On Tuesday in Tehran, Iranian state media reported that Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American urban planner, has been convicted of fomenting unrest against the government and sentenced to more than 12 years in prison. The Associated Press reported that a lawyer for Mr. Tajbakhsh told Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency that he had received the verdict.
Mr. Tajbakhsh, who holds a doctorate in urban planning from Columbia University, was arrested on July 9, after a wave of protests by opposition supporters in Iran who said that the June 12 presidential election there was rigged.
Earlier on Tuesday, Newsweek reported that Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian correspondent for the magazine who had been detained in July and released on bail on Saturday, had left Iran for London, where his wife is expected to give birth soon. According to Farnaz Fassihi of the Wall Street Journal, the United States pressed for the release of both Mr. Tajbakhsh and Mr. Bahari earlier this month in Geneva during talks on Iran’s nuclear program.
The Iranian Web site Zamaaneh reported that the indictment against Mr. Tajbakhsh charged him with “propaganda activities” and acting against national security by working with the Open Society Institute, which is supported by George Soros. As The Lede explained in a previous post that touched on Mr. Tajbakhsh’s case, elements of the Iranian government have accused Mr. Soros, who finances democracy-building programs in many countries, of plotting to overthrow Iran’s Islamic system of government in what the authorities call a “velvet revolution.”
A representative of the Open Society Institute in New York sent this statement to The Lede on Tuesday:
The Open Society Institute is dismayed by the unjust imprisonment and draconian sentencing of Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh. We call for his immediate release.
Dr. Tajbakhsh was a consultant for the Open Society Institute from 2004 to May 2007. He is a valued expert on public health, humanitarian assistance, and urban planning initiatives in Iran. Though he discontinued his service for OSI, we remain deeply concerned about his well-being.
Later on Tuesday, the White House released this statement:
We express our deepest regret and strong objection that the Islamic Republic of Iran has sentenced Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh to 15 years in prison. Mr. Tajbakhsh poses no threat to Iran or its national security. As an independent and internationally-respected scholar, Mr. Tajbakhsh has dedicated his life to fostering greater understanding between Iran and the international community. He embodies what is possible between our two countries. Our thoughts and prayers are with Kian’s family and loved ones on this difficult day.
Further, we are deeply concerned that Mr. Tajbakhsh may have been forced to stand trial in the revolutionary court without the benefit of his own legal counsel. The right to due process is universal and must be respected. The right to a fair and public hearing is embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the right to legal representation is also guaranteed in Iran’s own constitution, as well as in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a party. We urge Iran to release Mr. Tajbakhsh as soon as possible.
As my colleague James Dwyer wrote last month in an article about his case, “Mr. Tajbakhsh, 47, and his wife and their young daughter were planning to move to New York this fall for a visiting professorship in urban planning at Columbia University.” Mr. Dwyer noted that the indictment against Mr. Tajbakhsh also implied that there was something criminal about the fact that he “subscribes to a listserv run by Gary Sick, a Middle East scholar at Columbia who is described in the indictment as a C.I.A. agent.”
The Web site Free Kian published a statement on Tuesday saying that his family and friends are “shocked and outraged” by the sentence. The statement continued:
The baffling charges being lodged by the Revolutionary Court linking Kian together with high-ranking Iranian reformists purportedly plotting to overthrow the regime with American support are entirely baseless. As an independent scholar Kian is neither a member of the Iranian reformist movement nor in contact with any foreign headquarters inside or outside Iran, and has had no involvement in pre- or post-election unrest.
In August, Mr. Tajbakhsh testified during a mass trial of opposition supporters in Tehran’s Revolutionary Court. He was previously detained for four months in 2007. On that occasion, before he was released on bail he was forced to appear on state television and read a statement saying that the aim of his work was “to divide the people from the government.”
In 2008, according to the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence produced the following public service announcement, which sought to tarnish anyone associated with Mr. Soros as a counter-revolutionary:
In an article for The New York Times Magazine in 2007, Negar Azimi explained that Mr. Tajbakhsh — like another Iranian-American scholar, Haleh Esfandiari — had been granted permission by the Iranian government to engage in the academic work he was then arrested for pursuing. Ms. Azimi wrote:
Before their recent arrests, Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh were very cautious in their work. Esfandiari, now 67, came and went to Iran at least twice each year to see her aging mother. A petite and sweetly fierce grandmother herself, Esfandiari was careful about whom she saw and what she said, keen on being balanced in her views. She was a tireless facilitator of dialogue between the two countries, organizing dozens of exchanges between Iran and the U.S. with people of diverse agendas and backgrounds in her capacity as head of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She was so evenhanded that in some exile circles she was viewed as an apologist for the Iranian government. She was often called upon to lend nuance when public discussions about Iran veered into hyperbole; she declined offers to appear on Voice of America, for fear of being tied to an American agenda.
So when she was stopped in Tehran on Dec. 30 last year, en route to the airport, and had her passports taken away, it came as a surprise. She faced weeks of interrogations — sometimes for up to eight hours at a time. In February, they unexpectedly came to a halt. Her passports, however, were not returned to her. And then on May 8 she was arrested. Kian Tajbakhsh was arrested and taken from his home in Tehran. Both have since been accused of taking part in efforts to destabilize the government, charges that could carry the death penalty. The Intelligence Ministry has been keen to point out that the Wilson Center receives U.S. government money, as well as money from the Open Society Institute, the New York-based foundation begun by the financier George Soros. On May 22, the ministry announced that O.S.I. had “played key roles in intrigues that have led to color revolutions in former Soviet republics in recent years” and now aimed to overthrow Iran’s government as well.
Not only was Tajbakhsh given official sanction by Iran for his work with O.S.I., but he also undertook several projects directly for the government. To many who knew him and his work, O.S.I.'s being implicated in a conspiracy to topple the regime was absurd. The organization was invited by the Iranian government to provide technical assistance on a project related to IV drug use in 2002. Since then, it had been invited to work on projects from H.I.V./AIDS education to contributing to the relief efforts following a 2003 earthquake that devastated the southeastern city of Bam. “Kian’s activities were done in plain view and with the knowledge of the Iranian government,” Anthony Richter, O.S.I.'s associate director, recently told me.
Still, Tajbakhsh was aware of an increased sensitivity in recent months to contacts with the West. In early April, he was part of a group planning to launch an NGO that would help other NGOs maintain their books — to be more transparent and accountable. “I know, very dry,” he said, laughing, when we discussed the project earlier this spring in his Tehran apartment. He recounted a recent meeting of the proposed board in which they debated the question of whether they would apply for any foreign financing or be a part of any international networks. “We all voted against it,” he said.
“One always has to make compromises and choices,” he continued. “The compromises reinforce isolation, but perhaps this is what you have to do to exist.” Since Ahmadinejad’s election, a new NGO law had been drafted, instituting all manner of procedural pettifoggery to dissuade people from engaging with civil society at all. I asked him what the biggest change was as a result. “Withdrawal,” he said. “Quiescence.”
The most painful paradox in all of this may be that neither Tajbakhsh nor Esfandiari received American democracy funds and, in fact, were critical of the American effort’s potential costs. Whether their arrests are a reflection of an internal battle between pro-engagement elements of the Khatami and Rafsanjani variety and those who are increasingly insular (notably Ahmadinejad) remains unclear. What is clearer, perhaps, is that the very public nature of the U.S. funds gave the Iranian government the perfect opportunity to send an unsubtle signal to the world about the potential cost of engagement.
Ms. Esfandiari was released in 2007 and returned to the United States. Last month, after watching the mass trials and learning of Mr. Tajbakhsh’s indictment she told my colleague James Dwyer: “What they are doing to him and the others is really shameful.” She added: “The good thing about Iran is that nobody — I mean nobody in the country — believes these confessions, and no one pays attention to these trials. Any intelligent person can conclude that he’s saying these things because he is forced to.”
In June of this year, just before Iran’s presidential election, Mr. Tajbakhsh took part in a roundtable discussion of President Obama’s address to the Muslim world on the Room for Debate blog on this Web site.
