Sisters stuck in a diplomatic limbo

TEHRAN — The studious, brown-haired sisters finally worked up the courage to escape.

On Tuesday morning last week, they pretended to be too sick to go to school. As soon as their father left the house, they fled into the vast city where their father had brought them from Belgium against their will.

“Mommy, we’re scared. What should we do?” Yasmine, 15, asked her mom in a desperate phone call to Belgium.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” her mother, Dr. Zahra Pourhashemi, told them. “Just don’t go back. You’ve done the hardest part.”

She told them to head for the Belgian Embassy.

Using the few words of Farsi they’d picked up over the past few months and a bit of pocket money, the two sisters found their way inside the embassy and into an explosive diplomatic storm.

Yasmine and her 6-year-old sister, Sara, both born and raised in Belgium, were tricked into coming to Iran three months ago by their father, Shahab Salaami. Their desperate mother has been struggling to get them back.

Under Iran’s laws, although the Pourhashemi girls had never lived in Iran, they’re considered Iranian nationals because their father is an Iranian citizen.

“The situation is difficult,” Jacques Vermeulen, the Belgian ambassador, told a reporter from Le Soir, a Belgian daily. “We consider them Belgians. The Iranian position is that they’re Iranians.”

Louis Michel, Belgium’s minister of foreign affairs, told reporters he had contacted his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi.

He also appeared at a news conference with Dr. Pourhashemi and assured her he’d do everything he could to get her daughters back.

Mr. Kharrazi, for his part, told Mr. Michel that the girls would be subject to Iranian law.

“Although the family holds Iranian and Belgian dual nationalities, they are considered as Iranian and will be treated according to the current laws of the Islamic republic,” Iran’s official news agency quoted Mr. Kharrazi as telling Mr. Michel by telephone.

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