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THE PREMISES OF THE DIPLOMATIC MISSION SHALL BE INVIOLABLE  
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Vijay Prashad
April 11, 2024
Tricontinental: The Fifteenth Newsletter (2024)
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_ From Israel’s bombing of Iran’s embassy in Damascus to
Ecuador’s raid on the Mexican embassy in Quito, leaders feel
emboldened by the impunity granted by the Global North to disregard
diplomatic norms and respect. _

, Afshin Pirhashemi (Iran), Untitled, 2017.

 

We live in dishonest times, where certainties have crumbled, and
malevolence stalks the landscape. There is Gaza, of course. Gaza above
all else is on our minds. Over 33,000 Palestinians have been killed
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Israel since 7 October, with more than 7,000 people missing (5,000 of
them children). The Israeli government has brutally disregarded the
global public opinion mounted against them. Billions of people are
outraged by the stark fact of their violence and yet we are unable to
force a ceasefire from an army that has decided to raze an entire
people. Global North governments speak from two sides of their mouths:
clichéd phrases of concern to ameliorate their own disheartened
populations, and then vetoes at the United Nations and arms transfers
to the Israeli army. It is this two-faced behaviour that bolsters the
confidence of people like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
and enables their impunity.

That same impunity allowed Israel to violate the UN Charter (1945)
and Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations
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on 1 April 2024 when it bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria,
killing sixteen people – including senior Iranian military officers.
This impunity is infectious, spreading amongst leaders who feel
emboldened by Washington’s arrogance. Among them is Ecuador’s
President Daniel Noboa, who sent his paramilitary forces into the
Mexican embassy in Quito on 5 April to seize the country’s former
Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by
the Mexican authorities. Noboa’s government, like Netanyahu’s, set
aside the long history of international respect for diplomatic
relations with scant regard for the dangerous implications of this
kind of action. There is a feeling amongst leaders such as Netanyahu
and Noboa that they can get away with anything because they are
protected by the Global North, which anyway gets away with everything.

Lucía Chiriboga (Ecuador), _Untitled_ from the series ‘Del fondo
de la memoria, vengo’ (‘I Come from the Depths of Memory’),
1993.

Diplomatic customs go back thousands of years and across cultures and
continents. Ancient texts written by Zhuang Zhou in China and his
contemporary in India, Kautilya, in the fourth century BCE set the
terms for honourable relationships between states through their
emissaries. These terms appear in almost every region of the world,
with evidence of conflicts resulting in agreements that include the
exchange of envoys to maintain peace. These ideas from the ancient
world, including Roman law, influenced the early European writers of
customary international law: Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Cornelis van
Bijnkershoek (1673–1743), and Emer de Vattel (1714–1767). It was
this global understanding of the necessity of diplomatic courtesy that
formed the idea of diplomatic immunity.

In 1952, the government of Yugoslavia proposed that the International
Law Commission (ILC), set up by the UN, codify diplomatic relations.
To assist the ILC, the UN appointed Emil Sandström, a Swedish lawyer
who had chaired the UN Special Committee on Palestine (1947), as
special rapporteur. The ILC, with Sandström’s assistance, drafted
articles on diplomatic relations, which were studied and amended by
the 81 member states of the UN. At a month-long meeting in Vienna in
1961, all the member states participated in the Convention on
Diplomatic Relations. Amongst the 61 states that became signatories
were Ecuador and Israel, as well as the United States. All three
countries are, therefore, among the founding states of the 1961 Vienna
Convention.

Article 22.1 of the Vienna Convention says: ‘The premises of the
mission shall be inviolable. The agents of the receiving State may not
enter them, except with the consent of the head of the mission’.

Safwan Dahoul (Syria), _Dream 77_, 2014.

At a briefing [[link removed]] in the
UN Security Council about Israel’s recent strike on the Iranian
embassy in Syria, Deputy Ambassador Geng Shuang of China reminded his
colleagues that 25 years ago, the US-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia
resulted in an attack on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. At the time,
US President Bill Clinton apologised
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the attack, calling it an ‘isolated, tragic event’. No such
apology has come from Israel or Ecuador for their violations of the
Iranian and Mexican embassies. Geng Shuang told the chamber, ‘The
red line of international law and the basic norms of international
relations have been breached time and again. And the moral bottom line
of human conscience has also been crushed time and again’. At that
briefing, Ecuador’s Ambassador José De la Gasca condemned the
attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus. ‘Nothing justifies these
types of attacks’, he said. A few days later, his government
violated the 1961 Vienna Convention and the 1954 Organisation of
American States’ Convention on Diplomatic Asylum
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arrested Jorge Glas in the Mexican embassy, an act that was
swiftly condemned
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the UN secretary-general.

Such violations of embassy protections are not new. There are many
examples of radical groups – from the left and the right –
attacking embassies to make a political point. This includes the 1979
takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, when students held 53 staff
hostage for 444 days. But there are also several examples of
governments forcibly entering the premises of foreign embassies, such
as in 1985 when the South African apartheid regime sent its forces to
the Dutch embassy to arrest
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Dutch national who had assisted the African National Congress and in
1989 when the invading US army searched
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residence of the Nicaraguan ambassador in Panama City. None of these
interventions went by without sanction and a demand for an apology.
Neither Israel nor Ecuador, however – both signatories of the 1961
Vienna Convention – have made any gesture towards an apology.
Neither Iran nor Syria had any diplomatic relations with Israel, and
Mexico broke diplomatic ties with Ecuador in the wake of recent
events.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexico), _Mujer Ángel, Desierto de Sonora,
México _(‘Angel Woman, Sonoran Desert, Mexico’), 1979.

Violence traverses the world like a new pandemic not only in Gaza, but
spreading outward to this brewing conflict around Ecuador and the
ugliness of the wars in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo,
Sudan, and the continuing stalemate in Ukraine. War breaks the human
spirit, but it also invokes an enormous instinct to go to the streets
and stop the trigger from being pulled. Again and again, this great
anti-war feeling is met with the wrath of powers that arrest the
peacemakers and treat them – and not the merchants of death – as
the criminals.

Parviz Tanavoli (Iran), _Last Poet of Iran_, 1968.

Iran has a glorious tradition of poetry that goes back to Abu Abdallah
Rudaki (858–941) and then shines in the _Diwan_ of Khwaja Shams
al-Din Muhammad Hafiz Shirazi (1320–1390), who gave us this bitter
thought: _in the world of dust, no human being shines; it is
necessary to build another world, to make a new Adam_.

In this tradition of Farsi poetry comes Garous Abdolmalekian (b.
1980), whose poems are saturated with war and its impact. But, even
amidst the bullets and the tanks sits the powerful desire for peace
and love, as in his ‘Poem for Stillness’ (2020):

He stirs his tea with a gun barrel
He solves the puzzle with a gun barrel
He scratches his thoughts with a gun barrel

And sometimes
he sits facing himself
and pulls bullet-memories
out of his brain

He’s fought in many wars
but is no match for his own despair

These white pills
have left him so colourless
his shadow must stand up
to fetch him water

We ought to accept
that no soldier
has ever returned
from war
alive

_Vijay Prashad is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute
for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter
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editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi)
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_Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international
institute guided by popular movements and organisations. We seek to
build a bridge between academic production and political and social
movements in order to promote critical thinking and stimulate debates
and research with an emancipatory perspective that serves the
people’s aspirations._

* Israel
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* Iran
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* Ecuador
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* Mexico
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* international law
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