Iranian students kicking up a fuss
New York Times - December 21, 2006
Iran President Facing Revival of Students’ Ire By NAZILA FATHI
TEHRAN, Dec. 20 — As protests broke out last week at a prestigious
university here, cutting short a speech by President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, Babak Zamanian could only watch from afar. He was on
crutches, having been clubbed by supporters of the president and had
his foot run over by a motorcycle during a less publicized student
demonstration a few days earlier.
But the significance of the confrontation was easy to grasp, even
from a distance, said Mr. Zamanian, a leader of a student political
group.
The student movement, which planned the 1979 seizure of the American
Embassy from the same university, Amir Kabir, is reawakening from its
recent slumber and may even be spearheading a widespread resistance
against Mr. Ahmadinejad. This time the catalysts were academic and
personal freedom.
“It is not that simple to break up a president’s speech,” said
Alireza Siassirad, a former student political organizer, explaining
that an event of that magnitude takes meticulous planning. “I think
what happened at Amir Kabir is a very important and a dangerous sign.
Students are definitely becoming active again.”
The protest, punctuated by shouts of “Death to the dictator,” was the
first widely publicized outcry against Mr. Ahmadinejad, one that was
reflected Friday in local elections, where voters turned out in
droves to vote for his opponents.
The students’ complaints largely mirrored public frustrations over
the president’s crackdown on civil liberties, his blundering economic
policies and his harsh oratory against the West, which they fear will
isolate the country.
But the students had an additional and potent source of outrage: the
president’s campaign to purge the universities of all vestiges of the
reform movement of his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.
Last summer the newly installed head of the university, Alireza
Rahai, ordered the demolition of the office of the Islamic
Association, which had been the core of student political activities
on campus since 1963 and had matured into a moderate, pro-reform group.
Since then, students say, more than 100 liberal professors have been
forced into retirement and many popular figures have been demoted. At
least 70 students were suspended for political activities, and two
were jailed. Some 30 students were given warnings, and a prominent
Ph.D. candidate, Matin Meshkin, was barred from finishing his studies.
The students also complain about overcrowded and crumbling
dormitories and proscriptions against women wearing makeup or bright
colors, rules that were relaxed when Mr. Khatami came to power in 1997.
Amir Kabir University of Technology, a major polytechnic institute,
has been a hotbed of student activism since before Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. Drawing on networks at
universities around the country through an office that links their
Islamic associations, students can organize large protests on a
moment’s notice. There are also student guilds, which are
independent, and more than 2,000 student publications.
Mr. Zamanian, the head of public relations of the Islamic Association
at Amir Kabir, said that while the situation had not been ideal in
the Khatami years, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s antireformist campaign had led
students to value their previous freedoms.
They were permitted to hold meetings and invite opposition figures to
speak, he said, and could freely publish their journals. Now, he
said, their papers are forbidden to print anything but reports from
official news agencies.
The students also complain about the president’s failure to deliver
economic growth and jobs. At last week’s protest, which coincided
with a now infamous Holocaust conference held by the Foreign
Ministry, students chanted, “Forget the Holocaust — do something for
us.”
A student who identified himself only as Ahmad, for fear of
retribution, said: “A nuclear program is our right, but we fear that
it will bring more damage than good.”
Another student said: “It is so hard and costly to come to this
university, but I don’t see a bright future. Even if you are lucky
enough to get a job, the pay would not be enough for you to pay your
rent.”
Mr. Zamanian said that the protest had not been planned ahead of Mr.
Ahmadinejad’s visit, but that students were further enraged when they
saw supporters of the president being bused in.
Although the auditorium was almost filled with the president’s
supporters by the time any students were let in, the protesters
forced their way inside, chanted, “Death to the dictator,” and held
banners calling him a “fascist president.” They also held up posters
of the president with his picture upside down and set fire to three
of them. Many of the students are now in hiding.
At one point, the head of a moderate student guild complained to Mr.
Ahmadinejad that students were being expelled for political
activities and given three stars next to their names in university
records, barring them from re-entering. The president responded by
ridiculing him, joking that the three stars made them sergeants in
the army.
The president was eventually forced to cut his speech short and
leave. But angry students stormed his car, kicking it and chanting
slogans. His convoy of four cars collided several times as they tried
to leave in a rush. Eventually the students were dispersed.
An entry on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Web log, posted Wednesday, played down
the scale and significance of the protest, writing that the president
had a “good feeling when he saw a small group amid the dominant
majority insulting him without any fear.”
A few days after the protest, former Amir Kabir students affiliated
with the Islamic associations’ coordinating office wrote a letter to
Mr. Ahmadinejad. In it, they turned down what they said was his
invitation to share their problems with him, because they believed
that he wanted to use the occasion to bolster his candidates in the
local elections.
The students also wrote that the president had insulted their
intelligence by talking to them in the same language he uses in
remote villages on his provincial trips.
“You should know that what happened at Polytechnic University was the
voice of universities and the real voice of the people,” they wrote.
Tehran Polytechnic was the university’s name before the revolution.