal this was converted into the death sentence, apparently in contradiction of the Chinese law, and some are also linking this to the Meng Wanzhou case.

In another linked case, sister and brother, Cynthia and Victor Liu, along with their mother, Sandra Han, were detained, "suspected of having committed economic crimes" while on a visit to China in 2018 from the US, apparently in an attempt to lure their father back to China to face fraud charges. The siblings faced no charges but weren't allowed to leave China. Ms Han, remains locked up in an unknown location, aka as a 'black jail'. She is a US based businesswoman with millions of dollars in real estate holdings, but she had allegedly separated from her husband Liu Changming in 2012. He was a former state run bank employee who fled China with his family in 2007, after he faced criminal charges in a $1.4 billion fraud against the state bank.

US senators Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren released a statement on the 28th of September 2021, that confirmed that Cynthia and Victor were now back home "after three difficult years being held in China as pawns for the Chinese government" .. the two siblings were released on the same weekend that authorities let go of the two Canadian citizens  ... coincidence? I think not.

Iranian Hostage Crisis In 1979 Started The Hostage Trend ....

While for Iran, hostage-taking such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (one of at least 30 of foreign nationals who have been arbitrarily detained in Iran for diplomatic leverage in recent years), has become an established diplomatic tool since the 1979 revolution (if only Jimmy Carter had shown a backbone then, hostage taking might never have caught on in Iran), and was even presented as an 'economic policy' by one of the candidates in the country’s last presidential election debates.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and fellow British-Iranian detainee Anoosheh Ashoori were finally 'released' in March 2022, after a deal to secure their freedom was struck. The UK has always acknowledged that the debt of £400m (pre interest £328.5m), owed to Iran relating to a cancelled order for 1,500 Chieftain tanks dating back to the late 1970's, was "legitimate" and but that sanctions meant it couldn't be paid back. But now the UK government was "looking for ways to pay" it. 

In other words, despite UK denial that the hostages were linked to that debt, the Iranians had done exactly that, but as soon as the money was forthcoming, Iran's Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, declared that it was wrong to link the payment of the debt to the releases, adding: "These two persons were released on humanitarian grounds." ... We should never deal with that regime. 

Swedish Iranian doctor Ahmadreza Djalali was sentenced to death for spying for Isreal in 2017 in retaliation for Sweden putting Iranian judiciary official Hamid Nouri on trial for 'war crimes' for his role in the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in Iran in 1988. The verdict is expected in July 2022, but Iran doesn't want it to go to verdict, and has threatened to execute Ahmadreza Djalali by 21 May 2022 to force Sweden to swap the two men.

As  recently as May 2022, Iran had arrested two French Iranian teachers who were charged with planning to cause "chaos, social disorder and instability". A French tourist Benjamin Brière was sentenced to eight years in prison in January 2022 on spying charges after he allegedly photographed "prohibited areas" with a drone, while French-Iranian academic Fariba Adelkhah is serving a six-year sentence for conspiring against national security and "propaganda against the establishment". The Iranians even try to lure people to 3rd party countries to kidnap them.

Franqui Flores and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores two nephews of Venezuela's first lady Cilia Flores were arrested in Haiti in 2015, and were spending 18-year sentences in the US, after being convicted on drug charges. In 2022, President Biden authorised their exchange for five American oil executives who had been falsely accused of terrorism by the Venezuelan dictatorship under Nicolás Maduro Moros, in direct response to the two drug dealers arrests.

The Venezuelan government said in a statement that the "release of two young Venezuelans unjustly imprisoned in that country has been achieved," but that the US citizens were simply released for "humanitarian reasons" ... yeah, right!.

Franqui Flores and Efrain Antonio Campo Flores

The international community has been very slow to respond to hostage taking diplomacy, because it has been reluctant to name it for what it is ... why, is hard to fathom. We continue to treat these countries as responsible governments, while they show no respect for the rule of law, and continue to take international hostages .... the release of the two Canadians within minutes of Ms Meng's release, stripped any pretence that their cases were in anyway "Different in nature," and not tied to Ms Meng's, and confirmed that they were in fact, and had been, merely hostages against her release.

Just like the pirates/slavers in the 18th and 19th centuries, until there is a real consequence for the hostage-taking states, these instances will continue and indeed, in Iran increase. The truth is that while we let our citizens travel to Iran, then they have plenty of potential hostages ... the only way this would have stopped would have been if a major power had threatened regime obliteration when hostages first taken .... not going to happen now of course and god help us all when they have their first nuclear bomb.

Update: Iran has just released a number of dual national Iranians and a Belgian aid worker  in a swap for Assadollah Assadi, one of its criminal diplomats who had planned a bombing in France.