Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American academic who has lived and worked in the United States since the 1979 Islamic revolution, has made twice-yearly visits to Iran over the past decade to visit her aging mother. At the end of the last visit, on Dec. 30, she was on her way to the airport when masked gunmen waylaid her taxi and stole her luggage, including her American and Iranian passports. When she went to replace the documents, she was sent to the Intelligence Ministry for the first of several interrogations. On the last one, on Tuesday, she was taken to prison. She was allowed one call to her 93-year-old mother.
Exactly what the Iranian interrogators want of Esfandiari is not known. They may be trying to intimidate scholars; they may fear that she is part of an American scheme to promote a “velvet revolution"; she may be a pawn in the ongoing power struggle in Tehran. Repressive regimes like Iran’s are congenitally suspicious and paranoid, and there are several incidents on record in which Iranians from abroad have been arrested and harassed in Iran. What is known is that Esfandiari is a respected scholar, author of many works on Iran and director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. What is also known is that Evin Prison, where she was taken, is a nasty place. A Canadian-Iranian photographer was beaten to death there in 2003.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is notorious for his rants against the United States, Israel and the West in general. His regime is under severe pressure, at home and abroad, and he likes playing games with Western hostages, as he showed when he demonstratively seized and just as demonstratively released 15 British sailors and marines last month. Such conduct is cruel and contemptible, and serves only to confirm once again the malignancy of Ahmadinejad’s rule.
