Everywhere he traveled in the world, Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian invited people to visit Iran, where he has lived for nearly 10 years, and reported for the Post since 2012.
His brother, Ali Rezaian, said people would respond with caution to Jason’s invitation. “He’d say, ‘It’ll be fine, it’s great. People will be really nice to you. People are fantastic. It’s a great place to be. There’s good food. There’s fantastic sites.'”
Jason Rezaian has now spent more than 100 days in prison in Iran. His ongoing imprisonment, which the Iranian judiciary has failed to justify or explain, is a naked violation of press freedom. It is also a blow to efforts develop a complex, rich, and critical portrait of Iran in the media.
While he is sitting in prison, he is not reporting on Iran’s contentious politics, its troubled economy, its diplomacy, its citizens’ budding interest in baseball or American pop music. Nor, of course, is he reporting on the abuses of the Iranian state. Those are all topics he wrote about for the Post before he was detained from his home in Tehran on June 22.
“You go back and look at the stories that he’s done,” Ali said in a phone interview from New York. “They’re really representative of the kind of guy he is, the kind of reporter he wanted to be, which is one that showed people what Iran was like, one that really humanized people oftentimes not understood in the media.”
His body of works makes clear that he was committed to reporting on Iran in all of its complexity, and while he sits in prison, the outside world has a duller, smaller understanding of Iran as a country. The jailers, not the journalist, bear responsibility for painting a two-dimensional portrait of Iran, a simple storyline about repression.
Rezaian, a dual Iranian-American citizen, was arrested along with his wife Yeganeh Salehi, a journalist for the United Arab Emirates-based newspaper The National. Salehi was released on bail in October, although she was also not charged with any crime. Two Iranian-American photojournalists arrested along with them were also released less than a month later.
Foreign correspondents everywhere face the problem of packing political and cultural complexity into 800-word newspaper articles or three-minute television packages. This is a special challenge when it comes to Iran, a vast nation with a tortured relationship with the United States. Few Iranians will forget the CIA’s 1953 coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadeq. Few Americans will forget the 1979-81 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran, in which embassy staff were held hostage in a televised 14-month ordeal.
Jason Rezaian’s life story spans that political chasm. Born to an Iranian father and a mother from the Chicago area, he and his brother grew up in Marin County, CA. He began studying Persian in college and moved to Iran as an adult. Based in Tehran for the last several years, he was not able to let go of California completely, telling The New Yorker‘s Laura Secor that he fantasized about importing avocados. As a journalist, Rezaian was known for colorful, humanizing stories: hamburger joints, tourism tales. Before his arrest, he appeared in a taping of Anthony Bourdain’s popular food show Parts Unknown.
Though he reported on government rights violations, much of his work was in features about Iran’s culture, environment, and economy. “Therefore his arrest was very surprising to most of us. It further signaled that his arrest was politically motivated and had nothing to do with his journalism,” said Farnaz Fassi, a Beirut-based correspondent for the Wall Street Journal covering Iran and the Middle East.
Iranian authorities have presented no evidence against Rezaian. The closest thing to an explanation for his arrest came this week from Mohammed Javad Larijani, the head of Iran’s human rights council, who said in an interview with Euronews that the charges against him involve unspecified activity “which breaches the security of the state.” Larijani said he hoped prosecutors would drop the case before going to trial. Rezaian has so far been barred from hiring a lawyer, because no charges had been filed against him.
Speaking to his own newspaper, Washington Post foreign editor Douglas Jehl said the paper was “heartened” by the suggestion that the charges might be dropped. “Jason never should have been detained, and it is time for the prosecutor to join Iran’s Human Rights Council in calling for his release.”
One possible explanation for Rezaian’s ordeal is that his arrest is a bid by hardliners in Iran’s judiciary and intelligence services to undermine President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate elected in June 2013. The hardliners oppose Rouhani’s concessions in the nuclear negotiations and his efforts to integrate Iran into the international community. Rezaian and Salehi’s arrest “throws down a gauntlet to Washington,” writes Yaga Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington in an op-ed in The New York Times.
Media freedom advocates hoped Rouhani’s election would bring greater openness. For a moment, signs emerged that those hopes would come true. More foreign journalists were granted visas to report from Iran. A cabinet minister called for rolling back censorship. A top Iranian daily printed an interview with a top US State Department official.
But in the last several months the regime crushed those hopes again, arresting or summoning for imprisonment 10 journalists. They include Saba Azarpeik, an investigative journalist for local newspapers who had reported on a recent series of beatings of detainees in Evin prison. Another, Mahnaz Mohammadi, a documentary filmmaker, activist, and attorney, was summoned in June to serve a five-year prison sentence on charges relating to the accusation that she sent film to the BBC. The jailed journalists join 35 others who were already in Iran’s prisons, according to a 2013 study by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Jason Rezaian remains the most visible of these men and women. There is mounting evidence that his arrest is the result of cynical political calculations. His family and colleagues want him free. “Jason is one of the most honest and transparent journalists there is,” said Kelly Niknejad, the editor of the Guardian‘s Tehran Bureau news site. “I think his openness and his honesty and his kindness is just so out of place in a shark infested place like journalism in Iran, and it probably baffled them.”
Jared Malsin is a freelance journalist based in Cairo