Waiting for Maziar

Paola Gourley, 40, does not want to know whether the baby she's carrying will be a boy or a girl. At least, not yet. The father, Maziar Bahari, 42, is in prison in Iran, where he has been held without access to a lawyer or any chance to see his family since June 21. Paola, an Italian-English lawyer working in London, has no idea how much longer Maziar will be kept from her, and this is the first child for both of them. So when sonograms show the gender of their baby, she says she will put the results in an envelope and seal it, hoping that Maziar will be freed soon and they can look at the results together. But in the back of Paola's mind, there is a growing fear that their baby will be born in November and Maziar will still be in prison.

"I try to keep positive, but that's my biggest fear, that this is going to be a long-term thing," she told me from London on Tuesday. "I just hope that the people holding Maziar realize just how unfair it is, and that they release him soon. I am petrified that they will use him as a scapegoat and keep him in jail, and that he won't be with me when the baby is born. It makes me desperately sad."

 

Maziar Bahari

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Newsweek Reporter Maziar Bahari Joins Wife in London

Bahari Still in Iran, Unclear Whether He Can Leave Country

Newsweek Reporter Maziar Bahari Released in Iran

U.S. Presses Iran to Free Detainees

Bahari Faces Personal Ordeal

U.S. Supports Canada's Efforts to Free Bahari

Jon Meacham's Op-Ed in the NY Times

CPJ Calls for Release

NY Times Editorial: "Free Maziar Bahari"

Global Call to Grant Bahari Freedom

Meacham: An Opportunity for Tehran

Click Here for More Maziar Bahari Coverage

 

The only time Paola has seen any image of Maziar since his arrest was last Saturday, when he appeared on Iranian government news programs as one of about 100 defendants in the show trial now being staged in Tehran. He looked "gaunt," Paola said, unshaven and much thinner than the Maziar she knows. According to a state-news report, Maziar—a veteran print journalist for NEWSWEEK and an acclaimed documentary filmmaker—"confessed" that in some of his reports he might "unknowingly" have helped further an alleged conspiracy to undermine the regime through peaceful protest.

That's right: peaceful protest. The regime calls that a "color revolution" or a "velvet revolution" like the ones that changed the face of Eastern Europe over the last 20 years. Maziar also has admitted that he filmed violence on the fringes of the enormous dignified and silent marches that took place after the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12 (as, indeed, he was fully accredited and licensed to do by the government of Iran). In particular, on June 15 Maziar recorded high-quality videotape of some fiery clashes that turned deadly as hooligans with Molotov cocktails confronted the government’s Basij militias and their guns. On Saturday, a subdued, somber Maziar apologized and reportedly asked Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to grant him a pardon.

"During the time that I was preparing reports and images of the illegal gatherings in Tehran I unknowingly created the grounds to endanger national security," he said in a script that reads like something out of Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. "But now I have to accept that. The Supreme Leader managed the issue very well and settled the country."

Maziar, whom I have known for more than a decade, should not be in prison at all. Let's be clear about that. His reporting is scrupulous, fair, and balanced. Indeed, I've often argued with him when he defended some of the regime's most controversial major policies, including the nuclear-enrichment activities that have widespread support throughout the Iranian population. One of his documentary films—about the antiregime militant group Mujahedin-e Khalq, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States—earned him some blistering criticism in the West. In his reports for Newsweek.com after the election, he was careful to present both sides—noting that some demonstrators had started hurling rocks at the Basij before they fired into the crowd, and raising the possibility that outside agitators might have infiltrated some of the crowds.

A passionate patriot, Maziar's constant aim has been to portray Iran as the deeply proud, subtly complicated, and impressively sophisticated society that it is. But as Paola knows—and all of us know, in fact—the process he's caught up in now is not constitutional and follows no legal precedent, unless you count the Stalin-era show trials of the Communist Soviet Union, or maybe their American reflection, the red-baiting congressional hearings of the 1940s and 1950s.

Even in his supposed confessions, all that Maziar said that he did was the job the Iranian government had licensed him to do: sending reports to NEWSWEEK and videotaping events on the streets. Two months ago that was not a crime. Indeed, the Iranian regime wanted as much coverage of the June 12 election as possible. It welcomed hundreds of foreign journalists into the country to report on the landslide reelection victory it expected for the incumbent Ahmadinejad, who will be inaugurated for his second term on Wednesday. At the time, with Ahmadinejad comfortably ahead in what few polls were available, the regime seemed to have nothing to fear from outside scrutiny.