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To prevent Julian Assange from fleeing, police officers kept watch outside the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Friday.
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: August 18, 2012
LONDON — Over the decades, London has known other diplomatic sieges that ended dramatically.
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There was the one at the Iranian Embassy in 1980, when special forces killed five gunmen who had thrown a dead hostage into the street. That was followed by a standoff at the Libyan Embassy in 1984, when a member of the embassy’s staff fired on protesters from an upper floor, killing a policewoman from Scotland Yard.
And now, there is one at the Ecuadorean Embassy, a sanctuary for the past nine weeks for the fugitive WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, and, since Thursday, his place of asylum, as granted by Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa. Unlike those earlier sieges, this one, many believe, could last months, even years.
Mr. Correa presented his move as a pre-emptive strike against American plans to ensnare the Australian-born Mr. Assange and transport him for trial in the United States on espionage charges for his role in publishing tens of thousands of secret American military and diplomatic documents over the past two years. If American officials have made such preparations, they have studiously avoided disclosing them.
For Britain, the standoff is the culmination of a protracted drama that has embroiled Mr. Assange in an extradition case involving allegations of sexual abuse by two Swedish women — allegations Mr. Assange has strenuously denied — and a British Supreme Court ruling ordering that Mr. Assange be placed on a plane to Stockholm to face questioning in the affair.
The catch for Mr. Assange is that Ecuador’s granting of asylum appears to have left him no closer to any long-term relief from his legal problems, as he remains confined to the Ecuadorean Embassy’s second-story suite of rooms in a central London apartment block. Sanctuary in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, is 5,700 miles away, as reachable for Mr. Assange, in practical terms, as Mars.
Outside the apartment block, covering all possible escape routes front and back, and at strategic points inside, including the lobby, staircase and elevator access areas, a squad of about 50 Scotland Yard police officers stand ready to arrest Mr. Assange if he ventures out of the embassy and its cocoon of diplomatic immunity. More police officers wait in two vans nearby, along with a large armored transporter of the kind used to carry prisoners.
British newspapers, quoting Scotland Yard, say the watch is costing $80,000 a day, at a time when the London police force is under orders to cut 20 percent of its budget as part of the government’s austerity drive. Officials say those expenses are only part of the overall bill incurred in the Assange case, which has included 18 months of court hearings and has cost British taxpayers millions.
As much as a legal battle, it has become a soap opera, with Mr. Assange variously cast as the hero or villain, depending on political predilections.
At the embassy, television cameras stand arrayed behind crowd-control fencing, with satellite trucks alongside. Protesters from the Assange camp occupy the doorsteps of some of the most expensive homes in the upscale Knightsbridge district, smoking cigarettes and discussing the finer points of diplomatic law.
Not all opinion is running in favor of the WikiLeaks founder. Sweden has held to its demand that Mr. Assange be extradited to face his accusers there, and the lawyer for the two women involved, Claes Borgstrom, calling Mr. Assange “a coward,” has said he and his supporters appear to have only contempt for the rights of his accusers.
The distancing has spread to the wealthy supporters who put up the bail of $375,000 that was forfeited when Mr. Assange fled to the embassy. One of those, the rights activist and socialite Jemima Khan, who pledged $31,500, said after Ecuador granted him asylum that she had changed her mind and believed that Mr. Assange should go to Sweden after all to answer the allegations.
The Guardian, the left-leaning newspaper that championed Mr. Assange when it was one of his news media “partners” in publishing the American documents but later had an acrimonious falling out with him, ran an editorial strongly critical of Ecuador on Friday.
“Ecuador has found a way to tweak the tail of the imperialist lion, but the law is not on Ecuador’s side,” The Guardian said. Mr. Assange, it said, was wanted in Sweden “for the specific and proper purpose of answering two allegations of sexual assault, which is in anyone’s language a serious nonpolitical crime.”
For now, Ecuador and Britain have said they favor negotiations, but it is hard to see where the room for compromise lies. Britain has abandoned earlier threats to storm the embassy, and Mr. Assange appears to be planning on running WikiLeaks from his diplomatic aerie, including plans for a personal update via a Skype broadcast on Sunday.
British newspapers and broadcasters have competed in speculations as to how the siege will end. Some have ventured to the wilder shores of possibility, including having Mr. Assange flying off the apartment block’s roof with a jetpack, dressing as a woman to sneak past the police or climbing into a diplomatic bag.
The last of these has a vexed history in Britain, dating to the failed bid by Nigerian diplomats in 1984 to smuggle one of their countrymen back to Nigeria, drugged and bound in a packing case that was intercepted at the last moment at Stansted Airport outside London.
According to The Daily Mail, it is a caper Scotland Yard has already factored in. The newspaper reported Friday that police officers outside the Ecuadorean Embassy have orders to use a heat probe on all large boxes leaving the mission. The paper quoted an unnamed “security source” as saying, “You could prod it, and if it says ‘Ouch’ in an Australian accent, you can stop it going further.”
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Very informative piece, thanks.
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