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By admin, September 23, 2009 2:51 am

Jim Dwyer’s “About New York” column in The New York Times features Kian:

Say what you will for the United Nations and its General Assembly. The sidewalk diplomacy almost never disappoints, and the stakes are always high.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is back in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Thousands of members of the Iranian diaspora plan to demonstrate on Wednesday to protest the crushing of dissent in Tehran since June, when Mr. Ahmadinejad claimed to have been re-elected president in a landslide.

One prominent member of that diaspora will certainly not be present: Kian Tajbakhsh, a New Yorker and an Iranian-American scholar who was seized by the Iranian security forces in early July and has been confined since then without access to counsel. He has been accused of stirring up revolutionary sentiment and of being an instigator paid by sinister Western forces.

Mr. Tajbakhsh, 47, and his wife and their young daughter were planning to move to New York this fall for a visiting professorship in urban planning at Columbia University.

Instead, he remains in secret detention, surfacing only occasionally in a mass trial where the official narrative holds that all protests in Iran since June are the creations of the United States and its wealthy allies. Perhaps most remarkable to his friends is that Mr. Tajbakhsh, a secular scholar, is being tried alongside Islamist reformers.

The official indictment against him is a haze of inference and inanity: He was raised outside Iran, in London and New York; his father was a member of the shah’s government; in prison, he had to be taught how to pray, apparently having a deficit of piety in his upbringing.

More: He worked as a consultant for the Open Society Institute, which is financed by the Soros Foundation, and which the Iranians purport is a C.I.A. satellite. He subscribes to a listserv run by Gary Sick, a Middle East scholar at Columbia who is described in the indictment as a C.I.A. agent. He discussed a book with another troublemaker.

Pictures released from the mass trial last month show Mr. Tajbakhsh reading statements that are supposed to implicate him and others in the uprisings.

Another Iranian-American scholar, Haleh Esfandiari, who was held two years ago in solitary confinement for 105 days, said that she learned from the interrogations that the Iranian security forces were gripped with paranoia about popular movements that have overthrown autocratic regimes elsewhere. In this worldview, Mr. Tajbakhsh’s Western education, dual citizenship in the United States and Iran and breadth of interests would make him an obvious conduit for subversion.

“What they are doing to him and the others is really shameful,” said Ms. Esfandiari, author of “My Prison, My Home.” “The good thing about Iran is that nobody — I mean nobody in the country — believes these confessions, and no one pays attention to these trials. Any intelligent person can conclude that he’s saying these things because he is forced to.”

During her confinement in 2007, Ms. Esfandiari got to know Mr. Tajbakhsh because he was being detained under the same circumstances, on the same vague charges of stirring up trouble. She was released in August that year. A few weeks later, Mr. Tajbakhsh was freed just before President Ahmadinejad arrived in New York for the General Assembly. Part of his schedule included a talk at Columbia.

In introducing Mr. Ahmadinejad, Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, noted that Mr. Tajbakhsh, a Columbia graduate, was still being held in house arrest.

“Let me say this for the record: I call on the president today to ensure that Kian will be free to travel out of Iran as he wishes,” Mr. Bollinger said. “Let me also report today that we are extending an offer to Kian to join our faculty.”

It would be nearly a year before Mr. Tajbakhsh was able to travel freely, so he was still in Tehran in June.

“No one expected there to be this historic popular uprising,” said Pamela Kilpadi, a colleague.

Now Mr. Tajbakhsh is back in prison, and President Ahmadinejad is back in New York.

“Academics and religious scholars,” he said during his 2007 visit, “are shining torches.”

This article was quickly translated and republished in Farsi with the heading “Ahmadinejad breaks promise to Kian” (not to rearrest him):

[Link to article]

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By admin,

Nazila Fathi and Robert Mackey have written about Kian’s plight in The New York Times news blog:

“When Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rises to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, protesters who claim that he holds office only because of a rigged election plan to gather in large numbers outside the building…

The detainees who were arrested after the election have been hauled into court for televised mass trials, charged with plotting a “velvet revolution” to overthrow the regime. There have been no indications that they will be released soon.

Some of those still held, like Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American scholar, and Maziar Bahari, an Iranian-Canadian filmmaker and journalist who reports for Newsweek, were apparently not involved in political activities.

Mr. Tajbakhsh, who was also arrested for three months in 2007, has been jailed since July 9. No formal charges have been brought against him, but a family member who spoke on condition of anonymity said that he has been kept in solitary confinement under watch by members of the Revolutionary Guards. When Mr. Tajbakhsh, looking frail and passive, appeared on state-run television during a mass trial of dissidents in late August, his two-year old daughter, Hasti, ran to kiss his image on the screen. His appearance led family members to fear that he is being drugged.

At least one political prisoner and the daughter of another high-profile prisoner, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a former vice president, have confirmed that the political prisoners have been forced to take drugs — blue pills, they reported, that are said to make them less resistant and more cooperative with their interrogators…”

[Full article]