10 years later, Island man languishes in Iran jail
Today marks the 10th birthday that Saanich’s Saeed Malekpour has spent in an Iranian prison.
Which means that in Vancouver, his sister, Maryam Malekpour, continues her dogged, lonely campaign to free her big brother. It has consumed her life.
“I’m just sick and tired of doing this,” she says. “I don’t want to do it anymore.”
Yet she can’t stop, not with Saeed wasting away in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, where he is being held on what his supporters call trumped-up, politically motivated charges.
Saeed’s story has appeared here before. A gifted web programmer, he came to Canada in 2004 with his wife, Fatima Eftekhari. Eventually, they gained permanent-resident status. In 2006, they moved to Victoria, where he freelanced as a website designer and she finished her doctorate in medical nanotechnology and taught at UVic.
They embraced the Island lifestyle, skiing Mount Washington, swimming the Sooke Potholes, hiking Mount Doug. Their Saanich landlords loved them, describing the couple as friendly, fun-loving, compassionate and helpful.
Then things went sideways. After returning to Iran in October 2008 to see his dying father, Saeed was arrested on pornography charges.
His supporters say the accusation was ridiculous. All he had done was design open-source photo-sharing software that a client used, without his knowledge, to upload porn. The real story, they say, is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, worried about growing internet and social-media use, was using his case to intimidate the country’s restive young people.
Nonetheless, Saeed, after being tortured into a confession that he later recanted, was condemned to death, a sentence later converted to life in prison. He languishes there today, his marriage gone along with 10 years of his life.
“They know that Saeed is innocent,” Maryam said Monday. (Even if he wasn’t, his sentence was way out of line with those convicted of similar crimes, she says. An Iranian man who admitted running a porn site was given six months recently.)
Maryam agitated on her brother’s behalf so vigorously that she, too, found herself facing arrest and fled to Canada in 2012. She now works as a project coordinator for a Vancouver construction firm, but spends much of the rest of her time on a campaign she wishes she didn’t have to wage. She spoke at the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in Switzerland this spring, then appeared at a London, England, event on behalf of dualnationality prisoners in Iran. “I don’t have a normal life,” she says.
At least she gets to speak with her brother by phone two or three times a week. “He’s doing OK.” He keeps his hope up, but so far there’s no sign of action from the Iranian government. No sign from the Canadian government, either. “They tell me that they talk about Saeed behind the scenes.”
Canada does not have good relations with Iran, but Maryam thinks it might help if Ottawa were to enlist the help of those countries that do.
She is torn by the question of how best to persuade Iran to release her brother. The regime does not react well to being lectured by foreigners. Her agitation has ticked off Iranian authorities, who yelled at her aging mother about the fuss Maryam has made in the international media. “My mother was crying.” Her mom cries whenever her daughter calls now; Maryam misses her, but is reluctant to return to Iran. “I think it’s not safe.” At one point Maryam backed off from her activism, but rather than winning Saeed’s freedom, all that did was remove his case from the public consciousness. So now she wants people to join her in a “tweet storm” at noon today to mark her brother’s 43rd birthday, the 10th he has spent in prison. Twitter users can search #SaeedMalekpour for details.
Maryam is not comfortable driving efforts like this, putting herself in such a public role half a world from home, incurring the wrath of the Iranian government — but if she doesn’t fight for her brother, who will?
“I just want to lead my life, but I can’t just sit here and do nothing. I just want someone to hear my voice.”