Negotiator exposes the challenges of getting unjustly detained civilians to return home

Negotiations to achieve the release of American civilians unjustly detained in different parts of the world are often complex and details about the process are rarely made public.

Mickey Bergman is director of Global Reach (formerly the Richardson Center), a nonprofit organization dedicated to returning home Americans detained by terrorist groups, criminal organizations or foreign governments.

For 17 years, he has managed private diplomacy efforts in North Korea, Myanmar, Cuba, Russia and Venezuela among other countries.

Bergman, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and 2023, remembers in conversation with VOA that in Venezuela there were “more than a dozen” Americans detained, including the six former Citgo executives, and that their release involved a negotiation process. “We basically cleaned house, all the Americans came back,” he stressed.

“We cannot build deterrence on the backs of innocent Americans who are detained, because then we will make them hostages to our own policies,” he said, when asked if there is any correlation between the release of hostages and the fact that captors are encouraged to opt out. for this tactic in the future.

In 2022, the United States government, in exchange for seven Americansincluding five former executives of the Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) subsidiary, Citgo, who were detained in Venezuela since 2017, released the two nephews of President Nicolás Maduro’s wife who were accused and detained for drug trafficking crimes.

At the end of last year, through a negotiation process, the Joe Biden Administration freed Alex Saab, a close ally of Maduro who was being prosecuted in that country for money laundering, in exchange for a group of Americans imprisoned in Venezuela. The process was part of direct negotiations between Venezuela and the US, with Qatar as facilitator.

“There was a bilateral agreement between the two countries, a procedure on how to prevent cases like that from happening again. That is a positive deterrence policy. Now, that’s not going to stop him. Crises will happen, but that mitigates the risk,” Bergman said.

A different diplomacy

Bergman coined the term “peripheral diplomacy,” which does not involve state actors, to describe an innovative discipline that explores space beyond borders, as well as the capacity and authority of states and governments in international affairs.

“When the United States government engages with a government like Russia or Venezuela or indirectly with Iran, as soon as the Americans and the Russians enter a room to discuss, even if they plan to discuss a prisoner issue, immediately the Ukraine issue comes into play.” in Game. Nuclear stability is a world order and they cannot separate the issue from its prisoners, so they cannot find what the solution would be like,” she explains.

“When we come in, we only have one mandate to do that. “They can talk to us about policy, but we have no authority on policy, from what we can hear, it won’t affect anything, but we can focus completely on the humanitarian and prisoner issue, which allows us to define what the path is to solve it.” , keep going.

Regarding the approach to achieving liberations in countries such as Venezuela, Myanmar, Russia or North Korea, Bergman admits that “these agreements are never pretty,” because they basically exchange an innocent person for a guilty person.

“It doesn’t seem fair, but sometimes it’s the only way to bring an American back home,” he maintains.

He highlights that when the captors ask for something in return, whether the detainee is guilty or innocent, they simply turn them into political prisoners.

On how deals are costed, Bergman says not only does it need to be discovered when there is an overlap between the parties, but it also needs to happen at the same time.

“That can be a really frustrating game,” confesses the Georgetown University professor.

Global Reach currently deals with cases in countries like Russia and Iraq and only takes them on if a family requests it. Bergman maintains that there is currently a possibility of returning home some 30 Israeli hostages.

“I think the terms are already set, so every day that passes without it being implemented is a day in which they suffer, and some of them will not survive,” he notes.

The hardness of work

For Bergman, one of the most devastating and mentally difficult cases was that of Otto Warmbier, an American university student who visited North Korea as a tourist and who was arrested and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor after being accused of stealing a propaganda poster in a hotel in Pyonyang.

After a year and a half in prison, where according to North Korean authorities he suffered a medical crisis that left him in a coma, he was released and transferred to the United States, but he died seven days later. Neither he nor his counterpart in North Korea knew this.

“I went to Ohio to meet them (Warmbier’s parents) when he came back and he was still alive. She was in the room with them and all I could do was cry and say ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She gave me a hug, and said, ‘Look, it’s because of your efforts that I was able to hug my son while he was still warm.’

The negotiator highlights, when asked whether peripheral diplomats are considered a solution or a problem, that when they take a case neither the captors nor the US government want them to get involved. On the one hand, because they want something from the US and on the other because you are going to “spoil” their strategy.

“But I don’t represent any of them. I represent the family. We had a few incidents where we came up with the deal, we had everything ready. And they only took it three days before without telling us. But at the end of the day, they brought people home. So, if our egos were hurt by that, we can live with it,” she expounds.

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