The WaPo’s reporter in Tehran, Jason Rezaian, and his wife Yeganeh Salehi, also a journalist, were arrested a couple weeks ago:
As one of few foreign correspondents in based in Iran, Rezaian’s reporting hardly breached the sensitivities that the Iranian ruling apparatus is known to crackdown upon. His last two articles for The Washington Post covered baseball in Iran (“In Iran, a spark of enthusiasm for America’s national pastime”) and coverage of the nuclear negotiations from Vienna (“World powers agree to extend talks with Iran”). He was arrested in his home, alongside his wife, upon his return from Vienna. …
It is unclear on what charges the Iranian-Americans are detained, as official state media have verified the arrests but not the reasons behind them. An unconfirmed report by Tasnim news website, associated with Revolutionary Guards, claimed the arrests were on suspicions of spying.
The Economist notes that “Iran has long been hostile to the media”:
Twenty-seven journalists are currently in jail in Iran, according to the International Federation of Journalists, a Brussels-based lobby. But in the wake of the election last year of Hassan Rohani as president pressure on the media eased. Several journalists were freed in the days after he took office.
That now appears to have changed. Mr Rezaian and his wife (pictured above) are part of a worrying new spate of arrests. On May 28th Saba Azarpeik, an Iranian writer, was detained after Etemad (“Trust” in Farsi), a reformist newspaper, published a testy exchange between her and Muhammad Sadegh Kooshky, a professor at Tehran University and a member of an anti-Rohani pressure group. Two months later Marzieh Rasouli, a writer on arts and culture, was sentenced to 50 lashes and two years in prison. Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based organisation, says she and two other Iranian journalists, Parastoo Dokouhaki and Sahamoldin Borghani, were accused of collaborating with the BBC, which is seen as part of Britain’s spy network by some hardliners.
No one knows why Iran feels the need to crack down now.
Last week, Saeed Kamali Dehghan heard that six Iranian judges are leading the new crackdown on journalists and political activists:
In their testimonies, many prisoners have accused the six judges of acting on the instructions of top security officials and prison interrogators, and collaborating with the country’s intelligence ministry or the elite Revolutionary Guards. Several prisoners said the sort of sentences they were threatened with in interrogation sessions were later handed down in their trials, which they say points to close collaboration between judges and the intelligence apparatus.
Earlier this week, Haleh Esfandiari argued that Iran’s hard-liners are using the arrests “to undercut other countries’ confidence in [Rouhani’s] ability to deliver on promises Iran might make in a negotiated deal”:
The security agencies manage to discover spies and foreign plots whenever an Iranian government seeks a rapprochement with the West. In 1999, when the reformist Mohammad Khatami was president, 13 Iranian Jews from Shiraz and Isfahan, including a 16-year-old boy, were arrested on fabricated charges of spying for “the Zionist entity” and “world arrogance.” Ten were eventually sentenced to prison terms — a carefully calculated decision that defied the concerns of members of the European Union, and chilled Iran’s relations with them.
Mr. Khatami’s failure to take a stand against a trial that was widely regarded as farcical left him looking weak, as did his earlier failure to speak up when a political ally, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the mayor of Tehran, was tried and sentenced on fabricated corruption charges. Those two events only encouraged his opponents to thwart the president in other ways, further weakening faith abroad that he had the clout within Iran’s political system — and most important, with its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — to withstand pressure from the hard-liners.
The Dish 