By Sean Maher

Source:

July 29, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — A moment of clarity struck Nora Shourd recently as her worldwide campaign to free her daughter and two other U.S. citizens from their imprisonment in Iran brought her to an Iranian consulate in London.

“We tried to see the ambassador, but it didn’t happen,” she said. “We rang the doorbell, knocked on the door, and a guy came to the door and just said, ‘I can’t help you.’

“It was a crystal-clear moment,” she said. “I realized: You’re right, you can’t help us. You haven’t been helping us for a year.”

It was July 31, 2009, when UC Berkeley graduates Sarah Shourd, 31, Shane Bauer, 28, and Josh Fattal, 28, were arrested near the Iran-Iraq border by Iranian police who said the three had crossed illegally into Iran.

As the ensuing year unfolded, few confirmable facts emerged, but several variations of the story did: The trio’s families said the three had been hiking in the nearby Kurdistan region of Iraq and accidentally crossed the unmarked, zigzagging border between the countries; Iranians suggested the three had ties to the Central Intelligence Agency or other U.S. espionage agencies; and a June report by The Nation cited unnamed sources who said the arrest had not even occurred on Iranian soil, but on Iraqi territory illegally entered by the Iranian police.

The State Department has flatly denied any connection between the trio and U.S. intelligence agencies and has reported no evidence backing The Nation’s claims.

Iran has not filed charges against the three, who neither have seen a courtroom nor spoken with an Iranian attorney their families hired in December.

Health concerns

Meanwhile, Bauer and Sarah Shourd have reported suffering medical problems, and Shourd’s mental health in particular has become a major concern. She reportedly is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in Tehran’s Erin Prison.

“We feel pretty desperate,” Nora Shourd said. “I’m really pushing about Sarah’s health issues. We’ve asked for medical records over and over and haven’t gotten them.”

Sarah Shourd is known to her friends and family as an exceedingly social person. Her detention, along with Bauer’s and Fattal’s, recently prompted a dozen mental health doctors to write a public letter expressing “grave concern” about conditions that “pose severe risks for (the hikers’) mental health.”

Iranian journalist Omid Memarian, who was held in Erin Prison for two months in 2004 and left Iran for the U.S. a short time later, said the mental pressure on the hikers must be incredible.

“It was horrible,” he said of his stay in Erin. “The prison itself is very depressing and affects people’s soul and mind for a long time. The fact you don’t have access to the outside world is devastating.

“The meaning of time for you changes very dramatically,” Memarian added. “For them, I can assume every single hour of their time being there passes like a day or a week. For them, it’s not been a year now. It’s been much longer than what we feel.”

Though the hikers and Bauer, in particular, are students of Middle Eastern culture and the Arabic language, they don’t speak Farsi, the dominant language in Iran, and that likely also is contributing to the mental pressure of the situation, Memarian said. However, he said he doubts strongly they are being physically tortured, “because the Iranians know that would come out.”

Larger power struggle

Whether they’re being physically tortured or not, their continued detention is unacceptable to the U.S., State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Wednesday.

“Iran is not playing by the rules,” Crowley said. “Iran is demanding respect from the rest of the world but unfortunately not showing us respect.”

Crowley said the hikers have been caught up as “pawns in a much larger game.” He said the U.S. “will continue to do what we’re doing,” working with other governments to apply pressure and using Swiss proxies to talk with Iran. The U.S. hasn’t had any formal diplomacy with the country in more than three decades.

“People need to understand: This is the most complicated bilateral relationship the U.S. has with any country, and unfortunately these young people are caught in the middle of it,” Crowley said.

Asked why the U.S. hasn’t been more forceful, Crowley said, “Iran is sovereign. You can’t force a government to do something it’s unwilling to do without taking more coercive measures. … If the American people would be asking, Is their government doing everything we can conceivably do? The answer is yes. We have appealed directly, vocally and publicly for Iran to release them. We know Iran understands what we want them to do.”

“The responsibility here is squarely on their shoulders,” Crowley said.

Why they were there

The hikers have come under criticism in some U.S. circles, with the common questions being: Why were they there in the first place? Isn’t it stupid to go to such a dangerous part of the world?

“To understand that, you have to go all the way back to when these kids were 18, 19 years old,” Nora Shourd said. “They became activists then. Over the past decade or so, if you look at their histories, they’ve done an incredible amount of really purposeful work with their lives.”

Sarah Shourd, for example, spent a great deal of time helping women in Juarez, Mexico, and more recently teaching English to Iraqi refugees in Syria, her mother said. Bauer has published more than 50 articles in major magazines looking at the tragedies in Darfur and the impacts of war violence in Iraq.

“This is why they were in the Middle East. That was their life and their work,” Nora Shourd said. “And they were among the very few people in this world willing to do that kind of work, where they immerse themselves in a culture, and they’re down for the duration. They weren’t there for six months. They’d been there a year. They would have stayed another year.”

Shourd said her daughter and her daughter’s friends are the kind of young adults people admire: brave, compassionate and determined.

“We should be encouraging and supporting young people who do these kinds of things,” she said.

As for the reason they were in that part of Iraq specifically, Shourd said, “we’ve been learning that Kurdistan is making a big push to draw tourists. They call themselves ‘the other Iraq.’”

Numerous tourism videos promote the region for its hiking, scenery and waterfalls, Shourd said, and many of the hikers’ friends and locals they’d contacted assured them the region was safe.

“Not a single person said, ‘Don’t go there,’” she said. “They were misinformed, which doesn’t make them stupid. It makes them misinformed.”

Dozens of rallies are planned across the globe to protest the one-year mark of the hikers’ detention, including one in San Francisco on Saturday. Shourd encouraged anyone concerned with the humanitarian treatment of prisoners to go and put pressure on the U.S. and Iran to get the hikers home.

“The bottom line is, we have two governments. Both have some responsibility here,” she said. “If they were both doing everything they could, our kids would be home.”

• What: Free The Hikers: One Year Unjustly Detained, a rally and march to demand the release of the hikers and highlight the urgency of the situation, as the hikers” mental health has become a major concern.
• Where: 16th Street BART plaza (16th and Mission streets), San Francisco
• When: Noon-3 p.m. Saturday
• Information: Go to or e-mail .
• Jan. 11, 2007: U.S. military forces arrest five Iranian diplomats in northern Iraq, accusing them of connection to Iran”s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, a group believed to be aiding insurgents.
• March 2007: Private investigator and former FBI agent Bob Levinson goes missing while ostensibly in Iran investigating a cigarette smuggling case. Iran denies a U.S. request to allow Swiss diplomats to enter the region where he disappeared to search for evidence. To this day, State Department officials say, Iran has not cooperated with efforts to gain information on Levinson”s whereabouts.
• January 2009: Journalist Roxana Saberi, a U.S.-born journalist living in Iran since 2003, is arrested and later charged with espionage. She denies the charge to this day.
• May 2009: Saberi is released, having been convicted of possessing classified information, which she also denies, and given a two-year suspended sentence.
• June 2009: Iranian nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri disappears while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. He is later revealed to be living in the U.S.; Iran accuses the U.S. of abducting him, an accusation he will support and refute in different publicly released videos. The U.S. flatly denies the kidnapping charge.
• June 12, 2009: Results of a national election in Iran show standing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad winning by a landslide. The results immediately are called into question by his opponents, who say he rigged the election. In the following weeks, huge protests by the opposing Green Movement draw hundreds of thousands of people. Dozens are killed in the action, and hundreds are arrested. In the end, Ahmadinejad remains the winner.
• July 9, 2009: The U.S. releases the five Iranian diplomats, who become frequent guests on Iranian television talking about poor treatment they say they received from the U.S.
• Sept. 5, 2009: Belgian tourists Idesbald Van den Bosch and Vincent Boon Falleur are arrested on suspicion of espionage, held for three months and released without trial. They later report extreme psychological stress during interrogation and solitary confinement.
• Feb. 2, 2010: Ahmadinejad, visiting New York City, says he would consider a trade, releasing the three hikers in exchange for some unnamed Iranian citizens in U.S. prisons. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denies even negotiating such a deal and publicly refuses it.
• July 14, 2010: Shahram Amiri, the Iranian scientist, returns to Iran. Clinton says he has been living here of his own free will and is free to go when he chooses.