Germany – Taz, August 28, 2024
The German-Iranian Nahid Taghavi, who is being held hostage in Iran, must also spend her 70th birthday in prison. According to her daughter, the German government is hardly doing anything
When some prisoners were recently released in a prisoner exchange with Russia, it was not the first such exchange that Mariam Claren has witnessed in recent years. Claren’s mother Nahid Taghavi has been imprisoned in Iran since 2020, and since then Claren has seen French, Danish, Belgian, US, Swedish and Austrian citizens leave Iranian prisons and return home. In October, German citizen Nahid Taghavi will have spent four years in prison as a political hostage in the Islamic Republic of Iran. And this Wednesday she turns 70.
Of the many people who have been released since 2020, it was the deal between Russia and Western countries at the beginning of August that probably hurt Mariam Claren the most. “I am grateful that so many political hostages have been released,” she says. As a relative of a political hostage, she knows about the pain that has to be endured on a daily basis – and therefore also about the joy that a release brings.
However, the prominent role that the German government played in the deal with Russia made one thing clear to Claren, she says: if the German government wants to free hostages, then it can. And this makes one thing more obvious than ever before: the German government seems to have no interest in bringing Claren’s mother Nahid Taghavi home.
Taghavi is from Cologne, a retired architect and women’s rights activist. When she was arrested in 2020, her daughter no longer understood the world. Claren’s mother had done nothing wrong; apart from being a woman, being educated, being left-wing – and being German.
The Iranian regime has long practiced hostage diplomacy – a trivializing term – for many years. It means that the Islamic Republic arrests foreign citizens in order to put pressure on their countries: using people as bargaining chips.
From the very beginning, the German government – at that time still a CDU/CSU/SPD government, today the traffic light government – apparently paid little attention to the case. Claren, now 44, was left to her own devices from the very beginning. Although she makes regular phone calls to the Foreign Office, she is the one who passes on information to the authorities, not the other way around. Through her mother’s plight, Claren now knows the workings of the Iranian justice system better than most. In any case, probably better than the Foreign Office.
The German government under Chancellor Scholz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has neither set up a task force to gather information on the Taghavi case, nor does it even seem to recognize her status as political hostage.
This is particularly striking when compared to how other countries treat their citizens: French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, publicly refers to the French hostages as “state hostages” and regularly calls for their release in public. In a recent phone call with Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, Macron is even said to have made the release of the hostages a prerequisite for improving diplomatic relations. “I doubt that Olaf Scholz even knows who my mother is,” says Claren.
The deal with Russia and Belarus is completely different. According to US President Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz personally lobbied for the so-called Tiergarten murderer to be part of the deal in order to bring German and other prisoners home. Government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit spoke of an “obligation to protect German citizens”. This does not appear to apply to Nahid Taghavi.
