Television Shows Footage of Detained Iranian-Americans

Iranian state-run television showed yesterday the first footage of two Iranian-Americans being held by Teheran on charges of endangering national security, mixing clips of the detainees with images of civil unrest and revolution.

The video was a preview of a program called “Under the Name of Democracy” that state television indicated would be broadcast tomorrow.

Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh were shown separately, both in what appeared to be residential homes and wearing civilian attire.

Clips of the two, speaking in Farsi, were shown intermittently throughout the video.

“I was an element in the velvet revolution in Georgia,” said Esfandiari at one point.

The TV made no reference to the context in which she said this.

Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, was jailed in early May.

The Iranian Intelligence Ministry has accused her of trying to set up networks of Iranians with the ultimate goal of creating a “soft revolution” in Iran to topple the hardline Islamic regime, along the lines of the revolutions that ended communist rule in eastern Europe.

Archive images of street violence and protests in what appeared to be eastern Europe and Iran were mixed in with images of the two detainees.

At another point in the video, she said: “Finding speakers has been my role,” a possible reference to her efforts to bring prominent Iranians to the US to talk about the political situation in Iran.

Tajbakhsh, 45, an urban planning consultant with George Soros’ Open Society Institute, is also being held on security charges. “The role of the Soros foundation might have been targeting the world of Islam,” he said in the video clip, reading from a piece of paper.

The TV images yesterday followed Iran’s announcement earlier in July that fresh evidence had pushed its judiciary to launch new investigations into the cases of both Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh.

Two other Iranian-Americans, Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the US-funded Radio Farda, and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, are facing similar charges.

Family members, colleagues and employers of the four have denied the allegations.

Shakeri is in custody, while Azima is free but barred from the leaving the country.

International human rights groups, including the New York-based Human Rights Watch, have expressed deep concern for the health of the detained Americans – especially Esfandiari, who is 67.

Esfandiari has been trapped in Iran since visiting her 93-year- old mother in December, when three masked men with knives stole her luggage and passport as she headed to the airport to leave, according to the Wilson Center.

Agencies

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