With the Islamic Republic formally charging Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari this week with conspiring to undermine the regime in Iran, academics and others are calling for a boycott of the country.
Scholars have added their voices to the protest of Esfandiari’s arrest, including professors Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole and Gary Sick - the last was a National Security Council member under three US presidents. More than 70 academics signed their names to a letter that was sent to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Cole has also canceled plans to attend a conference in Iran this summer because of Esfandiari’s arrest. He has called for other academics to do the same and for international public protests of her detention. “I don’t see how normal intellectual life can go on when a scholar at the Wilson Center can’t safely visit Iran,” Cole wrote on his weblog last week.
Esfandiari, 67, is the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars based in Washington. According to the center, a statement from the Iranian Intelligence Ministry said that Esfandiari, the center and other organizations such as the New York-based Soros Foundation were conspiring to establish a network that would work “against the sovereignty” of Iran. A consultant for Soros was also reportedly detained this month.
Esfandiari holds dual Iranian-US citizenship and has been a strong proponent of US-Iran dialogue in her work at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Esfandiari helped to run a program that brought diverse perspectives on Iran to Washington.
Esfandiari left Iran during the revolution of 1979 and has lived in the US since, but returns frequently to visit the country in which she grew up. She has been in Iran since December when she traveled there to visit her 93-year-old mother. The Woodrow Wilson Center, the US State Department and Esfandiari’s family have said the charges against her are without foundation.
Arrested on May 8 after four months under house arrest, Esfandiari faced interrogations by the Ministry of Intelligence before being transferred to Evin Prison, north of Tehran. The prison is notorious for its political prisoners’ wing and the abuse that has been documented there by organizations such as New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Critics of the government say her arrest is in violation of Iran’s constitution, which protects the rights of individuals to freedom of thought, opinion and speech, as well as violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a signatory.
The Middle East Studies Association of North America sent a letter to Ahmadinejad telling him that her treatment “sends a chilling message to scholars throughout the world”, and calling on the president to allow her access to legal counsel and family members.
On Tuesday, the US House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan resolution demanding that Esfandiari be released.
Esfandiari’s relatives have enlisted Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi to represent her, but so far the Iranian government has denied Ebadi and her legal team access to their client. Ebadi is a well-known human-rights lawyer who has previously been jailed by the Iranian government for her own advocacy work.
The effects of an academic boycott are unclear. “As things stand, an academic boycott will simply strengthen those in both countries who would like to see no exchanges between Iranian institutions and individuals and their counterparts in the United States,” said Farideh Farhi, a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who has lived in Iran and writes frequently on contemporary Iranian issues.
Academics have cited several potential reasons for Esfandiari’s arrest and the charges against her. One is that the Iranian government suspects that academic institutions are behind Washington’s efforts at “regime change”. It has also been suggested that Esfandiari is simply a pawn in the internal politics between the hardline Ahmadinejad and his more moderate political opponent, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Esfandiari is known to be friends with Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faiza Hashemi.
Sick, now an adjunct professor of International Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, has suggested the possibility that Tehran is interested in a prisoner swap with the United States for the five Iranian Revolutionary Guards who were arrested by the US military in Iraq on January 11.
A more popular theory is the inclusion of US$75 million in the State Department’s budget for “democracy promotion” in Iran. When she unveiled the initiative in February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the money would be used to “support the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people” and counter the influence of Tehran’s hardline regime.
According to Farhi, the original allegations leveled at Esfandiari intentionally did not include a reference to the State Department’s program because the Iranian government knows that the Woodrow Wilson Center has not taken any of the $75 million.
“However, the accusations tie her to the broader issue of external attempts to promote civil-society activism as a means to bring about eventual regime change in Iran,” Farhi said.
Since the program was announced, Tehran has cracked down on women’s groups, student activists, labor groups and human-rights advocates. Esfandiari’s arrest two weeks ago came amid a string of arrests of women activists and student leaders.
Next week, Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Iraq, is scheduled to hold talks with Iranian diplomats. But it is unlikely that Esfandiari’s case or the two other Iranian-Americans being held as “soft hostages” will be discussed. The US administration has stated that those talks will be exclusively about Iraq.
