Roughly two months ago Iranian authorities arrested Homa Hoodfar, a respected Canadian-Iranian professor of anthropology. They imprisoned Dr. Hoodfar in the infamous Evin prison, denied her a lawyer and forbade her any visitors. Because Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, they likewise denied her access to Canadian consular officials. The Iranian government has not even bothered to announce with what, exactly, they are charging Dr. Hoodfar. She was in Iran visiting family and friends as well as doing some research on women’s public roles there.
Dr. Hoodfar is not the only dual national to be rounded up by Iranian authorities recently. According to The Guardian newspaper, “Other dual nationals arrested in recent months include the British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who works for the Thomson Reuters Foundation as a project manager, and British-Iranian businessman Kamal Foroughi. American-Iranian businessman Siamak Namazi, was also jailed with no explanation in October after visiting his family. His 80-year-old father, Baquer Namazi, a former Unicef official, has also been arrested and denied access to lawyers. A French-Iranian, Nazak Afshar, who is former employee of the French embassy in Tehran, was sentenced to six years in April.”
It seems that hardliners in Iran and the Revolutionary Guard Corps in particular, are going after these dual-nationals for a number of reasons. Perhaps first and foremost, they simply do not like “Westernized” Iranians coming into the country and poking around. Such people do not need visa to enter Iran thanks to their Iranian citizenship, and paranoid conservatives in the country fear they might be spies or that they may “infect” people with ideas inimical to the regime. Such hardliners do not want Iran opened up to the rest of the world and especially not to the West and its culture.
Which brings us to the second motive: hardliners in the Revolutionary Guards, the police, the judiciary and elsewhere use these arrests to stick a branch in the spokes of President Rouhani and other moderates’ wheels. Hawks of the Iranian regime were never really for the nuclear deal with the West and an end to sanctions since a rapprochement might undermine their control of Iran and its economy. When they go after such people, or when they execute political prisoners from Kurdistan and elsewhere, they remind everyone that they are the ones really running the country.
A third motive might involve the hardliners’ desire to wring concessions from Canada, the United States, France or other countries whose nationals they arrest. They might manage a prisoner swap for some Hezballah or Iranian operative arrested in the West, for instance.
The case of Dr. Hoodfar strikes a personal note for your humble columnist, however, and really highlights the senseless cruelty of such tactics. I was a student of Dr. Hoodfar when she taught anthropology at McGill University in Canada in the early 1990s. As a young undergraduate who did not yet know much about anything, I took her “Anthropology of the Middle East.” With books such as “Nomads of South Persia,” Dr. Hoodfar taught us about cultures such as the Baluchi and Lorr whom most of us had hardly heard of before. It was in her class that I saw my first film on the Kurds – Yilmaz Guney’s “Yol,” set during the time of Turkey’s 1980 military coup.
Dr. Hoodfar impressed us all with her thoughtful, inquisitive and compassionate approach to students. It is not every professor that really takes the time to get to know their students, to listen to their ideas, to let them express a wide variety of political viewpoints, to correct their mistakes gently and to make them want to learn more about the topic long after the last class session ended. Dr. Hoodfar was such a professor.
All of which makes it that much harder to understand why she is in Iran’s most notorious prison now. The powerful men of Iran often speak of things like justice, honor, morality and respect from others. It is hard to see how they promote or deserve any of these things when they imprison without charge an elderly woman and retired professor, respected by everyone who knows her. Homa is no spy. She is not even a political activist. She and the others should not be pawns in some crass political power game in Tehran. Those responsible for her arrest and imprisonment debase themselves and their country’s reputation every day that she remains in Evin prison.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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