wfn.org | Easing of Iran sanctions applauded

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

March 22, 2000 News media contact: Linda Bloom*(212) 870-3803*New York
10-21-71B{160}

By United Methodist News Service

Two United Methodists who had involvement in the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran
two decades ago have applauded the recent loosening of sanctions against
that country.

Retired United Methodist Bishop C. Dale White, who currently lives in
Newport, R.I., said he welcomed the March 17 announcement by U.S. Secretary
of State Madeleine K. Albright that a few small sanctions would be lifted as
part of a commitment toward larger efforts to end two decades of hostility
between the United States and Iran.

That hostility exploded during the Iranian revolution, when Americans were
taken hostage in Tehran in 1979. During that time period, White made two
trips to Iran - first with a group of clergy in December 1979 to deliver a
message of concern and understanding to the Ayatollah Khomeini and second to
deliver bags of mail for hostages in June 1980.

White noted that the struggle between the clerics and reformers in Iran was
prominent during the revolution. He said the Ayatollah's forces were
progressive at the beginning, but added that after Khomeini suffered a
stroke "the revolution was derailed and taken over by the extreme right-wing
clerics."

He finds it an encouraging sign that the reformists are now gaining ground
in Iran and democracy is slowly advancing, although "under a great deal of
difficulty and a great deal of danger."

The lifting of some sanctions, he believes, comes "at a critical time in the
life of Iran."

The Rev. Thom White Wolf Fassett, chief executive of the United Methodist
Board of Church and Society, called Albright's announcement "a great step in
the future," but noted that what the lifted sanctions cover - items such as
carpets, caviar and pistachios - are not substantial.

"The import of luxury items is a safe zone," he said. "What I hope it leads
to is the kind of exchange that really makes a difference."

Fassett was serving a different position at Church and Society during the
hostage crisis, in which that board "played a very interesting and very
quiet role." Working with the American Indian Treaty Council - considered a
neutral party by Iran - "we actually set up a mail bag delivery service of
letters to hostages in Iran." Those efforts basically were terminated by
Iran after an abortive attempted rescue of the hostages by the Carter
administration, he said. 

White was all too familiar with the ill-fated rescue attempt. He was a part
of a delegation sent by the 1980 United Methodist General Conference, the
denomination's highest legislative body, to ask President Carter to use
restraint in the hostage situation. They spoke with the President on April
23 shortly before the rescue attempt was launched. On the morning of April
25, the General Conference - still in session - reaffirmed its message of
restraint, opposing any form of violence by either side.

After the botched rescue, the militant students holding the hostages
scattered them in safe houses around the country. "All mail stopped to the
families, so the families were panic stricken," White added.

However, the students said that if church people would gather and deliver
the mail to Iran, they would see it reached the hostages. White was asked by
then U.S. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie to make the delivery, which
occurred in June of 1980.

On both his trips to Iran, White met some of the thousands of Iranians who
had studied in the United States or in France and professed admiration for
the American people but not for what they considered to be the country's
invasive foreign policy. 

In her March 17 speech, according to the New York Times, Albright
acknowledged the U.S. government's role in orchestrating the overthrow of
Iran's prime minister in 1953 and said that the shah, installed after the
coup, "brutally repressed political dissent." She also noted that U.S.
support of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s appears "to have been
regrettably shortsighted."

White said he has found that "westerners, by and large, know only the
lunatic fringe of Iranian society. They don't understand or don't know about
the positive elements in Iranian culture."

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