U.S. News & World Report
May 29 2009

Iran Holds Aid Worker Silva Harotonian on Espionage Charges

The State Department asserts the charges are without merit

By Alex Kingsbury
Posted May 29, 2009

Journalist Roxana Saberi is breathing easier these days, back in the
United States after spending four months in Iran’s notorious Evin
prison on charges of spying for the United States. Saberi’s was a
cause célèbre, but Evin is home to numerous political
prisoners, arrested for crimes against the regime both real and
imagined.

One of Saberi’s former cellmates, who has thus far escaped
international attention, is Silva Harotonian. She’s being held on
espionage charges that’like Saberi’s’the State Department in
Washington asserts are without merit. Harotonian is an Iranian
citizen, but her family in Los Angeles is hoping that Saberi’s release
could also help free her. A last-ditch appeal filed by defense lawyers
has yet to be ruled on.

While drinking a cup of tea in her mother’s Tehran apartment last
June, Harotonian was arrested and charged with fomenting a "Velvet
Revolution" against the Iranian government. The 34-year-old was
convicted in January and sentenced to three years in prison, where
family members say she is in poor and worsening health. They say she
is a well-intentioned aid worker wrongly accused. "She never even read
the news or followed politics. She just wanted to do something good
for her country," says her cousin, Klara Moradkhan, who lives in Los
Angeles.

At the time of her arrest, Harotonian was working for the
International Research and Exchanges Board, a Washington-based
organization that for four decades has facilitated exchange programs
around the globe. The group receives some funding from the U.S. State
Department, and U.S. officials insist that IREX and its employees were
not involved in anything either illegal or nefarious.

Unlike Saberi, an Iranian-American who was born in the United States,
Harotonian is an Iranian citizen of Armenian descent, although her
mother and cousins are naturalized U.S. citizens. Harotonian applied
for a U.S. green card in 2001, it had not been issued when she was
arrested.

Harotonian had been arranging travel for Iranian medical workers who
were to attend a conference in the United States about maternal and
child health education. She worked out of the IREX office in Armenia
and had traveled to Tehran on three previous occasions for projects
before being arrested last summer. A similar conference had gone off
without a hitch, and IREX had made no secret of its work in Iran, says
the group’s president, W. Robert Pearson. Sitting in his Washington
office and sporting a postage-stamp-sized freesilva.org pin on his
lapel, Pearson says that it’s the first time that an IREX employee has
been accused of spying. "Whatever the misunderstanding, we’d like to
know what happened so that we can help to clear it up," he says.

Because the case involves Iran detaining one of its own citizens,
U.S. officials have little leverage to act on Harotonian’s
behalf. Indeed, some of her backers quietly worry that too much
support from Washington could backfire in a case where the defendant
is trying to prove she wasn’t working for the U.S. government. Even as
they await the ruling on the final appeal, supporters are campaigning
for leniency.

rld/2009/05/29/iran-holds-aid-worker-silva-haroton ian-on-espionage-charges.html