The history of storming embassies: Diplomatic crises end with political agreements and compensations

Even though attacks on the premises of diplomatic missions usually forebode political and military escalation, the most famous cases in history ended with political settlement, compensation, or negotiation.

When in 1979 Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took dozens of American diplomatic staff hostage for an entire 444 days, Washington entered negotiations and provided its arch enemy with arms in order to resolve the crisis.

According to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, countries are responsible for protecting diplomats and their premises on its territories. The convention does not specify a clear penalty for the country that violates this article, yet countries have always been keen on taking all the necessary measures to protect embassies and their staff on their soil. Even ousted Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi vowed to protect the European missions although many of them were waging war on his military bases.

When angry Egyptians protesters stormed the hall of the Israeli embassy and seized documents, fears arose that Egypt could be penalized for not protecting a diplomatic mission within its borders.

However, Israeli officials said relations with Egypt are strategic even though they stressed that the incident cannot go unnoticed.

Angry protestors are calling upon the government to take a firm stance against the storming of Egyptian borders by the Israeli military and which saw one Egyptian officer and five soldiers dead.

On November 3 of every year, Iran commemorates the storming of the American embassy by a group of students who detained 66 diplomats and military personnel with the blessing of Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime.

The appearance of blindfolded American marines under the mercy of Iranian students infuriated Americans and put pressure on former president Jimmy Carter to resolve the crisis and liberate the hostages through military action, but the plan to do so failed.

The Carter Administration had to engage in negotiations with the regime of Supreme Leader Khomeini despite the latter’s statements in which he cursed “the American devil” and announced that “imperialism and Zionism” are his enemies. At the time, Carter was on the verge of being reelected yet lost to his rival Ronald Reagan.

In July 1980, representatives from Washington and Tehran negotiated in Athens the normalization of Iranian-American relations in details and the support Carter would get in his election campaign if the hostages are released.

In accordance with the articles of the Athens agreement, the United States sent in November 1980 huge amounts of spare parts for F-4 and F-5 warplanes and M-6 tanks to Iran via Turkey. Like the Republicans, the Democrats started to realize the important of wooing this old man in the East even though he ousted their ally.

After Reagan won the presidential elections, an agreement was reached in 1981 in London, based on which Iran released the hostages and the United States kept providing the Iranian army with weapons and spare parts.

A few months ago, Syrians supporting President Bashar al-Assad stormed the embassies of France and the United States, both leading a Western alliance that condemns the president’s violent repression of demonstrations and call for democracy in the country. However, Damascus announced it is committed to protecting diplomatic missions in its territories.

In 1999, American planes bombed by mistake the embassy of China in Belgrade during NATO raids on Yugoslavia. The Chinese rallied in front of the American embassy in Beijing and sang the national anthem and shouted slogans against the United States and “imperialism.” They threw stones on the embassy building and the Chinese authorities did not interfere even though the right to protest is not usually granted to Chinese citizens.

The two superpowers hurried to resolve the crises as China accepted from the United States a 28-million-dollar compensation for destroying the embassy building, but China paid three million dollars for the damage inflicted upon the American embassy during the protests.

In January 2009, hundreds of angry Yemenis stormed the Egyptian consulate in Aden in protest to Egypt’s “reluctance” to react to Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip at the time. They destroyed some of the furniture inside the building, but did not attack any of the diplomats. Then they burnt the Egyptian and Israeli flags and raised the Palestinian flag on the consulate’s roof.

Yemeni officials slammed the attack and the Egyptian Foreign Ministry condemned it because “buildings that enjoy immunity cannot be attacked by the mob” as the ministry’s former spokesman Hossam Zaki put it.

In September 2011, a group of thieves tried to steal the contents of the Egyptian embassy in Addis Ababa, but were stopped by the embassy guards. The Egyptian authorities called upon the Ethiopian police to arrest the culprits.


(First published in al-Masry al-Youm on September 10, 2011 and translated from Arabic by Sonia Farid)