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Thursday
June 7, 2001

Enough mutual guilt

I would like to comment on Mr/Ms Donald's opinion on the US embassy hostage crisis of 1979 in Tehran ["Compensation for hostage taking"]. Although we all condemn the act, still the facts of the matter remain under the shadow of fiction. I have only used the standard references available to public mostly through searching the net.

As far as personal compensation for the hostages, after the hostage taking, the American government filed a complaint at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Iran stating that the government of Iran was responsible for acting contrary to the Vienna Convention on the protection of diplomatic rights. It added that Tehran had acted against the Treaty of Friendship signed in 1955 with Washington about economic and consular relations between Iran and the United States. The Iranian government replied to the ICJ claiming that the hostages had been held by the "students following the Imam's line". Iran did not attend the court and the ICJ eventually condemned Iran and took it responsible for the hostage taking. It acknowledged that U.S. embassy in Iran was not seized by the Iranian government however, since the government had endorsed the action and had not taken action to keep the embassy and its staff immune from anarchy it was responsible and should pay damages to Washington. The amount of the damage was made subject to the agreement of the two sides. Should the two sides fail to reach agreement, then the Tribunal would make its own assessment in the next stages and decide the amount.

With the beginning of the negotiation on freeing the hostages, Iran made it clear that the first condition to return the hostages was that Washington should cease to claim any damages in the future. All these conditions have been cited in Paragraph 11 of the General Statement in the Algiers Declaration and Washington committed itself to withdraw its petition from ICJ simultaneously with the release of the hostages and that later on Washington or American citizens should not demand any damages against seizure of the former U.S. embassy and the hostage taking. The U.S. government agreed to prevent any claim raised in that connection. Meanwhile the U.S. government set a special commission and satisfactorily paid damages to the hostages and their families.

For information on the major part of the two decade long litigation and details of the arbitration of the claims of the two states at the Hague International Tribunal I would refer you to the available references. One can see that overall, in part caused by the incompetence of the Iranian delegation, our nation is the final loser by paying for everything since 1979 including the 3-4 billion dollars debt of Iranian private sector under Shah to American banks (I am afraid those who are responsible are all in the West enjoying themselves with the stolen money and possibly hating anyone bringing up the issue including this one!)...... and a lot of other loses that are painful to any truly nationalist person.

Altogether the political and economic compensation for the US, and punishment of that nature for Iranian people (not the regime) rounds up to billions of dollars by: freezing the Iranian assets in US worth of several billion dollars for more than a decade, an unfair demoralizing and demonizing of a nation by US government and US society which we consider as expensive as "priceless", technical -leave alone the political- support of the "wrong side" by the US during Iran-Iraq war while we were fighting the later-to-be the most hated enemy of US in mid east (for whatever reason), ... and don't forget the hypocrisy of Regan administration with their deal on timing the releasing of hostages, Iran-Contra, etc. If one truly cares about fairness and a "good start" then how about "compensation directly from the government of US" to the families of victims of the Iranian civil aircraft shut down by the USS Vincent in 1988?

Isn't all this enough for the guilt of both sides and on the other hand enough punishment and suffering for our nation. Youngsters committing crime get more compassion in civil cases in US courts, why so much hostility against a crude and naive act of a small group of young people during those harsh days of a nation's life.

Your faithfully,

Ali

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