Haleh Esfandiari

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Dr. Haleh Esfandiari (Persian: هاله اسفندیاری) (b. March 3, 1940) is an Iranian American academic and the Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. Her areas of expertise include Middle Eastern women's issues, contemporary Iranian intellectual currents and politics, and democratic developments in the Middle East, and she frequently writes, lectures, and organizes symposia on these topics. In 2007 she was detained, in solitary confinement, in Iran's Evin Prison for more than 110 days, between May 8 and August 21.

1 Biography
2 Career
3 Works
4 Awards
5 Detention in Iran
- 5.1 Calls for release
- 5.2 Released on bail
6 References
7 External links
8 See also

[edit] Biography

Esfandiari, who comes from a Shia Muslim family, was born and grew up in Iran. She has lived in the United States since 1980, having left Iran with her husband and daughter at the time of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She holds dual U.S.-Iranian citizenship (she had retained her Iranian passport to facilitate visiting her elderly mother in Tehran).[1]

Esfandiari is married to Shaul Bakhash, a Jewish Iranian American professor of history and Persian studies at George Mason University. She met Bakhash in the early 1960s, when both were reporters at the Iranian newspaper Kayhan. They have a daughter, Haleh Bakhash (b. ca. 1967) and two granddaughters.

[edit] Career

According to her official Wilson Center bio, she was Deputy Secretary General of the Women's Organization of Iran (Sāzmān-i Zanān-i Īrān; سازمان زنان ایران), a royal-patronage society^{[citation needed]} established in 1966 by Ashraf Pahlavi, the twin sister of the Shah of Iran. Esfandiari earned her Ph.D. at the University of Vienna.

In the U.S., Esfandiari has served as a Fellow at the Wilson Center from 1995-1996, and, previously, as an educator in the Near Eastern Studies department of Princeton University from 1980-1994, teaching courses in Persian literature and language. She has also worked as a journalist and has been a frequent lecturer on current Iranian affairs. She has served as director of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center for nearly ten years. She also is an advisor on the RAND Corporation advisory group with the Initiative for the Middle Eastern Youth under the RAND Corporation's Center for Middle East Public Policy.^[1]

Esfandiari was a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy in its first year of fellowship program in 1995.^[2] ^[3]

She is known to have been close to Faiza (Faezeh) Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former MP and a daughter of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, according to The New York Times.^[4]

[edit] Works

She is the author of Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution (1997) and In 2004 she contributed to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Policy Watch Special Forum in an article marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.^[5] In April 2005, she contributed a piece to the Foreign Policy Magazine that is published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace titled "Iranian Woman, Please Stand Up."^[6]

[edit] Awards

Esfandiari is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant.

[edit] Detention in Iran

On December 30, 2006, Esfandiari was robbed at knifepoint by three men while on the way to the airport after visiting her ailing 93-year-old mother in Tehran, Iran, whom she had visited approximately twice per year over the past decade. During this incident, the men threatened to kill her; then they stole her baggage and both her U.S. and Iranian passports. Consequently, she was not permitted to leave the country. When she applied for new travel documents, she was instead barred from leaving Iran and interrogated for up to eight hours per day over a period of several weeks (until February 14) by authorities from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. These interrogations, which totaled approximately fifty hours, took place in the Ministry's offices on Africa Street in Tehran, and at its main building on Khaje Abdollah Ansari Street in Tehran, and focused primarily on her work at the Wilson Center, according to a statement from the Center.^[7] During this time, she was allowed to return home each day. On January 18, 2007, an interrogator and three other men (one holding a video camera) broke into her mother's apartment and entered Esfandiari's bedroom while she was taking an afternoon nap; they then took her laptop computer and other items.[2]

In a statement released on May 10, 2007 by the Wilson Center, Esfandiari "was pressured to make a false confession or to falsely implicate the Wilson Center in activities in which it had no part."^[8] In early May, she was asked again to confess to having taken part in anti-government activities, which she refused to do.

On May 7, 2007, she was told to report to the Ministry of Intelligence. Upon her arrival there on the morning of May 8, she was taken into custody and driven^[9] to Tehran's Evin Prison, becoming the third dual U.S.-Iranian citizen to be detained by the Iranian government under similar circumstances in 2007 (the others being Radio Farda correspondent Parnaz Azima, whose passport was confiscated in January while also visiting her sick mother; and another whose identity has been withheld by the U.S. State Department at the request of her family). Another academic, Ramin Jahanbegloo, was similarly arrested and held for four months in Evin Prison in 2006; the dual U.S.-Iranian citizen Ali Shakeri, of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at the University of California at Irvine, who visited Iran to see his dying mother, has not been heard from since March 8, 2007, and is believed to be held by Iranian authorities;[3] Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American consultant for the Open Society Institute, was detained in Iran circa May 11, 2007; and a former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, has been missing in Iran since he disappeared in March 2007.^[10]

Since her detention, Esfandiari has been allowed to make approximately 15 one- or two-minute telephone calls to her mother (most, but not all evenings), but has not been permitted to have contact with her other family members. On May 15, 2007, Iranian Judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi confirmed that Esfandiari was being investigated as a suspect in "security" crimes, and that these charges were being investigated by the Intelligence Ministry.^[11]

On May 21, 2007, Iran's state TV announced that the government of Iran had charged Esfandiari of seeking to topple that nation's ruling Islamic establishment. The Ministry of Intelligence said that Esfandiari had admitted during interrogation that her institute was funded by the Soros Foundation.^[12]

On May 29, 2007 (one day after the rare high-level meeting between Iranian and U.S. officials), Jamshidi announced that Iran's judiciary had brought charges of "endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners" against Esfandiari, Azima, and Tajbakhsh.[4] Jamshidi denied that Iran had arrested Shakeri.[5]

[edit] Calls for release

Until the announcement of Esfandiari's detention, both Bakhash and the Wilson Center chose not to publicize her case, hoping that, by keeping quiet, her travel documents would eventually be returned and she would be allowed to return to the U.S. In February 2007 the Center's president, the former U.S. Representative Lee Hamilton, sent letters to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, in which he asked for assistance in obtaining Esfandiari's release; Ahmadinejad did not reply, but Zarif "indicated that he wanted to be helpful."

Following reports of her detention on May 9, 2007, both Bakhash and the Wilson Center gave statements to the press regarding the situation. Iran did not immediately confirm that Esfandiari is being detained. The U.S. State Department has called for her release.^[13] On May 11, 2007, U.S. presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and three federal legislators (Senators Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin L. Cardin, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen — all Maryland Democrats) called for Esfandiari's release.^[14] On May 15, 2007, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called for Esfandiari's immediate release.

On May 11, 2007, a campaign demanding the release of Esfandiari with a petition was initiated by the American Islamic Congress [6] and the Middle East Youth Network.^[15] Also in May Scholars for Peace in the Middle East started a petition for her release.[7]

On May 15, 2007, U.S. Senators Gordon H. Smith and Hillary Clinton introduced a resolution (S. RES. 199) calling for Esfandiari's immediate and unconditional release.

On May 17, 2007, Iranian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, who has known Esfandiari for many years, called for Esfandiari's immediate release and announced that she would be acting as one of Esfandiari's attorneys, along with Abdolfatah Soltani.^[16] The prosecutor of the Islamic Revolutionary Court, however, has prevented Esfandiari from access to counsel, refused to provide detailed information regarding the charges against her, and refused on two occasions to allow her mother to visit her in prison (although on one occasion her mother was allowed to deliver a package of clothing and medicine).[8]

On May 19, 2007, it was announced that the Middle East Studies Association of North America had written to Ahmadinejad expressing concern over Iran's detention of Esfandiari and other scholars.^[17] Also on May 19, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky issued a statement deploring Esfandiari's detention and calling it "a gift" to U.S. officials considering a future attack on Iran.^[17] Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan and past president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, stated that he would boycott a conference in Iran which he had planned on attending in summer 2007, and called on other scholars to do the same.^[17]

On May 22, 2007, U.S. Representatives Chris Van Hollen, Tom Lantos, Elijah E. Cummings, Wayne T. Gilchrest, and Gary Ackerman introduced a resolution, H. RES. 430, which called for the Esfandiari's release.

On July 16, 2007, footage of Esfandiari appeared for the first time on a program entitled In the Name of Democracy, aired on the Iranian state television channel IRIB^[18] Esfandiari was shown wearing a scarf and speaking in Persian.

In approximately August 2007, Lee Hamilton sent an appeal on Esfandiari's behalf to Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei, mentioning her extensive efforts to explain Iran's history and culture. Hamilton received a rare, unsigned response from the ayatollah's office stating that he would deal with the issue and that "necessary measures will be taken as soon as possible."^[19]

[edit] Released on bail

On August 21, 2007, Esfandiari was released on a US$333,000 bail, after her mother handed over the deed to her Tehran apartment.^[20]^[21] Her passport was returned and she left Iran and flew to Austria on September 2.^[22]

[edit] References

Middle East Program at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Haleh Esfandiari (html). Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (12/11/2006). Retrieved on 2007-05-09.
"Iran Detains Iranian-American Scholar", All Things Considered, National Public Radio, May 9, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-05-11.