Robert Fisk: Is Shane Bauer really an enemy of Iran?

[EFerrari]

Robert Fisk: Is Shane Bauer really an enemy of Iran?

The journalist, a fearless defender of the Middle East's dispossessed, is about to go on trial in Tehran for alleged espionage

Friday 6 May 2011

Journalism is not an exact art, so the Americans who go on trial in Tehran for "espionage" next Wednesday are called the "hikers", seized by Iranian border guards as they trekked close to the frontier in Iraqi Kurdistan almost two years ago. Shane Bauer and his fiancée Sarah Shourd, along with Shane's friend Joshua Fattal, were on holiday, enjoying the beauties of the great Ahmed Awa waterfall in Iraq when their vacation turned into one of those macabre and frightening dramas that Iran often seems to present to the unwary.

But the world's press somehow lost sight of the fact that Mr Bauer – far from being just a "hiker" – is also a fine and committed journalist, a writer of brilliant reports from Iraq, Ethiopia, Syria, even from the Native American Oglala Sioux reservation at Pine Tree, in America's South Dakota. He has interviewed the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and his long articles reflect enormous compassion for the poor and suffering of Iraq and for the Palestinians under siege in Gaza.

So why on earth is Iran holding Mr Bauer and Mr Fattal when they quite obviously sympathise with those whom the Islamic Republic of Iran constantly supports? There are, of course, wheels within wheels in Iran, but many of its officials have a keen sense of justice. In a world packed with violent men and war criminals, not a few of them in the West, the incarceration of these two men within the forbidding confines of Evin prison, let alone their trial next week, is an injustice.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-is-shane-bauer-really-an-enemy-of-iran-2279810.html

NMAL