Ali Shakeri is admired for diplomacy through wit. He has a knack, said fellow board members at UC Irvine's Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, for cutting through tension with a well-timed joke.
He has kidded tirelessly to knit together Orange County's large Iranian American community and has taken his lessons home, sharing meals with another board member who is Jewish.
In March, Shakeri told colleagues he was flying to Tehran; his mother was ailing. But when former President Carter spoke at UCI this month, and Shakeri was oddly absent from the event, board members began to wonder whether he was coming home.
This week, the group Human Rights Watch said the Iranian government probably detained Shakeri, 59, at a Tehran airport and might be interrogating him in an isolated location. He was scheduled to leave Iran and fly to Europe on May 13 but never arrived at his destination. Instead, his ticket had been canceled and his luggage taken from the airline's possession, the group said.
"It's a disaster," said John Graham of the UC Irvine center, "that this voice of peace has been potentially silenced."
Iranian officials have not commented publicly on Shakeri's whereabouts. In recent weeks, two Iranian American scholars with dual citizenship have been imprisoned while visiting the country. A reporter, also a dual national, had her passport confiscated and is unable to leave Iran. The detention of one of those scholars, Haleh Esfandiari, bears close parallels to Shakeri's apparent disappearance.
Esfandiari, a researcher based at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, traveled to Iran late last year to visit her 93-year-old mother. When she headed to the airport to leave Iran on Dec. 30, she was stopped by knife-wielding men in masks, according to center officials.
She was interrogated extensively and, earlier this month, imprisoned. The Iranian government this week announced she was being charged with setting up a network to overthrow the Islamic establishment. Her husband, Shaul Bakhash, denied the allegations as "totally without foundation."
Javad Payam, a friend of Shakeri's who edits a Persian magazine in Laguna Hills, is anxious. He has interviewed former detainees who have described being locked in cells without windows, air-conditioning or radio and forced to sleep on the floor.
