Wickham's musings from Chalke

 
On 23rd March ago fifteen British marines and sailors had just finished searching an Indian ship close to the boundary of Iranian territorial waters when two Iranian gunboats seized them. Our servicemen were there under the UN procedures for stopping illegal goods and arms getting into Iraq. Our escorting helicopter, assuming that the search was over and running out of fuel, had returned to HMS Cornwall twelve miles away. No help was possible and so our servicemen gave up without a fight as the Iranian vessels had heavy machine guns and our fourteen men and one woman were on two small RIBs (inflatable boats) with only small arms.

The Iranians claimed that the GPS equipment found on the RIBs showed that our people were inside Iranian waters. The boundary is disputed in that area and also varies because the boundary is supposed to be down the centre of the channel of the Shat Al Arab waterway and extended in the same line out into the open water, but the centre of the waterway shifts due to movement of the seabed, so the boundary theoretically moves.

Our Ministry of Defence spokesman said that he was sure our servicemen were inside the boundary by about 1.7 nautical miles. TV news showed a map with our position and the first position reported by the Iranians which was also outside their waters! The Iranians later gave a second position inside their waters.

The Iranian TV showed the captives in a carpeted room eating off plates on their laps. The woman looked extremely nervous and about to burst into tears but some of the others looked relaxed. The woman had a head scarf on.

After a week and a half of diplomatic statements from both sides, first stern then slightly softer in tone it appeared to be stalemate. The UN had been asked to help but our government had apparently abandoned the UN route and decided to send a special representative to Tehran. Perhaps the UN were deemed slow and ineffective as is often the case.

The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is notoriously hard-line but in practice has little power which is in the hands of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who never appears on TV so we didn't know what his attitude was to our request for the servicemen to be released. The president was obviously told that nothing further could be gained by holding the hostages so he pinned medals on the revolutionary guards who took the hostages then told everyone that the hostages were free.

They were bought out of a nearby room dressed in shiny blue or grey suits, shaken by the hand by the president and given gift bags.

So the Iranians got some brownie points by appearing to be magnanimous. Iran had had the upper hand throughout and the British government was helpless. Military action was unthinkable. We didn't know where the hostages were and anyway a rescue attempt might have gone badly wrong as did the American rescue attempt when their planes crashed on a desert airstrip and they had to abandon the rescue of 52 of their embassy staff who were eventually released after 444 days in 1981.

At first I thought that the hostages had been well treated. It now appears that the sailors and marines were blindfolded, handcuffed at times, stripped, dressed in pyjamas and held in solitary confinement so I take back part of that. However, I still think they can count themselves relatively lucky compared with the usual standards of prisoner treatment in that part of the world.

Iraq dipped prisoners in acid baths; the Taliban in Afghanistan has recently gouged out eyes; Vietnam broke the bones of John McCain and let them set without treatment; Vietnam or Laos hooks people together with wire looped under their collar bones after they attempt to escape and are then returned by the Chinese.

Solitary confinement is stressful but the Iranians probably didn't want the detainees concocting a similar story; they would have wanted each to tell his/her own version. We now know that they were told that if they admitted straying into Iranian waters they would be returned in a few days but otherwise they could be locked up for up to seven years.

The woman was under the impression for about four days that the others had been sent home and that she had been kept alone in Iran. She was asked to write letters home expressing regret, etc. The two officers were shown on Iranian TV explaining what happened and pointing out their position on a map which showed the boundary on the water. Both used phrases like "apparently strayed" and said that the episode was a "mistake" without saying whose mistake in an effort to avoid giving an outright apology.

So what do people think about the near-apologies given on Iranian TV by the hostages? Most are sympathetic. We know that they were being encouraged or threatened to admit that they had strayed into Iranian waters and no one here has believed that their statements under duress were true.

Discussion boards have had a whole variety of opinions, one person said that his father and two uncles were prisoners of the Germans in the Second World War and if they had been asked to apologise on Nazi radio for their actions they would never have considered it; not only would their mates have considered them cowards but they would probably have been court-martialled later.

I believe that during the second world war all a prisoner had to state was his name, rank and number. I wonder what the current British rules are for those taken prisoner?

All in all, they were treated better than the Americans and British troops treat their prisoners. The Americans have made blindfolded men run into solid walls just for fun and the British have hoisted a trussed-up man on the prongs of a forklift truck, amongst other things.

Has Britain been humiliated by Iran? Undoubtedly. They called all the shots from Day One. Iran wants to be the most powerful state in the region - nothing wrong in that - but also wants to have nuclear weapons and destroy Israel and is currently funding terrorism in Iraq, sending arms including ammunition and detonators for roadside bombs for Shiite insurgents to use against our forces.

An informative account of the background to the arrests is this one by the Assyrian International News Agency.