Terry Glavin: The war is over, and the Iranian people lost

Mandana (left) and Mahsa Sotoudeh. Photo by Handout /Baha’i Community of Canada.

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Mandana and Mahsa Sotoudeh are free now. That’s the good news. It’s bittersweet, all the same.

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On Wednesday morning, without any explanation, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence forces released 38-year-old Mandana and her 25-year-old sister Mahsa, allowing them to return to their homes in Shiraz. The IRGC had arrested and imprisoned the sisters three months earlier, also without any explanation.

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Mandana and Mahsa were never charged with anything, and their story is typical of the predicament endured by Iran’s long-tormented Baha’i minority, which has only worsened since last summer’s 12-day war with Israel. The Baha’i International Community has documented several hundred similar cases since last June.

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The persecution went into high gear during the anti-regime protests that began last December, which resulted in the deaths of perhaps 30,000 protesters. The arbitrary arrests have intensified since the U.S.-Israeli war began in February.

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Iran’s Baha’is are routinely arrested, commonly without warrant, and often subjected to the most sadistic forms of torture, usually on the pretext that they are Zionist spies or criminal subversives. The targeting of Iran’s Baha’i people is carried out without regard to evidence of criminal wrondoing and the victims may spend months or years in prison. When they’re released, it’s just as random and capricious as the arrests that led them to jail in the first place.

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“I just had a few minutes talking with Mandana, but I don’t know how much she can explain herself over the telephone because we never know whether they are being listened to,” Mandana’s sister-in-law Roya Basiri, who lives in Langley, B.C., told me late Wednesday.

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Mandana has lost a lot of weight. Her time in prison was a horrible ordeal. That’s all she can say. Reporting these stories is always complicated by the threat of a victim’s re-arrest or the further harassment of a victim’s family for having drawn attention to the circumstances of any particular case.

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“I am happy, but I am not happy,” Roya said, “because of everybody else there in prison, every single one of them.”

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Roya managed to make her way to Canada seven years ago after having registered as a refugee with the United Nations offices in Turkey. Her brother Behzad Basiri, Mandana’s husband, was himself arrested after the IRGC kicked in the door to the family house around the same time as the sisters were arrested in late March. Behzad was released after about a month in prison.

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The arrests make no sense, Roya said, except in the fact that the family follows the Baha’i faith, a pacifistic, messianic belief system in the Abrahamic tradition that evolved in Iran in the mid-1800s. Neither Behzad, his wife Mandana or her sister Mahsa were politically active in any way. They were not involved in the protests. Behzad suffers from a severe back injury. Mandana runs a nail salon. Mahsa runs a computer shop out of her home.