Iran confirms arrest of California peace activist

This is bound to harm U.S. Iran relations, according to this report in the Guardian, and it will certainly harm California-Iran Relations, with our huge population of Americans of Iranian descent- many of whom are reaching out in a positive way to the Iranian people.  

Mohammad Ali Hosseini, the spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, confirmed at his weekly news briefing that Iranian-American Ali Shakeri is being held.  On Friday, the semi-official ISNA news agency first reported the detention and investigation of Shakeri, of Lake Forest, Calif., by the security department of the Tehran prosecutor’s office.  Shakeri, a founding board member of the University of California, Irvine, Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, is the fourth dual citizen detained in Iran in recent months.  Iranian officials previously confirmed the detentions of three other Iranian-Americans: scholar Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant with George Soros’ Open Society Institute; and Parnaz Azima, a journalist who works for the U.S.-funded Radio Farda.  All three are accused of endangering Iran’s national security and of espionage, according to a judiciary spokesman. It is not known if Shakeri has been accused of specific wrongdoing.

The United States broke ties with Iran after the storming of the U.S. Embassy there in 1979 and the seizure of U.S diplomats as hostages, however the Bush Administration was recently forced to begin talks with Iran because of public and congressional opinion and the Baker Hamilton Report.  Since political extremists now control the Federal Governments of both countries, it is thought that these people-to-people contacts may offer the best hope for better relations between the U.S. an Iran.  This action by the current Government in Iran, however, could put a chill on those relations for many more years to come.