Rooyesh

Seeing the sliver of a new moon from her cell became the marker of Haleh Esfandiari’s solitary confinement, thousands of miles from home and facing an uncertain future. “I was sitting in my cell and through the bars I saw it and I said, ‘Oh, my God, there is the moon,’ ” said the Washington scholar, who was allowed to leave Iran

 early yesterday after being detained there for eight months by authorities who said she was a national security threat. “A month later I saw the moon again, and then I saw it a third time. It was quite tough. I was lonely and anxious.” In her first interview since leaving Iran, Esfandiari described her time in one of the Middle East’s most notorious prisons and how she coped with her confinement. Esfandiari, director of Middle East programs at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, flew from Iran to Vienna, where she met her husband, Shaul Bakhash, and her sister. She said she would rest in Europe before returning soon to her home in Potomac. Esfandiari, 67, said that she survived solitary confinement by sticking to a strict 10-hour exercise regimen to keep from thinking about the implications of the charges against her. Iranian officials said that she was engaged in “crimes against national security” and plotting a “velvet revolution” — a reference to the nonviolent upheavals that ousted communism in Eastern Europe — against the world’s only modern theocracy. The legal status of Esfandiari, a dual citizen of the United States and Iran, remains unclear.

The longtime U.S. resident went to Iran last December to visit her ailing 93-year-old mother. She was robbed at knifepoint of her Iranian and U.S. passports on her way to the airport to return home, in what some U.S. officials think was an officially sanctioned crime. When she applied for a new passport, she was instead summoned for intense interrogations by the intelligence ministry that lasted for months and she was barred from leaving the country. On May 8, she was formally detained and taken to Evin Prison. “Once they arrested me and I got over the shock, I decided either I survive or break down. To sit and think all the time was going to kill me, so I developed a schedule,” she said in the telephone interview from Austria. During her 105-day incarceration, Esfandiari worked out daily for an hour before breakfast on the floor of her cell. When she was not under interrogation, she did various exercises between 9:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. and again for an hour in the evening before going to sleep. Occasionally she was allowed to walk in a small prison courtyard, although always alone.

She never saw anyone but her interrogators and female guards. Between stress and exercise, she lost about 20 pounds, she said, and now weighs only 88 pounds. Esfandiari said she kept her mind busy by writing — in her head, not on paper — a biography of her grandmother. Isolated in a sector reserved for political prisoners, she slept on a mattress she fashioned from six blankets and used two chadors, the enveloping black cloth that Muslim women use to cover themselves, as sheets. She eventually requested a desk and chair like those used in schools so she did not have to sit on the floor. Iran has not provided any information about the fate of four other Americans imprisoned, detained or missing there. Esfandiari said she was unaware of the plight of the Americans except for Kian Tajbakhsh, a New York-based social scientist picked up three days after her arrest. Families of prisoners in Iran can provide money for personal items once a week, which Esfandiari used to buy fruit and vegetables. She sent fruit to Tajbakhsh, and, through prison guards, he sent her books that she read at night.

State-controlled Iranian television ran two documentaries this summer that tried to link Esfandiari with the Bush administration’s new $75 million project to promote democracy in Iran, and she said Iranian interrogators focused heavily on the Wilson Center’s programs. Esfandiari and the center have long denied receiving any U.S. funding for the lecture series she runs. “I didn’t know about the money,” she said. “I said I didn’t approve of [allocating] money to overthrow the regime and that I’m against doing things to interfere with other countries. I told them I thought the two governments should talk to each other.” Esfandiari was released from prison on Aug. 21. The release followed a personal letter from Wilson Center President Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman and co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group, to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iraq Study Group had recommended that the United States reach out to Iran in an effort to stabilize Iraq. In an unusual move, Khamenei replied and pledged to resolve Esfandiari’s case. Esfandiari said she sensed that the government never intended to try her. “My gut feeling was that there would be a solution,” she said. Hamilton’s intervention, she said, played a pivotal role. “Had it not been for Lee, this thing might have lasted longer,” she said.

But Esfandiari’s bail, which was the deed to her mother’s home, is still in government hands. Among the other Americans, Tajbakhsh and California businessman Ali Shakeri are still in solitary confinement at Evin, according to family members. Both were picked up in the same three-day period that Esfandiari was arrested. Parnaz Azima, a correspondent for U.S.-funded Radio Farda, is out on bail also guaranteed by the deed to her mother’s home. She, too, was visiting her ailing mother when her passport was confiscated and she was ordered not to leave Iran. All are dual nationals who have spent decades in the United States. Former FBI agent Robert A. Levinson has been missing since he took a business trip to Iran’s Kish Island, where visas are not required, in March. Unlike in the other cases, the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies having any knowledge of Levinson’s whereabouts.

Source: Washington Post

US-Iranian scholar Kian Tajbakhsh is to be released on bail after spending over three months in jail in Tehran on security-related charges, a top judiciary official said on Tuesday.

“Investigations are ongoing into his (Tajbakhsh’s) case and after this is completed, his detention writ will change to bail,” Tehran’s deputy chief prosecutor in charge of security crimes, Hassan Hadad, told state broadcasting.

Hadad did not give any information over when the bail order could be given. His comments were the first official confirmation that Tajbakhsh would be also bailed.

Urban planner Tajbakhsh has also been held in Evin since May for alleged links to a US drive to topple the Islamic regime. The academic had worked for with the Open Society Institute of the US billionaire George Soros.

Hadad confirmed that Esfandiari’s case had not been closed despite her departure from Iran to Austria, where she will spend time with her family before returning to the United States.

“Esfandiari’s case is near completion and by next week an indictment will be issued and it (the case) will be sent to court,” he said.

Esfandiari, 67, heads the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Both Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh had been accused by the authorities of using their academic contacts to promote an alleged US government drive to topple Iran’s Islamic authorities with a “soft revolution.”

The arrests increased tensions between Tehran and Washington at a time of growing concerns about the Iranian nuclear programme, which the United States claims is aimed at making an atomic weapon.

Meanwhile, it emerged that a US-Iranian journalist who has been stuck in Iran for the last seven months after her passport was confiscated had finally been given permission to leave the country.

Parnaz Azima, who works for Radio Free Europe’s US-funded Persian language arm Radio Farda, was charged with working for a “counter-revolutionary” media but was not jailed after paying a bail of around 550,000 dollars.

“Parnaz Azima collected her passport from authorities today and told Radio Farda that she would leave the country in the near future,” the Prague-based radio said in a statement.

There is still no news about a fourth US-Iranian, Ali Shakeri, a California-based businessman and board member of a private conflict resolution group, who is also believed to have been detained since May but on different charges.

Source: AFP

Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani was picked Tuesday to head a key clerical body empowered with choosing or dismissing the country’s supreme leader, state media reported, in a vote seen as a setback for hard-liners in Iran’s ruling establishment.

Rafsanjani, long a major player in Iran’s complex political scene who already heads a powerful government body called the Expediency Council, received 41 votes to become the chairman of the Assembly of Experts.

The assembly is a group of 86 senior clerics charged with monitoring Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and choosing his successor. The Expediency Council arbitrates between legislators and another influential body called the Guardian Council, a hard-line constitutional watchdog.

The 73-year-old former president is considered more moderate than current hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rafsanjani defeated Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, an extremist within the hard-line camp who received 34 votes for the Assembly of Experts leadership, state-run television reported.

While Jannati is among the proponents of the theory that the legitimacy of Iran’s clerics to rule the country is derived from God, Rafsanjani is believed to side with pro-democracy reformers who believe the government’s authority is derived from popular elections.

Analysts said Tuesday’s vote showed that moderate conservatives were gaining ground in Iran, where there is growing discontent directed at ruling hard-liners over rising tensions with the West and a worsening economy.

“Rafsanjani’s election is yet another no to the fossilized extremists such as Jannati and Mesbah Yazdi,” said political analyst Hamid Reza Shokouhi, referring to Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, who is Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor.

Analysts also said Rafsanjani’s election could pose a challenge to Khamenei, who as supreme leader has final say on matters of state.

When he was first chosen as supreme leader, Khamenei found himself in the shadow of then-President Rafsanjani. But Khamenei has since increased his power, and in recent years, Khamenei has allowed hard-liners to undermine Rafsanjani’s influence, part of his efforts to bring the former president under his control.

Analyst Saeed Leilaz noted that Rafsanjani has spoken lately of greater Assembly supervision over Khamenei. “The outside world must know that Rafsanjani’s election today is an important development in Iran,” he said.

Rafsanjani has long been an elusive inside player in Iran’s clerical leadership.

He has supported a policy of improving relations with the West including the United States. Though he backs the line rejecting a suspension of Iran’s uranium enrichment program, he has shown a willingness to compromise in backroom negotiations on the nuclear program.

On Tuesday, Rafsanjani said that perhaps the Assembly would be a more active player on the national scene, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

“If the Experts Assembly wants to play a more active role in the country’s affairs, it has the religious and legal justification to do that. … Perhaps the assembly will do so in its upcoming term,” IRNA quoted Rafsanjani as saying just before the vote.

Rafsanjani succeeds Ayatollah Ali Meshkini, the former Assembly of Experts head who died in July after a long illness. Rafsanjani, who served as president from 1989-1997, is also considered an opponent to Ahmadinejad and lost to him the 2005 presidential runoff.

The Assembly of Experts is seen as a pillar of Iran’s Islamic regime because of its lofty duties: monitoring the all-powerful supreme leader and picking a successor after his death. But the assembly has not published a single public report about its monitoring of Iran’s supreme leader in the past three decades.

Rafsanjani, who himself has achieved the high Shiite clerical rank of ayatollah, had hinted in the past that the assembly has to publish reports to respect the public and inform the nation of its activities.

The body’s real clout only kicks in after the supreme leader is gone — a sort of Iranian version of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals when they gather to pick a new pope.

The assembly has done that only once since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In 1989, it picked Khamenei to succeed his late mentor, the Islamic Revolution patriarch Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Source: Associated Press