Why Is Iran Detaining Jason Rezaian?

My first correspondence with Jason Rezaian, a Washington Post reporter who has been detained in Iran, was in 2010, and it was about avocados. They are virtually unheard of in Iran: less than one per cent of the Iranian population has ever tasted one, according to a suspiciously authoritative factoid. Jason, a native of California avocado country who came to live and work as a freelance journalist in Iran in 2008, had a notion. He would use the mashable green fruit as a tool to explore Iran’s isolation with a sense of humor and culinary enthusiasm. What might it take to introduce avocado production and consumption to Iran? “Will I have to break sanctions?” he mused. “Will they even grow in Iran, and, if they do, will anyone actually eat them?”

I got in touch with Jason because I thought he might like to know about some Iranian friends of mine whose family fortune was, unfortunately, tied up in mushrooms. Their quest to incorporate the mushroom into Persian cuisine spanned generations, but the family’s mushroom-shaped restaurant at a Tehran amusement park had flopped, and the mushroom farm fell on hard times. White mulberries, sweet lemons, persimmons, tiny cucumbers, soft walnuts fresh off the tree—Iranians eat a staggering variety of fruits and nuts, some of which I know no English word for, but precious few mushrooms, and no avocados to speak of.

As it happened, Jason did not have long to contemplate avocado farming. He had reported with whimsy, insight, and deft nuance throughout the Islamic Republic’s most restrictive years for press freedom, and, in 2012, the Post hired him as its Tehran correspondent. I was happy for him, and happy for American readers, but also worried. Dual nationals—Iranian-Americans like Jason—are extremely vulnerable in Iran. They are subject to Iranian law, which is hard enough on local journalists, and, worse, their link to the United States makes them targets of suspicion in a state preoccupied with the spectre of foreign conspiracy. The Post would raise Jason’s profile.

Jason was undaunted. He had reason to trust himself, if not to trust the Iranian security establishment. He wasn’t a flamethrower; his temperament was mild, easygoing, and unstintingly generous. More than once, Jason told me that he could not understand the competition among journalists: the more people reporting from Iran the better, as far as he was concerned. Iran needed, and deserved, better and deeper coverage than any one of us could provide. His stories, like the avocado project of his freelance days, often seemed to examine the country with an astute, sidelong glance that was rarely directly political; his most recent stories were about a coming water shortage, and about the rise of baseball as an Iranian pastime.

Together with his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, who writes for the Dubai-based paper the National, Jason was arrested, in his Tehran home, on July 22, 2014. They have been held for three weeks now at an undisclosed location. The sequence of events is both chilling and depressingly familiar to anyone who follows Iranian affairs. The couple has not yet been charged with any crime. On August 5th, a report in a newspaper close to the security establishment limned the likely case against them. It is both patently absurd and entirely run-of-the-mill for Iran: the paper alleges that Jason and Yeganeh are American spies feeding sensitive information to Washington, and, furthermore, that they are to blame for the viral distribution of a video of Iranians dancing on a rooftop to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” The young people who participated in that video were arrested and forced to recant their happiness back in May. (Jason covered the dust-up for the Post, though only after the people in the video had already been released.) A televised, coerced confession from the couple seems likely to come soon.

An outcry has followed their arrest, not only because they have many friends in the international press corps but because of who they are and who is now President of Iran. Those who know Jason have peppered the media with protestations defending his love for Iran and his political neutrality. If the Islamic Republic can’t tolerate Jason Rezaian, one might wonder whether it can tolerate any foreign media at all. Moreover, President Hassan Rouhani came to power a little more than a year ago, promising a new era of openness. But, since then, the number of journalists imprisoned in Iran has actually doubled, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, from thirty-two to sixty-five.

Most are Iranian reporters for the Farsi-language press—people like Saba Azarpeik, a journalist for the newspapers Etemad and Tejarat-e Farda, who was detained in late May and appeared in court two months later in poor physical and psychological condition. Azarpeik’s story, too, is depressingly familiar, at least to Iranians. She belongs to the country’s seemingly ineradicable corps of young investigative journalists. Azarpeik has reported on the abuse of political prisoners, including a recent spate of beatings in Evin Prison, and helped to inspire a parliamentary investigation into the suspicious in-custody death of a blogger named Sattar Beheshti. Since disappearing into the Iranian prison system herself, Azarpeik has suffered two broken vertebrae, according to a post on her mother’s Facebook page.

President Rouhani does not bear direct responsibility for the recent wave of arrests, which has swept up a noticeable number of female journalists from the local press. The prerogative to arrest, detain, and charge domestic journalists like Azarpeik lies with the Iranian judiciary, which is dominated by hard-line clerics and which answers to the Supreme Leader. The judiciary does not answer to the elected government; it has been known in the past, as well as now, to actively oppose it. When the reformist President Mohammad Khatami attempted to ease restrictions on the country’s press in the period from 1997 to 2004, journalists associated with his own faction faced prison terms and outlandish charges; newspapers run by the President’s allies were banned, one after another. In the final years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Presidency, the Revolutionary Guard seemed to have stepped into foreign-media space, restricting the movements of foreign correspondents over the heads of the ministries that had licensed and approved them. The President has little more than a bully pulpit from which to push back against such incursions. But Rouhani seems reluctant to use even that.

The latest interference with the press may well be intended to embarrass him. Rouhani’s pursuit of a nuclear accord with six world powers faces fierce opposition from hard-liners within the Iranian establishment who would be all too happy to see him fail. Now the President is forced to explain to international interlocutors exactly why his country has abducted a law-abiding Washington Post correspondent on what are recognizably trumped-up charges. Don’t think that Rouhani is in charge, his opponents might be saying to foreign powers; in the end you will need to deal with us. (The scholar Haleh Esfandiari made the case for this scenario in an eloquent Op-Ed for the Times.) The attacks on domestic journalists serve a similar purpose at home, signalling to Iranians the limits of Rouhani’s reach and the persistence of the security state.

President Rouhani has responded to these provocations with a silence that angers reform-minded supporters. He no doubt fears jeopardizing his diplomatic efforts and knows that his antagonists would like to prod him into conflict. The nuclear negotiations are already a high-wire act: people close to the President’s foreign-policy circles privately express apprehension for their own safety, knowing that should the nuclear talks fail—and even if they succeed—Rouhani’s most cosmopolitan aides could become fair game for conspiracy-minded hard-liners. But refusing to stand up to those hard-liners now will not protect the President’s people. Rather, it cedes the field. This is a lesson forced on Iran’s political élite again and again, but which none seem to learn until it’s too late.

The New Yorker