Nine months after three Berkeley graduates were taken into Iranian custody while hiking near an unmarked border in northern Iraq, their mothers have written Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking him to bring their children when he comes to New York next week for a nonproliferation conference.
“Please Mr. President, when you travel to the United States this weekend, invite our children to leave the darkness and despair of their prison cells and join you on your journey,” the mothers of Shane Bauer, 27, Sarah Shourd, 31, and Josh Fattal, 27, wrote in letters in English and Farsi to the Iranian president, saying their children are “mentally distressed, physically ill and so devoid of hope that they are contemplating the extreme measure of a hunger strike.”
“We know that the relationship between our countries is fraught with deep tensions,” the letter continues. “But these political issues have nothing to do with our children and they do not deserve to suffer for policies over which they have no control.”
Their letter comes as Human Rights Watch issued an appeal for the hikers’ release, saying their detention without charge for nine months is in violation of Iranian law.
“The authorities have already held these three Americans without charge for five months longer than Iranian law permits,” Human Rights Watch’s deputy Middle East director Joe Stork said in a press release that accompanied a letter to the head of Iran’s Judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani. “Yet they haven’t offered any reason why their detention should continue even another day.”
The families of the three hikers met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton this week for the second time, as well as with the top State Department Iran official, John Limbert, himself a former hostage in Iran in the wake of the 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran where Limbert was serving as a diplomat. The families also met with White House officials about their case.
Ahmadinejad applied on Wednesday for a visa to attend a conference on the nuclear nonproliferation treaty convening in New York next week. Clinton is also to attend.
Swiss diplomats who met with the detained hikers in Evin prison earlier this month said that Bauer and Shourd have serious medical problems and Shourd is depressed. Bauer and Fattal are being held in one cell together and Shourd is in solitary confinement. The Swiss diplomats also reportedly told the families that the three are considering a hunger strike. Their Iranian lawyer has never been allowed to meet with them, and they have never been charged.
Iranian scholar Mehdi Khalaji, whose father, an ayatollah in Qum, was jailed in Iran earlier this year before being released, urged the families to focus their appeals to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who he described as being in charge of the case.
“The only person who has ordered the arrest of these Americans and who can order their release is Ayatollah Khamenei,” Khalaji said Friday from Paris, adding there have been several cases, including that of Iranian-American think tank scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was released from Tehran’s Evin prison after the head of her think tank, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, wrote a letter to Khamenei.
Khalaji recommended an appeal to Khamenei saying that even if the students violated an Iranian law by accidentally wandering over the border, it was done “unconsciously,” Khalaji said. He also recommended appeals from religious leaders, especially Christian leaders.
Earlier this week, retired South African Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutucalled on Iran to release the hikers.
Clinton and the White House called on Iran again last week to release the hikers and to provide information on retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing after a March 2007 meeting on Kish Island while investigating cigarette smuggling for a private firm. His wife Christine Levinson said that she and her family are hoping Levinson will be released, and can walk their daughter down the aisle at her upcoming wedding.
