One year later, little hope for US hikers held in Iran

As relations between the US and Iran sputter, 3 American hikers languish in the middle.

Tracey SamuelsonJuly 31, 2010 08:42Updated August 2, 2010 05:42

Laura Fattal, Cindy Hickey and Nora Shourd, the mothers of Josh Fattal, Shane Bauer, and Sarah Shourd respectively, hold pictures of their children while protesting for their release outside the Iran Mission in New York on July 30, 2010. (Mike Segar/Reuters)

NEW YORK — When Laura Fattal went to visit her son Josh in an Iranian prison in May, just a week before his 28th birthday, she didn’t bring him a card. She didn’t want him to think he would be there for the next few days, let alone a week.

But Josh and his two friends, Sarah Shourd and Shane Bauer, have all celebrated birthdays inside Tehran’s Evin prison. And today they’ll mark a different anniversary — one year since Iranian authorities arrested them as they hiked near the Iranian border with Iraq.

It is unclear whether the three hikers accidentally crossed into Iran or were forced across the border by armed Iranian guards, as a recent report by the Nation suggests. But what is clear is that it’s been a tumultuous year for the hikers, their families and U.S.-Iran relations.

“We’ve been through a big roller coaster ride,” Fattal said in an interview. “There have been a lot of great highs and a lot of deep lows.”

Despite moments of optimism, little progress has been made toward the hikers' release and, more broadly, toward the engagement with Iran that President Barack Obama first promised on the campaign trail in 2007.

It was a promise Obama reiterated in a bold address to the Islamic world from Cairo in June 2009.

“I recognize it will be hard to overcome decades of mistrust, but we will proceed with courage, rectitude, and resolve,” Obama said, speaking specifically about the United States’ relationship with Iran. “There will be many issues to discuss between our two countries, and we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.”

But just over a week after the Cairo address, violence toward Iranian protesters disputing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in the country’s June 12 elections began to tarnish the Obama administration’s new engagement strategy.

Tensions between the two countries continued to build in September, when Obama announced that Iran was building a secret nuclear facility in Qom, a city roughly one hundred miles outside of Tehran. In October, Iran rejected a proposal to exchange low-grade enriched uranium for fuel rods capable of powering a medical research reactor — a so-called nuclear fuel swap — after its negotiators initially agreed to the deal.

Despite renewed efforts by Brazil and Turkey to broker a fuel swap in May, the United Nations passed a new round of sanctions against Iran in June; the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia have passed or announced plans for more extensive sanctions in the last few weeks.

“We’ve been at a stalemate ever since [the nuclear fuel swap failed],” Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., said “The hikers became victims of this lack of political engagement between these two countries.”

Esfandiari has also been the victim of estranged U.S.-Iran relations. An Iranian American, Esfandiari was detained in Evin prison for 105 days in 2007 after Iran’s intelligence ministry accused her of working with the U.S. government to overthrow the Iranian regime.