As Americans celebrate the release today of 32-year-old American hiker Sarah Shourd from Iran’s Evin prison, it’s worth noting that Shourd is the exception, not the rule.
Shourd’s fiance and friend will be locked up for two more months, if not longer, and they represent just a few of the scores of innocent travelers, scientists and advocates who still languish in Iran’s prisons, accused of collaborating with the West or otherwise arousing the suspicions of Iran’s hyper vigilant government.
Despite occasionally releasing a prisoner as a gesture of goodwill, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regularly persecutes countless innocents in Iran for having had any Western contact, many of whom are humanitarians and innovators. In doing so, Iran’s regime stymies the advance of social progress in Iran and further hampers diplomacy between Iran and other nations.
In June 2008, Iranian authorities arrested and detained two of the country’s prominent AIDS doctors, the brothers Kamiar and Arash Alaei, without cause or explanation. Ever since the Alaeis have been held in Evin prison, where Shourd and her compatriots spent over a year, without a proper trial.
But the abuses do not end there. During Ahmadinejad’s administration a series of activists, students and journalists have been detained under illegitimate charges, many of whom had little or no political ties. In 2007, two women, Alieh Eghdam-Doust and Ronak Safarzadeh, were jailed for participating in a peaceful campaign for gender equality. Silva Harotonian is an Iranian citizen who was living in America and working for the International Research & Exchanges Board, when she was arrested in 2009 and sentenced to three years in Evin.
Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari was released in August 2007 after being held for more than 100 days in Evin Prison. Like in the Alaei case, the charges against Esfandiari were tinged with xenophobic fears:
“They thought by organizing conferences abroad, or by arranging workshops for [women’s organizations] especially, the United States and other governments wanted to empower these groups and thus create a regime change,” Esfandiari said in an interview with National Public Radio.
It’s a shame that Iran can’t see the clear detriment these imprisonments are to both to its international image and its progress as a nation.
Prior to their arrest, the Alaeis worked for several decades developing Iran’s first programs in harm-reduction, a treatment program for heroin addicts.
When the Alaeis were starting out in the mid-80s, Iran had few initiatives to combat its disastrous heroin epidemic and skyrocketing HIV infection rate, then one of the highest in the world. Over 20 years, the Alaeis launched clinics across Iran while working to integrate sexually-transmitted disease treatment into mainstream Iranian healthcare.
By 2006, Iranian prisons were passing out condoms and syringes, a remarkable feat for a nation where discussing HIV is still taboo. The Alaeis’ clinics eventually spread to 67 cities, and their work made such a profound impact that the WHO applauded Iran as a model of best practice.
The Alaeis sought to spread their insights to doctors globally. They participated in two conferences sponsored by the Aspen Institute in 2006 and 2007, and they arranged exchange programs between American medical students and their Iranian counterparts.
Ahmadinejad praised these exchanges. At a Columbia University talk in 2007, he lauded researchers as “shining torches who shed light in order to remove darkness…around us in guiding humanity out of ignorance and perplexity,” and he personally invited Columbia faculty and students to work with academics in Iran.
But it was these same exchanges that Iranian prosecutors targeted when they sentenced the Alaei doctors to years in prison for “recruiting and training people to work with different espionage networks to launch a velvet overthrow of the Iranian government.” Following a furtive one-day trial, the doctors were charged with, among other things: “communications with an enemy government.”
If the ‘enemy government’ in question is the U.S., then Ahmadinejad himself is guilty of communicating with its leader in November 2008, when he sent a letter congratulating the newly-elected President Barack Obama. In it, Ahmadinejad called for actions “based on justice and respect for the rights of human beings and nations.”
Iran, its academics and its foreign guests would be far better off if Ahmadinejad could walk the walk, too.