For five months, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian has slept on the concrete floor of his cell, waking each morning to relive the nightmare that is solitary confinement in one of Iran’s most notorious prisons.
Rezaian, an Iranian-American who holds dual citizenship, was arrested under dubious circumstances in July and jailed at Evin prison in Tehran, where he has been held for the past 153 days – the longest any western journalist has been detained in Iran.
The 38-year-old reporter was arrested with his Iranian wife, Yeganeh Salehi, who is also a journalist, and an American couple, who have not been identified.
Of the four, Rezaian is the only one still in prison. He was not formally charged until 6 December, and, even now, the nature of those charges has not been disclosed.
“Very early on, our hope was that this would resolve itself in a few days or weeks,” Jason’s brother Ali Rezaian told the Guardian. “Looking back, it’s inconceivable that we’re here now, five months later and still in this situation.”
According to his brother, Rezaian is being held in a bare prison cell, where he is forced to sleep on the hard floor. His physical and mental health are deteriorating, and his family is deeply concerned his prolonged detention will cause permanent damage, Ali said.
He has spent days at a time locked in his cell without seeing another human being other than his guard, according to his brother. Other days, interrogators will question him for hours, Ali said.
In the first months of his detention, Rezaian lost nearly 20% of his body weight, which has caused new health problems, his brother said.
Rezaian suffers from chronic high blood pressure – for which the prison is providing him with the Iranian version of his prescribed medication – and he is also afflicted with recurring eye infections and an inflammation of his groin.
“It’s a horrible situation for him to be in, especially because he hasn’t done anything to be in there in the first place,” Ali said. “He knows what’s going on. He knows that he’s the longest-held western journalist now and it’s taken a real toll on him. His mental situation is really at risk.”
Rezaian has been denied bail, a translator or access to an attorney. He is allowed brief visits from his wife, who was recently allowed to bring him warm clothes.
But his US relatives went four months without hearing Rezaian’s voice. On Thanksgiving Day, his mother, Mary Breme Rezaian, received a surprise phone call from the Iranian prison.
Mary Rezaian told the Washington Post that she spoke with her son for nearly a half hour that day. At the time, Jason Rezaian had not been formally charged, and the window for his extended detention had nearly come to a close. She said they hung up hopeful that they’d be seeing each other soon.
Rezaian, the son of an Iranian immigrant father and an American mother from Chicago, was born and raised in Marin County, just north of the San Francisco Bay Area. He left California to attend college at the New School in New York. He later returned to the Bay area to help his father run the Persian rug stores he owned before turning to journalism.
From 2005 to 2007, Rezaian wrote a blog called Inside Iran for the San Francisco Chronicle, before moving to Tehran permanently in 2008.
“He wanted people to know that Iranians have the same aspirations and hopes and dreams for their families that people all around the west and everywhere else do, and to get rid of this one-dimensional view of Iran,” Ali said.
Even though his family knew the potential risks of his reporting in Tehran, Rezaian was very careful not to cross the invisible lines set for reporters and “always followed the rules”, his brother said.
“He was always on the straight and narrow,” Ali said. “He knew what he could and couldn’t do there.”
Rezaian freelanced for a string of publications before becoming the Post’s Tehran correspondent in 2012. A year later, he married Salehi, an Iranian journalist who worked as a correspondent for the Abu Dhabi-based newspaper the National. Salehi had recently been granted permanent residency in the US.
Before their arrest, Rezaian had been in Vienna covering the latest developments of crucial international talks over Iran’s nuclear program. One of the last stories he published was about baseball in Iran.
On 22 July, Iranian security officials wearing plainclothes raided the couple’s apartment and confiscated laptops and documents. Waving an arrest warrant, they took Jason and his wife, and an American couple, who were later released. Salehi was released on bail in October, but her husband’s detention was extended by two months.
Ali said that under the conditions of Salehi’s bail, she is no longer allowed to work as a journalist. Neither she nor her family has spoken to the media.
“It’s been very, very difficult on Yegi,” Ali said, calling Salehi by her nickname. “The entire process has been extremely isolating. And she’s been prevented from a lot of things. She can’t travel, she can’t work. She’s been prevented from talking to an attorney. There’s also a social stigma around it, and because of that, while they’re in this process, they are very isolated, which has been very difficult for her and her family.”
Rezaian was formally charged by the Iranian judiciary on 6 December during a marathon court session in Tehran. The judge denied his request for bail.
“The Iranian government has never explained why Jason was detained or why he has been held for more than four months without access to a lawyer,” the Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, said in a statement on 6 December, the day charges were brought against Rezaian.
“Jason is an American citizen who was acting as a fully accredited journalist. If he has indeed been charged, we know that any fair legal proceeding would quickly determine that any allegations against him are baseless.”
Five months after his arrest, Rezaian’s family have still not been told what the charges against him are, nor have they seen any evidence against him. Ali Rezaian said he was not even sure his brother, who speaks but does not read or write Farsi, understands the charges against him. Jason has not been provided with a translator.
“I don’t think he even understands exactly what the charges are,” Ali said. “At least, I know he has been unable to communicate with anybody what they were.”
If history is a guide, experts say, the nature of the charges against Rezaian are likely trumped up – and linked to national security. The US State Department has repeatedly called on Iran to drop the charges against Rezaian and immediately release him, along other Americans still jailed in the country.
Iran and the US severed diplomatic ties three decades ago during the hostage crisis that followed the 1979 Islamic revolution. Since then, the two countries have competed for influence in the Middle East, at odds over the Israel-Palestinian conflict as well as the bloody civil war in Syria. In recent months, the Obama administration has been engaged in continued talks with over how to resolve Iran’s controversial nuclear programme, which the US views as a major regional threat, although Tehran insists the programme is peaceful and denies that it wants to acquire nuclear weapons.
Some experts familiar with Iran’s government have speculated that Rezaian and his wife were caught in the crosshairs of political infighting among the country’s fractious leadership. The country’s elected president, Hassan Rouhani, is a relative moderate, who has called for normalizing relations with western countries but faces fierce opposition from hardline government officials loyal to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who controls security issues.
Rezaian’s detention – a situation the secretary of Iran’s own human rights council has called a “fiasco” – has caused much embarrassment to the president, who has sought to cast himself as a reformer. After his election in 2013, Rouhani went to the Washington Post to publish his first and only opinion piece in the western press, calling for cooperation between Iran and the west.
The day Rezaian was arrested, Iran’s culture ministry had just renewed his press credentials.
“That shows you that one branch of government was totally fine with what Jason was doing and extended his press credentials, and another branch of government, the security forces and the intelligence forces, goes and breaks in and detains him,” said Faraz Sanei, the Iran researcher with Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division.
“It’s a very complicated picture, both in terms of how agencies view press freedoms and in terms of Iranian laws.”
Iran has long been condemned for its ongoing persecution of journalists, which has been stepped up in recent months. This year, Iran’s judiciary, at odds with the reform-minded president, has overseen a series of arrests of journalists and local activists, often carried out by the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guards.
Sanei said the next step could be a formal, probably closed, trial, though what happens next is up to the discretion of the Iranian government.
“We know that already there are severe due process violations so any trial that takes place, frankly, is going to be tainted,” Sanei said.
Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus are suspicious of dual citizens, and historically such citizens are treated solely as Iranians, experts say, which is why requests for consular access by the Swiss, who represent US interests in Iran, has been denied.
“Any dual national Iranian is considered an Iranian in Iran, which makes it that much more difficult”, said Haleh Esfandiari, a dual Iranian-American citizen and a former Evin prison inmate.
Esfandiari, who is now the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC, spent 105 days in solitary confinement in 2007, after she was accused of conspiring to topple the regime.
Recalling her detention, she said worse than the physical pain is the psychological distress.
“There is a lot of mental pressure,” she said. “I fought very hard to not end up in a state of despair. Because that’s what they want. They want you to feel desperate, low, depressed so that then they can make you sign a confession or repeat what they want you to tell them.
Esfandiari said she hopes Rezaian knows there are people outside Evin prison working tirelessly to secure his release.
“One of the tactics of the interrogator is telling the prisoner, especially in our cases, that nobody in the outside world cares for you, while in reality the world does care for you,” she said.
Considering this, Esfandiari said she thinks increased media attention of Rezaian’s ordeal would help put pressure on Iran’s government to release him, which she believes happened in her case.
“Publicity is the last thing the Iranian government wants,” she said.
She explained: “The big difference between my case and Jason’s case is that I was in the press on a daily basis. There were things constantly being written about me … and that made it really unpleasant and uncomfortable for the Iranian authorities.”
Rezaian’s family have launched a campaign demanding that the Iranian government drop all the charges against him and release him unconditionally.
Last week, Rezaian’s mother travelled to Tehran after appealing directly to Ayatollah Khamenei for Jason’s freedom.
She arrived in Tehran on Tuesday, Ali said, but was denied access when she went to see Rezaian in prison on Wednesday morning. She has vowed to keep trying until Iranian officials let her see her son.
Ali said he and his family will continue to fight unwaveringly for Rezaian’s release. Until then, they are doing their best to keep up their spirits and not lose hope.
“We’d love for him and his wife to be able to leave the country,” Ali said. Addressing the Iranian authorities he added: ”Please, just drop the charges, we don’t even have to know what they are. Just let him leave. He could get on a plane tonight. He could be home by Christmas.”
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