Letter to President Obama - Mary Racelis

President Barack Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama,

I am a Senior Citizen and a longtime admirer and supporter of yours, now appealing as strongly as I know how, for your personal attention to the plight of Baquer Namazi, an American citizen languishing in a Tehran jail.

Arrested and imprisoned last February, my ex-UNICEF colleague and friend, Baquer, has just been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. As he is 80 years old and physically frail, that judgment in fact becomes a life sentence. An older person myself at 84, I can only imagine how my friend must feel.  His health is far worse than mine and the psychological stress on him surely crushing. Yet he has maintained his defiant posture in steadfastly rejecting the unconscionable accusations against him.  

Baquer and I worked together in the 1980s and 1990s in Eastern and Southern Africa, he as UNICEF Representative to Kenya, the land of your forebears, and I as Regional Director also in Nairobi. Each day offered a new opportunity to bring more hopeful futures to Kenyan and other African children and women. Yet, despite his long-time humanitarian efforts, Baquer, of dual American-Iranian citizenship, was condemned (quoting Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafai Dolatabadi) for “espionage and collusion with an enemy state [the United States].” Baquer’s work with UNICEF an American plot?  No way!

For eight months, hundreds of UNICEF retiree colleagues of Baquer’s worldwide, many of us American citizens, have been writing to Congressional representatives, Ambassadors, and media contacts to publicize Baquer’s situation in hopes these would lead to his release. We know that the State Department has made valiant efforts on behalf of Baquer and other dual nationals similarly detained. UNICEF has issued three public statements of concern in his behalf, and influence has been brought to bear in many other parts of the United Nations and international human rights systems. A small group of us even appealed directly to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to grant clemency to our colleague on humanitarian grounds. So far, those responsible for the incarceration of this blameless and dedicated American have not budged from their hardline stance.

I am now turning to you, my President, in the hope that you will personally find the words and arguments which we have not been able to discover, to reach out to your Iranian counterpart at the highest level and set in motion the freeing of Baquer Namazi.  Our fervent wish is that, during this final phase of your administration, you will personally take up his case and demonstrate once again both your profound sense of humanity, and your capacity to reach out across otherwise unbridgeable divides.

In justice and compassion, I ask you from the bottom of my heart to do whatever you can to free our fellow countryman, Baquer Namazi.

Yours sincerely,    

Mary Racelis, former UNICEF official