Roxana Saberi, Medill ’99, a freelance journalist working in Iran, is being detained near Tehran and has been for almost a month. She has yet to be officially charged with a crime, the Committee to Protect Journalists said – circumstances the committee says it finds alarming.
“The Iranian government has been quite secretive about this, which is one of our concerns,” said Mohamed Abdel Dayem, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.
The former Miss North Dakota is being held at Evin prison, outside Tehran, a representative of the Iranian judiciary said at a press conference Tuesday. The representative said she is being held based on a writ from the Iranian revolutionary court.
“(Evin prison) is reserved almost exclusively for political prisoners and has a notorious history of torture,” Dayem said. In 2003, photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was detained, tortured and raped until she eventually died of a reported head injury.
The revolutionary court is comparable to a military tribunal with a single judge and few or no opportunities for appeals, Dayem said. Defendants often must prepare for their trials and appear in court without legal counsel.
Saberi’s father, Reza Saberi, said he received a call from his daughter Feb. 10. She told him that she had been arrested for possession of alcohol, which is illegal in Iran, and was being held. The initial call was “no more than two minutes,” he said.
“She called again and said, ‘Please don’t take any steps (to alert the media) because they are going to free me in a few days,'” he said. “We waited day after day until 18 days had passed. That’s when I had an interview with NPR.”
The interview aired Sunday. Reza Saberi said the next step is to hire a lawyer to try and get to his daughter.
“The lawyer will go and get the real story, so we can have some footholds,” he said.
Dayem said alcohol possession is not likely to be the reason for her detention.
“While illegal in Iran, nobody has spent a month in an undisclosed location for purchasing a bottle of wine, or a barrel of wine for that matter,” he said.
Because of the severity of the situation, a charge of alcohol possession was “a pretext at best,” Dayem said.
Dayem said Saberi’s credentials to report in Iran had been revoked in 2006. Saberi has lived in Iran since 2003 and, until now, had gone unchallenged by the Iranian government. The months leading up to the Iranian presidential election this summer had seen increasing restrictions on journalists, he said.
“We’ve observed a tightening, a significant tightening on the margins of the press,” Dayem said.
Saberi’s arrest has had a sobering effect on Medill students interested in overseas reporting.
“I’ve considered doing foreign correspondence,” Medill junior Gemma Baltazar said. “And hearing about stuff like this makes me reconsider.”
The Medill community has been active in addressing the situation.
“I am impressed and pleased with how the Medill and Northwestern communities want to rally behind an alum,” said Medill Prof. Jack Doppelt, who taught Saberi while she earned her master’s degree in journalism.
Doppelt kept in touch with Saberi while she was in Iran. On Feb. 8, two days before Saberi called her parents, Doppelt, along with several other people, received a strange e-mail from her. The subject line was, “HI, here is can let you excited place!” The body of the e-mail was an unintelligible spam sales pitch.
After hearing about Saberi’s arrest, Doppelt contacted the other people who had received the e-mail.
“We were inclined to believe that it was sent – however it was sent – when she was already in custody,” Doppelt said.
To show solidarity in support of Saberi’s right to due process of law, CPJ created a petition on Facebook directed at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It urges the Iranian government to either make the charges against Saberi clear or release her. Its original goal was to get 1,000 signatures. As of press time, the petition had 3,456. It will remain open for those who wish to sign until Friday.
