Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar, has been kept in solitary confinement in Iran's Evin prison without access to her family or lawyers since early May. Esfandiari, who heads the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, was arrested while on a visit to Iran to see her 93-year-old mother. The Intelligence Ministry accused her of trying to set up networks of Iranians with the aim of promoting democracy and toppling the country's clerical regime.
Esfandiari and three other Iranian-Americans who are being held in Iran on charges of subversion are only the tip of the iceberg. In recent months, Iran's hardliners have launched a wave of repression against reformers, intellectuals and ordinary Iranians that has been largely unreported outside the country.
The Iranian news media have been one of the government's prime targets. Police have harassed and arrested journalists, and the National Security Council has handed newspapers a list of topics they cannot mention. The three-page list includes UN sanctions against Iran, and arrests of women by the Morality Police for wearing “un-Islamic†clothing.
The latter topic is particularly notorious. A well-connected French journalist who used to report from Iran but now files her reports from outside the country, says police have questioned close to 150,000 women in the past few weeks, mostly for wearing headscarves in a fashion that reveals some of their hair. In the capital, Tehran, the number of officers responsible for enforcing the dress code has been doubled.
In addition, the public stoning last week of a man accused of adultery shows that the government is once again imposing archaic Islamic punishments that it promised to abandon five years ago. There are also reports that dozens of feminists have been detained for questioning. Some have been charged with crimes. One of them, Deleram Ali, was sentenced to be whipped and imprisoned for 34 months. Her so-called crime was to conduct a campaign of equal rights for women in a country where a female is legally worth half a male in court proceedings and inheritance cases.
Why the sharp crackdown? After all, Iran's populist president Mahmud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005 promising a better life for the country's 71 million citizens. He even proposed allowing women to attend soccer games (although that was too much for the country's mullahs, who ruled it out).
Some observers see the wave of repression as a reaction by the government to the international pressure on Iran to stop its uranium enrichment program. With the United Nations Security Council members threatening more sanctions, and the United States beefing up its fleet of warships in the Persian Gulf, the hardliners are feeling the heat and cracking down on dissent at home to strengthen their hold on power. If so, the hardliners are making a big mistake.
Men are also subject to scrutiny
By all accounts, most Iranians are fed up with clerical strictures on everyday life, arbitrary restrictions on freedom of expression, and above all, with the government's gross mismanagement of the economy. By tightening the screws, the hardliners are only making themselves more unpopular. A recent telephone poll by an American think tank showed that four out of five people in Iran would prefer a truly democratic system in which all of their leaders were elected by a direct popular vote. Iranians are finally getting the message that their system of rule by clerics isn't working.
It is worth noting that most experienced foreign observers, and probably the Bush administration, realize that one way to prop up this increasingly unloved Islamic regime would be to attack it. Iranians, especially the two-thirds who are under 30, feel the pull of Western culture. But they are first of all Iranians, and if their country were attacked by the United States, they would rally round their government.
One alternative to attacking Iran is to talk with it. That is the approach the United States and Iran are now reluctantly trying. American and Iranian diplomats held a second round of meetings today in Baghdad. Like the first meeting in May, it was limited to the future of Iraq. But if the two governments can start agreeing on how to stabilize Iraq, that could open the door to broader discussions of the issues that have made them arch enemies since Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979.
