Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar and director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, was released Tuesday on bail from an Iranian prison where she had been held since May.
It was not immediately known whether she would be permitted to leave the country, or would be forced to stand trial on espionage charges. The Iranian government has accused her of trying to further a “soft” revolution to overthrow the hard-line Islamic regime. Ms. Esfandiari’s supporters have rejected that allegation as spurious and have described her as, in fact, working toward Iranian-American rapprochement through the center’s programs.
Mervat F. Hatem, a professor of political science at Howard University and the president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association, said that Ms. Esfandiari’s case had already had a chilling effect on scholarship, with academics cancelling planned research trips to Iran. “This obviously becomes a disincentive to do the kind of work that is necessary to present a more balanced view of the region,” she said.
Ms. Esfandiari, a 67-year-old dual American and Iranian national, had traveled to Iran in December to visit her 93-year-old mother, as she customarily does twice a year. As she was going to the airport on December 30 to begin her return home, “the taxi in which Dr. Esfandiari was riding was stopped by three masked, knife-wielding men,” according to a chronology provided by the Wilson center. “They threatened to kill her, and they took away all of her belongings, including her Iranian and American passports.”
When she applied for a new passport, the center’s statement says, she was summoned for the first of a series of interrogations by officials from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence, with those sessions “sometimes stretching across seven and eight hours in a single day.”
Ms. Esfandiari’s interrogations “focused almost entirely on the activities and programs of the Middle East program at the Wilson center,” the statement says, and she “was pressured to make a false confession or to falsely implicate the Wilson center in activities in which it had no part.” The center is a nonpartisan research institution that receives about one-third of its budget from the U.S. government and the rest from private sources.
On May 8, Ms. Esfandiari was arrested and taken to Tehran’s Evin Prison, a notorious detention center for political prisoners, where she was held without access to lawyers or family members. An Iranian lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi, took on Ms. Esfandiari’s case. She was never permitted to meet with her client, though, said Ms. Esfandiari’s husband, Shaul Bakhash, who is a professor of history at George Mason University. “She was in contact with family in Tehran, and was able to bring Haleh’s case to the attention of media in Iran and abroad,” he said of Ms. Ebadi’s role.
Other Arrests of Scholars
Ms. Esfandiari is one of three Iranian-American scholars who have been arrested in Iran this year as relations have worsened between Washington and Tehran. Kian Tajbakhsh, who works as a consultant for the Open Society Institute, a nonprofit agency founded by the philanthropist George Soros, was also detained in May. Last month he and Ms. Esfandiari were featured on Iranian state television, providing what the government called “confessions” of their roles in attempting to turn Iran into a Western-style democracy.
“They were let out of prison only to be forced to appear on Iranian television, where they read coerced statements,” said Amy Weil, a spokeswoman for the Open Society Institute, describing the footage, which showed the two academics in a purportedly domestic setting. “Frankly the attempt by the Iranian government to justify their detention has only brought their innocence into much more stark relief.”
This month the Iranian government said that it had completed its investigation into the two academics, and on Tuesday Ms. Esfandiari’s mother received a telephone call asking her to prepare to post bail for her daughter, said Mr. Bakhash. He received word of the developments through a phone call at 5:30 a.m. Tuesday from his wife’s sister in Vienna, who had been informed of the news by their mother. Ms. Esfandiari’s mother put up her apartment as collateral for the bail, which news reports said amounted to some $330,000, and was reunited with her daughter by early evening, Tehran time.
Soon thereafter, Mr. Bakhash spoke to his wife for the first time since May. “She sounded delighted that she was finally out of Evin Prison and is obviously looking forward to coming home,” he said. Ms. Esfandiari told him that she had been well treated but had lost weight and had been unwell in prison. Her passport had not been returned to her, so her ordeal was not yet behind her. “The end will come when she’s able to leave the country,” Mr. Bakhash said. “We really hope they will allow her to join us soon. We still have some concern as long as she’s kept in Iran.”
Mr. Tajbakhsh remains in Evin Prison. In a statement the Open Society Institute welcomed Ms. Esfandiari’s release and said it was “eagerly” expecting news that he too would be set free.
There was also no word on the possible release of the other Iranian-American scholar, Ali Shakeri, a peace activist and founding board member of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine. Parnaz Azima, an Iranian-American journalist with the U.S.-backed Radio Farda, was also arrested in Iran this year but is free on bail.
