Held or Missing in Iran: Two Women Plead for Their Relatives

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To the Editor:

Re “Iran Is Looking for Partners,” by Mohammad Javad Zarif (Op-Ed, Dec. 11):

Mr. Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, argues that Europe should work with Iran, which he presents as a reasonable and peaceful state. I want very much to believe him, but actions speak louder than words.

My husband, Xiyue Wang, an American citizen, has been held for a year and a half in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran. Without a shred of evidence, he has been convicted of spying and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. What was his alleged crime? Researching his dissertation.

My husband, a graduate student at Princeton University, was gathering information for his study of comparative governance in the Islamic Central Asian world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He wanted to compare governance practices across national boundaries in this largely Muslim region — an ambitious project, but one that grew out of his longstanding respect for Islam and his love for Persian culture.

His project required him to sift through mundane documentation of day-to-day governance in the Qajar dynasty a century ago, to look for common threads and to see how and when good governance practices emerged.

The documents he needed to peruse were hardly exciting, and definitely not confidential. In fact, to obtain access to the archives, he needed to lay out his research plans in advance and obtain permission from all the requisite authorities. Far from forbidding him to work in the archive, they even wrote him a letter of introduction.

Ever since Xiyue was abruptly taken into custody, his life and mine have been overturned. We had been pursuing our careers and raising our energetic toddler, a daily round of work and family time. Now we live in a Kafkaesque nightmare. It’s like getting a terminal cancer diagnosis: in five minutes, everything changes, and over time, you become unwillingly expert in obscure procedures and tests.

I have learned more about Iranian politics than I ever wanted to know, and I read about nuclear negotiations as if my happiness were at stake, because it is. For Xiyue, it’s much worse.

He is treated with calculated cruelty, subjected to daily humiliations. His teeth are decaying; his knees hurt because of arthritis, aggravated by endless sitting and squatting on the floor; he is cold, and the labyrinthine prison system makes it hard for me to provide him with warm clothes.

At times his cellmates have threatened and beaten him. We are allowed to talk on the telephone regularly, and I try to keep his spirits up, but it is hard when neither of us knows how much real hope there is. Once, in a despairing moment, my husband attempted suicide.

Our son is growing up without a father. He was 2 when Xiyue was arrested; he’s 4 now. At first Shaofan talked about his father a lot, but now it is less and less. I don’t know if it’s kinder to remind him that he has a father who loves him or to let him forget.

It pains me when I see him sad, and also when he is cheerfully oblivious. It is not fair that Xiyue is missing these precious years of our son’s childhood, and it’s not fair that Shaofan has a mother whose thoughts are miles away.

I would like to believe that this episode is one horrible tragic mistake and that the Iranian authorities are as Mr. Zarif has described them. I want to believe that there is no intent to hold our lives hostage because it confers political leverage. Xiyue is just a student, a nobody; only his citizenship made him a valuable target.

If Iran truly stands by international norms of a respectable foreign policy in word, then it must do so in deed as well. Mr. Zarif, if you want people to think that Iran is a reasonable country, letting this innocent young American return home to his wife and son would be a good start. We have suffered enough.

HUA QU, BEIJING

To the Editor:

It is astounding that a country that doesn’t even have the simple human decency to show mercy in resolving the case of my father, Bob Levinson, can wax poetic on peace and tangible action.

Iran has not shown tangible action on his case for more than 10 years, and my father and my family continue to suffer every single day because of it.

No country should even consider cooperating with Iran until it honors its own promise to cooperate with the United States on Bob Levinson. Talk is cheap. It is time that Iran take its own meaningful first step to peace by finally sending our beloved father home to us.

SARAH LEVINSON MORIARTY, CHESTER, N.J.