Having some knowledge and experience of Iran, this reporter was never wholly convinced of the “Axis of Evil” status that was applied to the country by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2002. It was a time when American judgments were shaped and, perhaps, somewhat warped by the hideous experience of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
This reporter’s memories of Iran did not wholly bear out Bush’s condemnation. Having been there just after the fall of the Shah and the arrival of the rule of the ayatollahs, there were certainly some grim sights to witness.
There were the public whippings of those who were caught daring to drink alcohol. There was the extraordinarily expensive river of booze - wine and cognac and aged scotch - that flowed down the gutters from the InterContinental Hotel after the Revolutionary Guards had gone into the wine cellars and tossed hand grenades to destroy the devil’s fluid. There was the stench of charred had vegetation after they sent flame-throwing tanks into the ancient vineyards of Shiraz, where wine had been made for 6,000 years.
All this was deeply depressing. But there were also Iranians, cultured and profoundly civilized, still bearing the scars from the torture chambers of the Shah’s SAVAK secret police, who said that such manifestations were a kind of understandable exuberance, an excess of liberation. And they assured their Western friends that anyone who had suffered torture and imprisonment would never inflict such horrors on the innocent.
It sounded very plausible. But over the years, these civilized friends died, or were killed, or were imprisoned, or went into bitter and disillusioned exile. Some hated what the ayatollahs had done to Iran, and to the ancient civilization of Persia that underpinned it. But some maintained a level of understanding and sympathy and scholarly detachment.
One such is my friend and colleague, Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars who now languishes in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. As a senior scholar of that same institution, I can write with some knowledge and authority of Haleh.
She is a small and birdlike woman of great charm and profound integrity, with a deep commitment to scholarship. I have appeared with her on platforms and in seminars, and we have questioned one another in lectures and during collegial lunches. Last summer, we were together on a weeklong cruise to Alaska organized by the Wilson Quarterly, for which we both write.
Haleh spoke about modern Iran in a way that intrigued and opened the eyes of many of those with us. With whales sounding to one side of the vessel, and glaciers rising on the other, she would explain the long millennia of Persian history, the roots and flowering of its culture, and the constant threat of destruction that had begun with the ancient Greeks, continued with the depredations of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, and culminated in the humiliation of being just another sphere of influence in the British Empire.
With such memories, Haleh noted, a certain defensive nationalism, a prickly pride, a bitter memory of the way that British and American Intelligence had conspired to incite a coup to overthrow the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, was to be expected. Mossadegh’s offense was to have nationalized the British-owned oil industry.
She spoke with pride and passion of the way that more women were at universities in Iran than men, and she shattered the easy assumptions of Americans that wearing the black robe of the chador was necessarily a symbol of female subservience. She spoke of Xerxes and Alexander the Great to explain that European and Persian civilizations had grown up as neighbors, even as twins.
My younger daughter, who had just graduated from a British university, and who had accompanied me on the cruise was fascinated by Haleh - by her sincerity as much as by her erudition, and by Haleh’s gentle explanation that great civilizations - Britain’s slave trade, Russia’s gulags, Germany’s death camps, France’s Dreyfus case - sometimes took terribly wrong turns, but that the deepest roots of civilization would eventually reassert themselves.
Haleh had been visiting her mother for Christmas on her most recent trip to Iran, when, heading back to the airport December 30, she was attacked by masked men, who, at knife-point, stole her belongings and her American and Iranian passports. She applied for another passport in order to leave the country and was summoned to the intelligence ministry where she underwent 50 hours of interrogation. She is now in Evin prison, a place known for the disappearances and executions that have been the fate of so many of its inmates.
The Wilson Center had, understandably, and, at the request of her husband, kept a discreet silence while there was hope she would be allowed to leave. But Haleh’s recent imprisonment leaves no more room for silence.
Ironically, the director of the Wilson Center is former congressman Lee Hamilton, an ex-chairman of the House International Relations Committee and the co-author of last year’s Baker-Hamilton report that proposed that the way to help extricate the United States from its difficulties in Iraq would be to open a dialogue with Iraq’s neighbors, like Iran. This reporter has no doubt that Hamilton’s views on the need to open a dialogue with Tehran were strongly shaped by our mutual colleague, Haleh.
Her continued detention is an outrage against scholarship, an outrage against human decency, and an affront to the great tradition of Persian civilization that Haleh so proudly and profoundly represents.
Like all my colleagues at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, I hope to see this splendid woman again, very soon.
Martin Walker is United Press International’s (UPI) Editor Emeritus.
