[Ed. Note: Esfandiari story is second item below.]
The frosty relationship between the United States and Iran has created a chill in many areas of scholarly endeavor. One resulting battle, over whether Iranian scholars can belong to the American Chemical Society, has been largely resolved. But a new imbroglio looms with the arrest of a prominent U.S.-Iranian scholar who was visiting Tehran.
The American Chemical Society announced this month that it had reversed a decision to expel its members in Iran and will allow all 36 of them to rejoin. The society had said that having such members put it in violation of U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. The Iranian members will, however, be denied two benefits: the group’s career-development services, and reduced-price admission to the society’s twice-yearly national meetings.
The society had effectively expelled 22 of the Iranians when it did not send them membership-renewal notices this spring. The other 14 Iranians, whose memberships were not up for renewal, had received notices of expulsion. Madeleine Jacobs, the group’s executive director, said that an anonymous donor was paying the $136 annual membership fee and the $58 annual postage fee for the society’s magazine for the latter group this year as a gesture to make up for any “personal distress and hardship” that those scientists endured.
The society’s one member in Sudan — another country under U.S. trade sanctions — had also been removed and was being invited back with the same restrictions. The society, which has 160,000 members and calls itself the world’s biggest scientific association, would not disclose whether its members in Iran and Sudan work for academic institutions, government agencies, or industry.
The initial decision to remove the Iranians drew protests from academics, especially from Iranians living in the United States. The controversy harked back to a 2003 disturbance in which the Treasury Department said it was illegal for American research journals to edit papers from scientists in countries under U.S. trade sanctions. That policy was later rescinded.
Ms. Jacobs said the original decision to remove the Iranians and the one Sudanese had been made by midlevel staff members without her knowledge or that of the society’s board. She said no employee would be penalized for the action.
Although the expulsions were carried out in January, Ms. Jacobs said she and the society’s other senior officials learned of the move from an article in the journal Science only in late March.
Arrest in Tehran
Meanwhile, Haleh Esfandiari, a prominent Iranian-American academic, was imprisoned in Tehran this month. She is director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a nonpartisan research institution that receives about one-third of its budget from the U.S. government and the rest from private sources. News of her arrest was first reported in The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Ms. Esfandiari, a dual citizen of the United States and Iran, traveled to Tehran in late December to visit her 93-year-old mother. On December 30, on her way to the airport to leave Iran, her taxi was stopped by three knife-wielding men who stole her baggage, including her passports, according to the Wilson center.
Four days later, while applying for replacement Iranian travel documents, she was “invited” to an interview with an Iranian official for what turned out to be six weeks of daily interrogations at Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. The questions focused almost entirely on the activities and programs of the Wilson center.
Ms. Esfandiari was allowed to sleep at her mother’s house each night. But after resisting demands by the ministry to make what was described in news accounts as a false confession, she was arrested and incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
Already, prominent organizations — including Human Rights Watch and the Middle East Studies Association of North America — have publicly called for Ms. Esfandiari’s release.
