WASHINGTON - As the Western media focus on
the fate of 15 Britons detained for allegedly
trespassing into Iranian waters, the status of
five Iranian officials captured in a US military
raid on a liaison office in northern Iraq on
January 11 remains a mystery.
Even though
high-level Iraqi officials have publicly called
for their release, for all practical purposes, the
Iranians have disappeared into the US-sanctioned
"coalition detention" system that has been
criticized as arbitrary and even illegal by many
experts on
international law.
Hours before US President George W Bush
declared that they would "seek out and destroy the
[Iranian] networks providing advanced weaponry and
training to our enemies in Iraq", US forces raided
what has been described as a diplomatic liaison
office in the northern city of Irbil, the capital
of Iraqi Kurdistan, and detained six Iranians,
infuriating Kurdish officials in the process.
The troops took office files and
computers, ostensibly to find evidence regarding
the alleged role of Iranian agents in
anti-coalition attacks and sectarian violence in
Iraq. One diplomat was released, but the other
five men remain in US custody and have not been
formally charged with a crime.
"They have
disappeared. I don't know if they've gone into the
enemy combatant system," said Gary Sick, an Iran
expert at Columbia University who served in the
White House under president Jimmy Carter. "Nobody
on the outside knows."
A spokesman for
Multinational Forces Iraq (MFI),
Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher Garver, said this
week from his office in Baghdad, "They are still
in 'coalition detention' in accordance with the UN
Security Council Resolutions 1546, 1637 and 1723."
He provided no further information regarding their
status or treatment.
The resolutions
endorse the transitional government of Iraq and
extend the mandate of the US-led coalition force
into 2007.
The continued detention of the
Iranians has escalated tensions between the US and
Iran and may even have set the stage for the
seizure by Iranian forces of 15 British sailors
and marines who allegedly crossed into Iranian
waters last weekend.
"The Iranian group in
Iraq was arrested by American forces, and we have
been asking continuously for their release," Iraqi
Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told the Saudi
daily Al-Riyadh this week, "but this is something
different from the British sailors."
A US
State Department official with knowledge of the
situation said the Iranians were informed of the
status of the diplomats after their detention
through the Swiss government, which represents US
interests in Iran in the absence of any US
diplomatic presence. He referred all additional
questions to MFI in Baghdad.
Washington
severed diplomatic ties with Iran in 1979, after
Iranian students sympathetic to the Islamic
Revolution took 52 staffers hostage at the US
Embassy in Tehran.
During this month's
regional meeting in Baghdad in which US officials
also participated, the Iranian delegation
requested the release of the five men, according
to a State Department spokeswoman. In response,
the Iraqi government asked the US-led coalition to
investigate the circumstances involving their
detention, she said, adding that "the
investigation is not complete, and we don't
comment publicly with respect to ongoing
investigations".
The United Nations
Security Council resolution that officially marked
the end of the US occupation and transferred
sovereignty to the Iraqi government retains the US
military's right to implement "security
detentions". However, any such detentions should
be subject to Iraqi law, according to Scott
Horton, who teaches international law at Columbia
University School of Law.
"The Iranians
who are being held as 'security detainees' are not
being charged with anything, and so are being held
unlawfully," he said.
Under Iraqi law,
detainees identified as insurgents who are
"actively engaged in hostilities" - those
implicated in attacks on coalition forces and
innocent Iraqi civilians - are supposed to be
charged in civilian courts. They may be held up to
14 days before being brought before a magistrate
and either charged with a crime or released. To
hold detainees longer without charging them,
detention authorities must provide justification
for doing so, according to Horton.
That
such requirements appear to be systematically
ignored by US forces not only in Iraq, but also in
Afghanistan and the broader "war on terror", has
fueled criticism of Washington's detention
policies and practices by human-rights groups and
legal experts around the world.
"The US
hasn't articulated the legal grounds under which
it detains 'combatants'," said John Sifton, a
researcher with Human Rights Watch. "They
regularly conflate criminal terrorism, innocent
civilians and real combatants on the ground, and
throw them all into the same pot. The vagueness of
the war on terror has supplied the soil under
which all this has flourished."
US
detention camps in Iraq currently hold more than
15,000 prisoners, most of whom, like the Iranians,
have been held without charge or access to
tribunals for months, even years, in some cases,
according to a recent New York Times investigative
report.
"It's an exercise of raw power by
the US that's not backed by any legal
justification," said Horton.
The UN
secretary general's office has only commented
briefly on the detained Iranians and Iran's
detention of the 15 British sailors, describing
both incidents as "disputes between individual
states".
"We've left it to the respective
countries to work it out among themselves," said
Farhan Haq, a UN spokesman. "Ultimately it's up to
Security Council members themselves to determine
how its resolutions get implemented."
The
legal fate of the captured Iranians turns in part
on the issue of whether the two-story building in
Irbil that was the target of the January 11 raid
was, as Iran claims, an official consulate, in
which case its premises and staff are entitled to
diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention,
or rather a liaison office, as US officials
contend, which would not be entitled to the same
protections.
Both Iran and the Kurdish
regional government have agreed that consular
activities - such as the issuance of visas - had
been carried out by office staff since 1992.
But the US State Department insists that
it was not an accredited consulate and that the
five detainees are members of the Quds Force, an
elite unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps described by US State Department spokesman
Sean McCormack as specializing in "training
terrorists and those sorts of activities".
According to a knowledgeable source at the
Iraqi Embassy in Washington, the five were not
accredited diplomats, although they had submitted
documents for accreditation before the raid was
carried out. Their applications were being
processed, said the source, who asked not to be
identified. The source also said that the Kurdish
regional government had treated both of them as if
they were indeed accredited.
The raid on
the Irbil liaison office was the third in a series
of episodes that targeted Iranian officials
operating in Iraq. On December 20, US forces
stopped a car carrying two Iranian diplomats and
their guards. The next morning, soldiers raided
the compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shi'ite
leader of the largest political party in Iraq, the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in
Iraq, and detained two Iranians who turned out to
have been members of the Revolutionary Guard.
After a tense nine-day political standoff,
the Iranians were released from US custody and
were ordered by the Iraqi government to leave the
country.
As part of extensive review of
its diplomatic relations with Iran, the Iraqi
Foreign Ministry plans to turn all liaison offices
in Iraq into consulates, giving them official
diplomatic status, according to the New York
Times.
There are 36 Iranian diplomats
currently based at Iran's embassy in Baghdad, as
well as 11 at its consulate in Karbala and nine
more at another consulate in the southern city of
Basra.
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