'I would like to die in my country'

When the subject turns to Iran these days, the focus tends to be on the country's bid to revive its nuclear program under its new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But Mehrangiz Kar, a human rights activist and lawyer in Iran who is now a fellow at Harvard at the Kennedy School of Government's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, has a more personal story about another aspect of Iran. And it offers an intimate look at the persecution of activists inside the country.

Kar's husband, Siamak Pourzand, 75, a well-known journalist before the country's Islamic Revolution in 1979, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in April 2002 for ''undermining state security through his links with monarchists and counterrevolutionaries." Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and International PEN have questioned the legality of the closed trial that handed down Pourzand's sentence, and they have criticized the medical care he has received in prison; he's currently under temporary house arrest in Tehran because of his poor health. Pourzand's family and various human rights organizations suspect that Pourzand's jailers tortured him to exact his confession. US Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware issued a statement in July asking the Iranian government to release him.

''I wish I could say that all the pressure is going to have a result," says Elise Auerbach, an Amnesty International volunteer specializing in Iran and Jordan. ''But I just don't know how responsive the Iranian government is right now to international pressure." The Interests Section of the Islamic Republic, in Washington, D.C., the diplomatic representative of Iran in the United States, did not respond to the Globe's inquiries.

Pourzand was arrested in November 2001, a few months after Kar left Iran for breast cancer treatment. Permission to leave came soon after Kar's own pretrial incarceration. She had received a four-year sentence for a speech she gave at a conference in Berlin in 2000, but the sentence was reversed on appeal.

''I said, 'With this [current Iranian] constitution, reform is not possible. If you are serious [about] reform and human rights, you have to agree [to have] reform in the constitution,' " says Kar, sitting in her sparsely decorated office at the Carr Center.

She pauses, then adds, ''They never forgave me for that statement."

After bringing her younger daughter, Azadeh Pourzand, now 21, to Maryland, Kar had hoped to return to Iran. But after her husband's arrest, she decided she could be of more use publicizing his predicament outside the country.

Now Kar struggles to keep together a family in four parts of the world. She worries about her husband, who since she left the country has been arrested twice, fallen into a coma, had a heart attack, and suffered a spinal condition that left him barely able to walk. Her eldest daughter, Lily Pourzand, 31, moved to Canada in 1999 after getting her law degree in Iran because she knew that a person from a political family like hers could never pass the country's bar exam.

It's a wearying predicament for a 61-year-old woman, particularly one who ''believes in activism within the country," says Azadeh Pourzand, now a junior at Oberlin College in Ohio. Kar has published 15 books and more than 100 articles about human rights and women's rights. But for the past five years she's wandered from fellowship to fellowship in a grind that makes her increasingly feel the need to go home.

Kar says that an Iranian official once asked her, ''Why do you want to return to Iran?"

Kar replied, ''Because I am old; in my age, I cannot get [a] job outside of Iran and I would like to die in my country."

Kar's experience in jail was significantly different than her husband's. Her accusers were members of the reformist government under the country's previous president, Mohammad Khatami. They initially placed her in solitary confinement for two months, but that changed as Lily Pourzand got word out of her mother's arrest. Kar wasn't allowed to call her family for the first 10 days of her arrest. Then international pressure forced the Iranians to allow her to call her family once a week.

But at that time Iran also had a parallel legal system not under the control of the government. As Lily Pourzand explains, ''They were the underground agents working separately for the hard-liners."

This is the group, Kar says, ''that arrested my husband. They are very, very violent . . . and they are related to [the] hard-liners in power. That's why now if I return to Iran, this group [is the one that will] arrest me."

Just before he disappeared, Siamak Pourzand called and told his family that he thought two motorcycles were following him.

''Honestly, I didn't take it seriously," says his eldest daughter. ''I asked, 'Why?' "

Lily instructed her father to get the license plate numbers on the bikes. She never received his return call. Soon after, Siamak Pourzand was at his sister's home walking a visiting friend to his car. The friend's car pulled away, but Pourzand's sister said her brother never reentered her house. For three months, the family had no idea whether he was alive, says Lily.

The state media televised Pourzand's ''confession" in July 2002. ''It was not [a] trial," says Kar. ''It was something like [a] show. And he was [testifying] against him[self], against me, against friends." The television images showed he had lost a lot of weight.

His sister visited Pourzand twice, but his family received only one phone call from him until he received a temporary medical release in November 2002 because of his poor health. ''He was in an isolated cell for over one year and a half under terrible torture," says Lily.

He said, ''Count me dead," says Azadeh Pourzand. Conversations after his release were excruciating. ''Sometimes," says Kar, ''when we were calling him he [didn't] know us. He said, 'Who are you? I don't know what you're talking about.' He was telling his daughters, 'Why are you telling something nice and kind to me? I am nothing.' He had forgotten words like, 'I love you,' 'I like you,' 'I miss you.' He said, 'Will you please send me your pictures because I have forgotten you.' "

A success under the Shah of Iran, Siamak Pourzand was considered an enemy of the government that followed. ''They introduced him," says Lily, ''as one of the people who [it would be] good to kill, and they advertised it in the newspaper." He was arrested and jailed twice -- once in 1986 and again in 1990, says Lily.

For a while, Pourzand lived a quiet life as the editor of an internal magazine for an engineering association. But after Khatami won the election in 1997, Pourzand began working as a cultural commentator for the reformist media. Six months before his 2001 arrest, Pourzand became the head of a newly formed cultural organization in Iran.

''They don't like that we do that," says Kar. ''They think you are publishing propaganda, promoting western culture. . . . They say anything like that is something against Islam."

In 2003, six months after his medical release, Pourzand was rearrested and jailed at Evin prison, known for housing activists. ''By that," says Kar, ''we could understand that he is in a legal prison."

His medical condition deteriorated until March 2004, according to Amnesty. His jailers sent him to a hospital, says Kar, ''with chained hands and feet. After that my understanding is, because they didn't tell us anything, they preferred that he be outside the prison because they were afraid [he would] die."

Since last April, Kar says, Pourzand has lived under house arrest in a small apartment in Tehran from which he regularly sends reports about his medical condition to Evin prison. His telephone is tapped, he doesn't have his passport, and he receives random visits from strangers as part of a scary game that holds the threat of reincarceration.

About four months ago, says Lily, the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office reiterated its demand for the release of her father, originally made in 2002. Soon after, he received a call from the leader of the group that initially imprisoned him, says Lily. ''[He] said, 'I want to say, Hi. We have no address from you. . . . You know we are different from Evin.' He wanted to come over and have a visit [with] my father. We had a very bad 24 hours. We were afraid they would take him again." Kar refuses to let such tales scare her. She suddenly confesses that she probably will to return to Iran.

''I'm closer to a decision," says Kar, ''because I am getting tired. I say, 'OK, you do anything you like.' Because this situation is not --"

She breaks off, then continues, ''I work a fellowship. It's not a job. At this age, what can I do?"