IN MY SHOES: Imprisoned In Iran
Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari, 67, was released from an Iranian jail on Tuesday after more than 100 days confinement on suspicion of spying and endangering Iran’s national security. One of four Iranian-Americans arrested by Iranian authorities in separate incidents, it is not known when Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, will be allowed to return to the U.S. She is one of four Iranian-Americans being held in Iran.
About a month ago, Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, a history professor at George Mason University, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about the trumped-up charges against his wife:
First, there is an arrest. Then, to justify the unjustifiable, the authorities come up with outlandish charges and accusations … vague enough to criminalize the most common scholarly activities.
Next … some in the Iranian leadership recognize what the imprisonment and false charges are doing to Iran’s international standing, and attempt damage control. In the last two weeks, smear campaigns against Haleh in newspapers close to the regime have stopped. A judiciary official has claimed that she is in good health - a claim difficult to credit when for the past 50 days she has been interrogated and intimidated and denied family visits, legal representation and the medication and medical attention she needs.
Meanwhile, the security services seem compelled to prove the arrests enabled them to uncover "networks" and expose "subversives." They demand yet more time to complete their "investigations," heedless of the damage they do to the mental and physical health of the detainees and the anguish they cause their families.
Over the years, many Iranian intellectuals, writers and academics have been put on trial for "espionage" or "endangering national security," sentenced to sometimes long prison terms and mistreated in the process.
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