Rooyesh

The Associated Press reports a radio reporter being detained in Iran urged the Bush administration to end its vocal campaign for democracy there, saying it encouraged Iran’s current regime to curtail its citizens’ freedoms. Parnaz Azima, who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, spoke with WTOP radio in a telephone conversation that she said she believed was being monitored, noting that she had been followed and photographed since her detention began.

She is one of four Iranian-Americans arrested while visiting Iran and charged with endangering national security. Her passport was seized on Jan. 25 when she arrived in Tehran to visit her mother. She is free on bail but is barred from leaving the country. Three others remain in custody and the Iranian government has not spoken of their fate. Azima said the Bush administration’s $66 million (€49 million) campaign to promote change inside Iran through Persian-language news, entertainment and music broadcasts has spurred President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government to work to eliminate Iran’s democracy movement. “I hope that Mr. Bush’s administration doesn’t repeat this. This is a very serious mistake,” she said. “The open announcements about funding democracy in Iran have angered the government and now they have one goal — to crush those activities and to put pressure on the Iranian activists, especially those who are inside Iran.” A State Department spokeswoman, Nancy Beck, declined to comment on Azima’s statements, saying she had not heard them. The detentions have sparked widespread criticism, particularly in the U.S. where Bush administration officials are already at loggerheads with Iran over its controversial nuclear program. In a guest column in Wednesday’s edition of The New York Times, the husband of detained scholar Haleh Esfandiari, said Iranian officials have been “angling” for confessions from the four similar to that they claim was proffered by liberal intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo, who has been held since March. “No one, in Iran or elsewhere, believes these coerced statements. They do nothing for the country’s security or its international standing,” wrote Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash. “They only make the regime look inhumane.” Bakhash said Iranian officials, instead of repeating “this sorry charade,” could follow the model they used when they freed the British sailors and marines who were held for nearly two weeks after being seized in what Iran said was their territorial waters in the Persian Gulf. The country suffered no “embarrassing aftermath,” he said. “In the case of my wife and the others, the Iranian authorities can repeat the discreditable mistakes of the past or they can emulate the good sense they eventually displayed with the British,” said Bakhash. “They can free the detainees and bring a quick end to what has become an embarrassing episode for Iran and a cruel experience for those they have so unfairly imprisoned.” Azima is unsure what will happen to her, although she said she was offered conditions for her release: Admit to collaborating with the democracy movement and quit her job with Radio Farda. “Categorically, I said no,” said Azima to the first demand. Her job, she said “is my personal affair and nobody can dictate to me where to go and what to do.” Azima does not know how long it will take to resolve her case. “My lawyer says I have to wait until the court decides what will happen to me. The judge says it could take one or two years.” The fate of the other three Iranian-Americans being held in Iran is also unclear. All remain in custody: Esfandiari, who directs the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with George Soros’ Open Society Institute; and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California, Irvine. An Iranian government spokesman, Alireza Jamshidi, said last week that the government’s investigation of the four was still in its “final phases” and results would be announced in one or two weeks.