Acclaimed Journalist Roxana Saberi to Speak with Facing History Audiences

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The year was 2009 and the headlines read like something out of a tabloid. A multiethnic, Midwestern former Miss America finalist was arrested while working in Iran as a journalist and was being held in the country’s worst prison.

Evin prison - many went in and never returned. The people held, often for years, were targeted for acts most in the free world regard as the exercising of basic rights: speaking out against government, practicing a certain religion, reporting a story. Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi was just one of them. Living in the country and writing a book on Iran, Saberi found herself in an Evin cell just 11 days after President Barack Obama took office in the United States. On May 2, Saberi will be the featured speaker at the fourth annual Facing History and Ourselves benefit dinner [2] in Denver, Colorado.

Saberi, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Iranian father who immigrated to the U.S. together after they wed, was born in New Jersey and raised in Fargo, North Dakota. It was there, in the heart of the Midwest, that Saberi’s curiosity of other cultures was first piqued. “Growing up in North Dakota, there were not very many racial or ethnic minorities,” Saberi said recently by phone from New York where she has resumed work on her book about Iranian culture and the country’s everyday people. “My brother and I stood out quite a bit. When I was younger I wanted to fit in, I wasn’t as proud of my parents’ heritages. As I grew older, I grew more curious about what those heritages meant to my identity.”

As a young adult at Concordia College, that curiosity led Saberi to the college newspaper and the campus television station. “I was meeting new people, learning about something new every day,” she said of her burgeoning love affair with journalism. “I was able to teach what I’d learned and I saw that it would give new purpose to my work. There was so much diversity, I didn’t feel like I’d ever get bored.”

In 1997, Saberi graduated with degrees in Communication and French. That same year, she had a brief stint as a beauty queen contestant. “I was supposed to go to North Carolina to do an internship at an NBC news channel,” she laughed. But an acquaintance called in a favor – the Miss North Dakota pageant was lacking in contestants. When she won – “I was shocked,” she said – Saberi told the audience that her goal was to encourage cultural appreciation. “When I went to these schools and spoke, I talked about how we are unified in our humanity, but we’re also diversified,” she said. “We have unity and diversity. It was an issue that many people in North Dakota hadn’t really ever talked about.” She went on to place in the top 10 in the Miss America pageant.

In 2003, after earning masters degrees from Northwestern (broadcast journalism) and Cambridge (international relations) universities, and working as a journalist in the U.S., Saberi moved to Iran, the country of her father, to further pursue her budding career. “I felt like I couldn’t get to know the country well unless I went there,” said Saberi, who had visited her mother’s homeland of Japan three times as a child, but never her father’s. “I believed it was good for me to learn more about Iran, and it would be good for others to learn more, through journalism.”

Saberi applied for an Iranian passport, which granted her access to a country not many outsiders were allowed into. While there, Saberi did reporting for PBS, NPR, Fox News, and stations broadcast in Asia, South Africa, and New Zealand, as well as for Vatican Radio. The Iranian government revoked her press pass in 2006, but Saberi took it as an opportunity to start writing the book about the Iranian people that she’d always wanted to. “It’s about their lives beyond the news headlines,” she said.

Saberi’s interest in Iran was two-fold: She wanted to learn more about her father’s identity, and thus her own, but she also recognized the need to tell the largely untold story of a people in a country that was rising in its global importance. “Iran is a very important country, not just in the Middle East region, but in the world because of its history, its geopolitical location, its resources, its oil. It has the world’s only Shiite Islamic government. It is between Iraq and Afghanistan and the U.S. was involved in both countries at the time,” Saberi said. “We hear the stories of the politics, but we don’t hear as much about the ordinary people in this important country and their lives.”

In early 2009, just weeks before Saberi was set to leave Iran and return to the U.S., four men showed up at her apartment and arrested her. They did not give her a reason and they did not allow her to notify anyone – not her neighbors, her Iranian boyfriend, or her parents back in America – about where she was and what had happened. Taken to the notorious Evin prison, Saberi was put in solitary confinement. Under pressure from her captors, she falsely confessed to allegations of espionage. It was not until April that a court would finally try her for the charge.

“I didn’t feel what it was like to have my rights taken away like that until I was in prison,” said Saberi, who at one point was sentenced to eight years behind bars. “You’re an author or journalist and you want to write a book and you’re imprisoned for that.”

Eventually, Saberi made what she describes now as the “difficult” decision to recant her false confession. After her time in solitary confinement, her captors moved Saberi into cells with other prisoners. Her cellmates rotated often – the guards did not want to keep the same women together for too long. It was while sharing a space with the other female prisoners and hearing their stories that Saberi decided to recant. “I met many women who said, ‘We’d rather stay in here and tell the truth than leave and tell lies.’ They wanted freedom of conscience. I realized I couldn’t have that without recanting my false confession,” she said. “I always thought that I wanted to dedicate my life to a greater purpose and I thought, maybe journalism can help me do that because it is helping to inform other people. When I was in prison, I kind of forgot that greater purpose and my greater purpose for a time became about wanting to be free. Then I met these other women whose values and greater purposes – freedom of religion, of assembly – were more important than their physical selves. They refused to be robbed of their dignity. These things reminded me that yes, freedom is good, but only if you’re able to have freedom of conscience as well.”

The day she told her captors the truth, Saberi – cut off from any media and knowledge of life outside the prison walls – finally learned that the world was closely watching her case. President Obama and U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton called for her release, as did widely-recognized organizations like Amnesty International. Media representatives from outlets ranging from the BBC and NPR, to ABC and Fox News, to the Wall Street Journal signed an open letter to the Iranian government expressing their concern.

Saberi’s parents were eventually allowed to visit their daughter in prison, but even then she was threatened against choosing the lawyer she desired and went through a quick, unjust trial. Within time, Saberi began a hunger strike. “That’s what it took for me to stand up for the truth,” she said.

When she finally learned that the charges against her were overturned and she would be released from Evin, Saberi was skeptical. “I didn’t really want to believe it until I was out of the prison and with my parents,” she said. She’d heard the same promise from her captors and the court system multiple times before.

As she drove away from Evin in May, 2009, Saberi watched the prison shrink in the rearview mirror with mixed emotions. “I felt joy for my freedom, but sorrow for the women I was leaving behind,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Why am I so lucky? Because I am Iranian-American? Because I am a journalist?’ There are so many people who deserve freedom. There were so many of them then and there are so many of them today.” When she first returned to America, Saberi moved back to North Dakota and into her parents’ home. She began work on a book about her experience in Evin. Titled “Between Two Worlds: My Life and Captivity in Iran,” the book was published in March, 2010 – just months after her release. Today, in addition to working on the book she originally started while in Iran, Saberi speaks out about “Between Two Worlds” and advocates for human rights worldwide. On October 19, she speaks with friends and family of Facing History and Ourselves in Chicago as part of our Allstate Community Conversation series.

Saberi has spoken with Facing History audiences across the country as part of the organization's Community Conversation series [3] in partnership with The Allstate Foundation and has worked with Facing History classrooms from coast to coast. “I’ve loved being a part of Facing History,” said Saberi, who first heard about the organization through a friend living in Boston. She subsequently reached out to Facing History to see how she might get involved. “One of the main things that stood out to me about the organization is the focus on the importance of the decisions that we make and the way we can learn from other people – in history and our own contemporaries. Making decisions based on principle, values, the importance of universal rights, freedoms – all these things have a link to my own experience. It’s wonderful that kids start learning that at a young age and through real stories.”

So will she ever return to Iran? “I don’t think I’ll be going back there for awhile,” she said, resigned, citing safety concerns. “I miss the country and the people. They made me feel very welcome and I learned a lot from them.”

For now, she will do what she can: continue to write and to speak up. “We who have the ability to speak out, need to speak out,” Saberi said. She keeps the memory, values and purpose of her friends back in Evin – and others like them worldwide – in her memory always. “Every one of us really can make a difference. We have the responsibility to speak out. We might not be able to free every person from wrongful incarceration, but oftentimes when people find out about efforts being made for them, it helps them tolerate their condition and makes them feel not alone. And they shouldn’t feel alone when they’re standing up for rights that are universal.”

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Visit the Roxana Saberi website [4] to find out more about Saberi, her book, and how to get involved in human rights advocacy.

Learn more about Saberi's appearance at the Facing History benefit dinner [2] in Denver on May 2 and RSVP.

Find out about Facing History's annual benefit dinners [5] and discover one in your area today!

Facing History's Julia Rappaport wrote this article. For questions or tips on what Facing History is doing in your community, email her at Julia_Rappaport@facing.org [6].