Iran Feature: The Limbo of the Refugee Journalists (Arjomand)
Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 7:13
Noah Arjomand writes for Tehran Bureau:
Nima biked to Turkey. He'd been in and out of the Iranian prison system on political charges for the past decade. He was sure he was on the no-fly list and the police were monitoring buses and trains leaving the capital, so he rode his bicycle more than 500 miles from Tehran to Tabriz in eastern Iran. From there, he got on a train to Van on the Turkish side of the border, bribing his way through customs with what money he'd been able to bring with him. From Van he biked almost 900 miles to Ankara to register for refugee status with the United Nations.
He had little money while he waited for the U.N. to assign him an interview date and town of residence. "The first few days I lived in a park, the park within the Parliament building complex. I pitched a tent." He grinned and shook his head. He stayed there for about ten days, evicted occasionally by guards whose language he didn't speak, before the U.N. told him to report to the police station in Kütahya, 185 miles or so to the west. Nima packed up his tent and biked over.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an NGO founded by American foreign correspondents to advocate for press freedom and aid reporters in trouble, sent me to Turkey to meet with a few of the dozens of Iranian journalists who had fled their country. Turkey is the most stable of Iran's neighbors, and since Iranian citizens are allowed to cross the border without visas, it's a gateway for Iranian refugees hoping to resettle in Europe or North America.
Most left Iran after the controversial 2009 presidential election, when popular opposition to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's widely disputed reelection exploded and was met with state violence and a crackdown on the press that continues to this day.
Ali is a little man with a receding hairline who smiles a lot. Mina is pretty and very quiet, a decade younger than her husband. I visited them in their apartment in Ankara, where they were waiting to hear back from the U.N. and the American embassy....
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