CAF Concerns Regarding Fariba Adelkhah’s Hunger Strike and the Health of Roland Marchal Detained in Iran

CAF Concerns Regarding Fariba Adelkhah’s Hunger Strike and the Health of Roland Marchal Detained in Iran

CAF Concerns Regarding Fariba Adelkhah’s Hunger Strike and the Health of Roland Marchal Detained in Iran

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Middle East Studies Association 3 February 2020 in response to Fariba Adelkhah’s hunger strike and the health of Roland Marchal detained in Iran.]

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
c/o H.E. Mr. Takht-Ravanchi
Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Email: iran@un.int
Fax: +1 (212) 867-7086

Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi, Head of the Judiciary
c/o H.E. Mr. Takht-Ravanchi
Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Email: iran@un.int
Fax: +1 (212) 867-7086

Major General Hossein Salami, Commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary
c/o H.E. Mr. Takht-Ravanchi
Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Email: iran@un.int
Fax: +1 (212) 867-7086

Your Excellencies,

We write on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) to express our grave concern over the detention of Iranian-French researcher Dr. Fariba Adelkhah and her French colleague Dr. Roland Marchal since 5 June 2019 in Iran’s notorious Evin prison. We particularly fear for the health and well-being of these academics. Since 24 December 2019, Dr. Adelkhah has been on a hunger-strike to protest their unjust detention. Given her serious concerns over Dr. Marchal’s health, Dr. Adelkhah has stated that she would be prepared to suspend her hunger strike if her colleague were to be released. It is now more than one month since this renowned scholar has been on a hunger strike, while both academics continue to be denied consular visits and visits with one another. We vehemently protest such cruel treatment of the detainees by the Iranian authorities and ask for their immediate release.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, MESA publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 2,700 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

We wrote to you on 22 July 2019 and again on 28 October 2019 to protest the arrest and detention of Drs. Adelkhah and Marchal, respectively. Both of these scholars are researchers at CERI-Sciences Po in Paris. While Dr. Adelkhah is a leading anthropologist studying Iran and Afghanistan, Dr. Marchal is a sociologist who has devoted his decades-long career to researching post-conflict reconstruction in Sub-Saharan Africa. These scholars are renowned researchers in their fields in part because of their important contributions to moving scholarship beyond an essentialist and stereotypical understanding of the Middle East and Africa. Marchal, whose research has never extended to Iran, was arrested in June 2019 while visiting Adelkhah.

Since the arrest of these two scholars in June 2019, in violation of Article 32 of the Constitution, the Iranian judicial authorities have failed to provide any reasons for the charges against them of collusion against national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic, while they have dropped charges of espionage. Furthermore, since December 2019, Dr. Marchal, who holds French citizenship exclusively, has been deprived of consular visits that would have allowed his detention conditions and his health to be monitored. To protest such harsh and unjust treatment, on 23 December 2019 Fariba Adelkhah co-signed a letter with another detained academic, the Australian Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert, announcing that they would both go on a hunger strike beginning 24 December to obtain recognition of their innocence and respect for academic freedom in the Islamic Republic. While she was on hunger strike, in mid-January 2020, Dr. Adelkhah declared a bast – a term for an ethical protest in a place of asylum – in the prison’s communal area and refused to return to her cell. Dr. Adelkhah has demanded to meet with Dr. Marchal, who is detained in the Revolutionary Guard section of the prison, to comfort him and check on his health given his isolation under the current conditions of his detention.

Your excellencies, we urge you to recognize Dr. Adelkhah’s protests against the unjust and unlawful treatment to which she and other imprisoned academics in Iran have been subject. Indeed, the arrest and detention of individuals without charge is a violation of Iran’s national laws as well as its obligations under international law. With the growing tensions between Iran and some Western powers, it seems that many of the recent arrests of academics by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards may be politically motivated, geared towards using these innocent scholars as pawns in pressuring Western powers, such as France, to change their policies toward Iran. MESA’s Committee on Academic Freedom strongly objects to this disturbing trend, and urges you to insist that Iran’s security forces and its judiciary abide by their obligations under national and international law.  In addition, the fragile health condition of most of these detainees, including Drs. Adelkhah and Marchal, strongly argues for their release on humanitarian grounds.

In sum, the arrest and detention of these academics represents a miscarriage of justice; we urge you to release them immediately and ensure their safe return home.

Thank you for your attention to this very serious matter. We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Dina Rizk Khoury

MESA President
Professor, Georgetown University

Laurie Brand
Chair, Committee on Academic Freedom
Professor, University of Southern California

cc:

His Excellency Dr. Hassan Rouhani, President
The Honorable Mahmoud Alavi, Minister of Intelligence
The Honorable Mohammad Javad Zarif, Minister of Foreign Affairs
The Honorable Takht-Ravanchi, Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations
The Honorable Michelle Bachelet, The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
The Honorable Philippe Thiebaud, Ambassador of the Republic of France to the Islamic Republic of Iran
Fonds d’Analyse des Sociétés Politiques, Association de Recherche

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412