BBC - Around the World - Ariel's 'Foreign Bureau' - 7 June 2005

I interviewed someone recently and two hours later he was arrested.

An ethnic Arab, he cornered me at a press conference saying he wanted to talk about the unrest between Iranian Arabs and the security forces in south west Iran. It still amazes me that there are people willing to speak out despite the risks.

Iran is a strange mixture of repression and freedom. It confuses many journalists. They don’t realise initially that the Ministry of Islamic Guidance has faxed every possible security agency in the places they are going to visit to forewarn them of their plans.

Every time a visiting team comes I wonder if I will have to fish them out of jail. First it was Breakfast news which filmed murals of Imam Khomeini in one of Tehran’s main squares. They didn’t have a letter of permission and were arrested. Then a team making a documentary on the nuclear issue was stopped at the airport and had its tapes confiscated though some were later returned.

Based here we have to get permission to film virtually anything outdoors and to travel outside the capital. When I first went to the clerical city of Qom we had a letter but my cameraman still got arrested while taking shots of the city.

Before he’d even fixed the camera on the tripod a plain clothes policemen stopped him. It took the whole afternoon to resolve the situation by which time it was too dark to film and we had to go back to Tehran.

Next time, the local police station told us, go to police HQ before starting to film. So we tried that, armed with a letter addressed to all security forces in Qom. But the number two officer in charge that day wouldn’t accept our letter because his name wasn’t on it. He told us to return to Tehran (three hours’ drive) and get another one. And he said: ‘If you try to film in my city I will have you arrested.’

Then there are the weekly foreign ministry press briefings. At first I went every week. Every time I passed through the security checks a man would tell me to put my headscarf further forward. I would wear bigger and bigger headscarves – not to mention socks to cover my feet – but still my clothing would attract opprobrium.

At one point I was invited to an event to mark Basij (Islamic volunteers) week. I faxed my name then came the response: ‘Sorry, women are not allowed inside Basij camps.’ We explained that the BBC didn’t have a male reporter to send. Actually, we didn’t miss much, but the organisers still complained about ‘the absence of the BBC correspondent’.

We work in an ageing apartment with the Financial Times and a freelance Danish newspaper reporter. As I write, the computer man has come again to try to fix the so-called high speed internet line. Yesterday a socket in the kitchen blew up.

My main concern is what happens if there’s an earthquake. Almost every day there’s a tremor somewhere and everyone still remembers the quake in Bam that killed 30,000 people. We’ve been busy buying military surplus tents and camping gear as we recently saw on a map of seismic zones that our office lies right on a fault line. We’ve stashed the gear behind what was the bar – built before the revolution. Tents and sleeping mats now protrude from the counter where once the north Tehran elite must have partied.