What's Iran's Beef With Roxana Saberi?

Roxana Saberi with former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami (Saberi family photo)

"Ms. Saberi is a truly wonderful person who is in no way guilty of the charges leveled at her. I was lucky to work with her some years ago and have always remembered her as the modest, smart and kind person she was to me. I pray that truth-loving individuals will remember Roxana and work on her behalf until she is freed."--Kerry, from the comments below.

"I never faced much discrimination or any problems like that. It was more that I was embarrassed to look differently and have parents from different countries. It took me awhile to team that it's good to be different and it's important to respect others' differences."

If only her Iranian captors could hear those words today. Maybe she spoke them. Those were Roxana Saberi's words to the Bismark Tribune, in June 1997, a day after besting 19 contestants to win the Miss North Dakota crown and represent the state in that year's Miss America pageant. Originally from Fargo, she was 20, daughter of an Iranian father and Japanese mother. A piano solo (something classical but forgotten) had clinched it for her.

In Atlantic City three months later she won that year's inaugural Miss America Scholar award (she'd graduated summa cum laude from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., with a 3.97 grade point average) and made it to the last 10 the night of the pageant, but finally lost to Illinois' Katherine Shindle.

The following fall Saberi's byline was appearing in North Dakota newspapers, then as a staffer for the Springfield News-Leader in Missouri ("Another barbecue chain is taking a slice out of the local market," she wrote in a July 1999 piece) and other papers. Along the way she earned two master's degrees--one in journalism from Northwestern University, one in international relations from Cambridge. And she made the jump to National Public Radio in 2003. She's also worked for the BBC, ABC News and Fox News. She's a rising star of what's left of America's foreign affairs journalism corps.

But today, she sits in Tehran's repulsive Evin prison, where she's been held since Jan. 31. She's accused of espionage, the all-purpose dubious charge of cowardice and arbitrariness. (Iranian blogger Omid-Reza Mirsayafi died last month in Evin, supposedly a suicide. He was charged with insulting Itan's leaders on his blog.)

The charge is bogus, of course. But the motive behind it isn't. It's consistent with several characteristics of the Iranian regime: Its insecurity; its chaotic, competing power structures, which yields seemingly schizophrenic behavior by the regime (welcoming dialogue with Obama with one hand, smashing rights with the other); and what may be ideological corrosion at the heart of the regime.

Iran's leaders haven't gone out of their way to praise Barack Obama. But they've held back the virulent rhetoric, so worn during the Bush years, as if to see what Obama may have planned. Their response to his recent message to Iran was relatively cautious. Which is precisely what may explain these whip-cracks: Iran's more reactionary factions, such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fundamentalist base and the country's Revolutionary Guard, feel threatened by conciliation, which would marginalize them. They have to remind Iranians that they matter somehow. They're like Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in South Lebanon, which needs a belligerent Israel to justify itself and its its own radicalism (Israel usually, stupidly obliges). So they stage these high-profile crackdowns.

Saberi is a double victim. She's the victim of a regime's regressive penal code and xenophobia. But she's also the victim of Iran's internal struggles between reformers and reactionaries. The reactionaries are in power. They sense danger in June's election. They're asserting themselves. They can't very well bomb Israel. So they do the next-best thing. They take an American prisoner. ho knows, maybe there's longing among the fanatics for that old-time-religion head-banging symbolized by the 444 days of the 1979-80 hostage crisis.

That's not to say that the ploy can't backfire. It could with enough worldwide revulsion, enough pressure from European and American governments (more pressure from the Obama administration would be a nice start, as opposed to letting Saberi fall victim to Obama's larger aims). Even the Iranian regime is sensitive to concerted opposition.

Saberi is reportedly threatening a hunger strike but was just visited by her father, who found her in good spirits. He vows to stay in Iran until her release. Don't put it past the Revolutionary Guard not to jail him, too, though both may appeal to Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi, head of Iran’s judiciary and an occasional voice on behalf of human rights. But his is a minority view.

Meanwhile, Saberi sits and suffers for no other reason than to satisfy the arbitrary hysterics of a pathetic, brutish regime.