U.S. scholar on trial in Iran

The Washington Times

Kian Tajbakhsh was supposed to be starting a prestigious professorship this month at Columbia University. Instead, the Iranian-American urban planner is standing trial on allegations that he is one of the masterminds of the protests that followed Iran's June 12 presidential elections. Mr. Tajbakhsh, who served four months in an Iranian prison in 2007 on espionage charges, is not the most well-known American citizen arrested in recent years by Iran's authorities, but he may be in the most jeopardy.

The government has accused him of fomenting a so-called "velvet revolution" -- the sort of peaceful, mass political movement that ousted several Eastern European regimes two decades ago after the fall of the Berlin Wall and, more recently, governments in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia. "The circumstances surrounding Mr. Tajbakhsh's current detention are particularly serious, given the severity of the ongoing power struggle within the Iranian regime," said Pamela Kilpadi, a friend who has been working on a book with the professor.

"[Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard appear to be pitted against the clerical judiciary establishment, with Kian an innocent victim caught in between," she said. Mr. Tajbakhsh appears to have been targeted because he has been associated with the Open Society Institute, an organization largely funded by financier George Soros. Mr. Soros has achieved an almost mythic reputation among Iran's hard-line factions, who believe he is behind much of the civil unrest around the world against authoritarian regimes. (Read more...)