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Iran TV Shows Detained Iranian-Americans
 By NASSER KARIMITEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iranian state-run television broadcast clips on Monday of two Iranian- Americans being held on charges of endangering national security, mixing footage 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 on Wednesday. Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh were shown separately, both in what appeared to be 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 broadcast made no reference to the context of her comments. 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 U.S. 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. Iran has in the past allegedly forced detainees to incriminate themselves publicly on television. British sailors detained by Tehran in March for allegedly entering Iranian territory, for instance, repeatedly appeared in videos during their captivity. Britain accused Iran of using the sailors for propaganda by putting them on TV for appearances in which they "admitted" trespassing in Tehran's waters. The crew was freed after two weeks. The TV images on Monday followed Iran's announcement earlier in July that evidence had pushed its judiciary to launch new investigations into the cases of both Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh. The Wilson Center had said Esfandiari was being held in solitary confinement in Tehran's notorious Evin prison without access to her family, lawyers or international rights organizations. Two other Iranian-Americans, Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda, and Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, face 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. Posted by: anonymous5089 2007-07-16 |
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