Activists, friends and family across the United States are campaigning for the release of a 28-year-old Cal State Northridge graduate student and member of the group “Campaign for Equality,” who has been imprisoned in Iran after being pulled over for a traffic violation.
Esha Momeni, 28, a mass communications graduate student from Los Angeles, arrived in Iran two months ago to visit her family and conduct research for her thesis.
According to the Free Esha community formed on Facebook, Momeni was arrested on Oct. 15 in an unusual manner after being pulled over on Moddaress highway for an alleged traffic violation by individuals who identified themselves as undercover traffic police. She was taken to Evin prison and has remained there in custody.
“She was working on a master’s thesis project about the Iranian women’s movement. She is a videographer who was simply interviewing Iranian women and has broken no laws (and) has not done anything wrong,” Momeni’s thesis adviser and director of mass communications graduate program, Melissa Wall, said in a blog post.
Following her arrest, authorities entered her parents’ house and removed items such as books, camera footage, and computers, according to for-esha.blogspot.com, a blog dedicated to reflect news on Momeni and statements by her family, friends and professors.
Momeni is a member and volunteer for the One Million Signatures Campaign, a movement that has emerged inside Iran to reform laws and gain equality for women in Iran, Sussan Tahmasebi, a member of the Iranian chapter of the campaign, said in an e-mail.
It is a very public group based on signing a petition addressed to Parliament representatives of Iran, another campaign member, Roja Bandari, said in an e-mail interview.
“Here in Iran, I, you, and our mothers are all brides dressed all in white, and with our peaceful approach we dance in the alleys from house to house so that our promise of equality and unity transforms the sounds of the chains on our feet to the melodies of an anklet,” Esha Momeni wrote in an article in the summer of 2007.
Wall said in her blog that she and Momeni discussed the dangers (of going to Iran), but in the end it was Momeni’s decision to go.
“Dangers obviously exist but it was not something Esha was afraid of because she was not doing anything wrong,” said another volunteer from the California chapter of the campaign who has known Momeni for a year and requests to remain anonymous because of her future plans to visit the country. The volunteer also said that there is a history of arrest of campaign members who were released after a few weeks.
The short film Momeni was making included interviews with other campaign volunteers speaking about their everyday lives in Iran for academic purposes, the volunteer said.
Momeni wanted to clear the perceptions Americans have about Iranian women, Momeni’s mother said in a meeting with one of the Campaign for Equality members that was transcribed and posted on the blog.
She wanted to show her professors and her American friends how powerful Iranian women are.
“Esha was surprised and bewildered by the image of Iranian women that most Americans seemed to have and began to explore stereotypes and barriers to cross-cultural communication. She eventually decided to employ video in her thesis to document the everyday lives of Iranian women in order to combat the stereotype of them as passive and ineffectual,” CSUN’s communication’s department chair, Dr. Kent Kirkton said in a letter posted on Wall’s blog.
Another of Momeni’s communications professors, David Blumenkrantz, also said on his blog that he was surprised by her arrest.
“I am certain she was doing nothing wrong,” he said.
“President Ahmadinejad, who himself speaks of democracy, went to America and said whatever he wanted. Did he suffer any repercussions or did that cost America anything? Everybody says, ‘look this is American democracy, a president goes to a country and has a open platform to say whatever he wants while the media listens.’ My daughter comes to Iran, as a student and a researcher, she speaks to a few activists and they throw her in jail. You can judge for yourself, is this what we call justice? Which part of this is right, which part of it is OK?” Gholam Reza Momeni said in an interview with Radio Farda in Iran that was translated and posted on the Free Esha blog.
Momeni’s lawyer, Mohammad Ali Dadkhah, said no charges have yet been brought but that Revolutionary Court officials told her parents the arrest was related to her involvement in the “Change for Equality” campaign, according to the blog.
“Ms. Momeni is a U.S. citizen. She is a student invested in learning and understanding current conditions in the country of her family’s origin,” said CSUN President Jolene Koester in his statement released on CSUN’s Web site. “We are in support of the efforts of the U.S. government in their efforts to secure Ms. Momeni’s immediate release.”
According to the blog, Momeni was born in Los Angeles in 1980 after her family moved here so her father could pursue a civil engineering degree at Cal State Los Angeles. He later returned to Iran with his family after the revolution of 1979. Esha Momeni earned her bachelor’s degree in graphic design at Azad University in Tehran in 2002. She then moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at CSUN in 2006.
“My understanding is that she’s a dual national,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters in Washington, D.C, according to the Middle East Times. Iran does not recognize dual nationality, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Naturalization Form Services, although Iran recognizes those with dual Iranian-other country citizenships as Iranian citizens.
The department is working on the case through the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which routinely handles American interests since the United States has no direct representation in Iran, Wood said.
Momeni is at risk of torture or other ill-treatments, according to Amnesty International, a worldwide movement of people who campaign for internationally recognized human rights for all.
Evin prison in Tehran, which is managed by the Intelligence Ministry, houses many political prisoners and is notorious for its political prisoner’s wing.
Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist, was tortured and killed in police custody in June of 2003. She was arrested while taking photographs outside Evin prison during a student-led protest and was in police custody for more than three weeks.
“Zahra is not the first woman to be tortured and killed. There are at least 3,000 more names of women who were executed in the last 25 years by this theocratic-despotic state,” said Shahrzad Mojab, lecturer at Concordia University in Montreal, in a letter posted on Kazemi’s official Web site.
