A day after revealing the name of Dr. Kian Tajbaksh, Iranian university professor detained a few days after the arrest of Haleh Esfandiari in Tehran, reports say Ali Shakeri, another Iranian-American, a collaborator with the Center for Citizen Peace Building, was arrested ten days ago, while leaving the country and imprisoned in an unknown prison not granting the right of a lawyer.

The Center for Citizen Peace Building was founded in 1999 in the University of California in Irvine. The goal of this center was to help citizens find realistic solutions for communicating in a national and international level.

Ali Shakeri, who is introduced as consultant of this center in its website, www.socsci.ucil, made a trip to Tehran a month ago, to meet his old and ill mother, who died three days later. He was arrested two weeks ago in Tehran Mehrabad airport while leaving the country, and was taken to an unknown place without informing his family, who was searching him for three days. After this time he contacted his family. All that his family can say after this contact is that Mr, Shakeri is in France. This seems to be what the interrogators had required them to say.

Skakeri's friends and colleagues, contacting the airline and airport police, found out that he had never left the country and that his suitcases were collected from the airport in Tehran. His wife and children who live in Los Angeles could not still assign a lawyer to Mr. Shakeri, and it seems that, not wanting to complicate the case more, they would act according to what he had recommended them to do in his last contact.

Shakeri is a partisan of velvet revolution in Iran and his speeches have faced sever opposition from the part of extremist Islamic Republic supporters. He is also a member of Democracy for Iran Institute in Irvine, which has held meetings and seminars inviting moderate reformists and has thus taken steps in introducing Iran to the American society. In early hours of his arrest, there were some doubts about whether his name similarity to Dr. Ali Shakeri, leader of National Council of Resistance, [supporters of Shahpour Bakhtiar, the last prime minister of overthrown Shah] was the reason for his arrest.

Yesterday, Robin Wright, a journalist of Washington Post who follows the developments in Iran, reported the arrest of Kian Tajbakhsh, who was detained 12 days ago in Tehran, his family only being aware of this arrest after a week. Kian Tajbakhsh is a consultant for philanthropist George Soros's Open Society Institute which is an institute run by Soro, a nature lover and famous capitalist. This institute has recently been alleged by hardliner Tehran journals, quoting the Intelligence Minister, as one of the centers promoting a velvet revolution in Iran. Reports, which have seemingly been spread by security and intelligence sources, say that the name of the consultant of Soros's Society has been revealed by interrogating Haleh Esfandiari, which points to the arrest of Kian Tajbakhsh who is a social researcher.

Many political analysts believe that the arrest of academics having relations with centers outside the country is a means of preventing interior information from being revealed outside the country; this is the continuation of the ideas of Saiid Emami, who have returned to the Intelligence Ministry alongside Mohseni Ejeii. This group is trying to cut the cultural and scientific ties established during the presidency of Khatami and to prevent the trip of university professors and teachers.

According to this group's way of thinking the arrest of Ramin Jahanbagloo, interrogation from Mousavian, former diplomat close to Hashemi Rafsanjani, detaining Nazi Azima and arrest of Haleh Esfandiari and the new arrest of Kian Tajbakhsh and Ali Shakeri, and also others, whose names are not yet revealed, are all links of the same chain.

Other analysts believe that at the dawn of negotiations between Iran and America, the government tends to close all possible channels of communication and to show the Americans that they should negotiate with Iran solely through the predetermined channel.

Whichever of these analyses might be true, one point is obvious: the Islamic Republic is once again at the top of the list in neglecting human rights and is again the target of numerous statements and resolutions from the human rights groups around the world. We should wait for a major development in this trend; the trend which has gone down in the shadow of the nuclear crisis.

Iranian authorities have always insisted on the fact that if the nuclear crisis is resolved then the West will bring about other expectations, the most important of which is Iran's human rights records. In this way Iran is showing that although it may negotiate about the nuclear issue or support for Iraqi groups, but the human rights issue is not negotiable at all. Thus Iran tries to expand commercial and political ties with the US and Europe and become closer to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to diminish the human right pressures from the international community.


source: www.roozonline.com
By: Hamid Ahadi