Hearing No Apology, a Hostage Can’t Forgive

Barry Rosen, executive director of public affairs at Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, was the last American press attaché to Iran and along with his fellow diplomats was held hostage in the U.S. Embassy.

April 10, 2014

On Nov. 4, 1979, a group of radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and kidnapped the diplomats inside, flouting fundamental international law.

I and 51 of my colleagues then suffered through 444 days of fear, beatings, solitary confinement, mock executions and other horrors — some so unspeakable I prefer not to immerse myself in the memories. Some of us had teeth knocked out, bones broken and our bodies bruised. We lost weight and sanity. Some tried to kill themselves.

No matter how Aboutalebi tries to minimize his past, he is as complicit as each vengeful radical who terrorized us.

Since our return to America, our torture and treatment have led to early deaths, suicide and psychiatric care. Some of us never really came home because human beings, after all, can only stand so much.

I am sure you can understand our anger over Iran’s selection of Hamid Aboutalebi as its ambassador to the United Nations, and the joy we shared when the Senate -- red and blue, liberal and conservative – led the fight against him, with the ultimate goal of eliminating state sponsorship of acts of terror. We wait for the Obama administration to end this travesty.

No matter how Aboutalebi tries to erase or minimize his past, he freely admits in interviews that he acted as a translator and negotiator for those who took control of the embassy. He excuses himself by saying that he was a young man, but he is as complicit as each vengeful radical who terrorized us.

Many have been heard in the heated debate surrounding Aboutalebi. But we have not heard from Aboutalebi himself or from the Islamic Republic. There has never been an acknowledgement of what occurred 35 years ago, much less an apology. That silence is the greatest outrage of this controversy.

Had Aboutalebi come before the United Nations, before the United States, and offered a formal apology on behalf of his country and himself, with a plan for reparations for our physical and mental torture and the damage to our families, perhaps then America and we former hostages, our spouses and children might have been able to say, “You are forgiven.”

Before we can move forward, with serious nuclear negotiations as well as a rapprochement between our two countries, Iran must affirm that it committed heinous crimes against us, breaking and altering our lives forever.