Iran Cracks Down on Student Protesters
TEHRAN, IRAN—Babak Zamanian, a lanky 23-year-old student of mining engineering, vividly remembers the last time he bellowed slogans denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Death to the dictator!" he chanted vociferously on a freezing winter day in December 2006, leading a crowd of Iranian students as the Iranian leader delivered a speech at Amirkabir University of Technology, a hotbed of student protests in Tehran.
A few weeks later, Zamanian was blindfolded by authorities and tossed into Section 209, the notorious solitary confinement block in Evin Prison run by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security. And that began a four-month ordeal of physical and psychological abuse by interrogators determined to have him confess on camera to collaborating with the cia. When he refused, he says, they tied his hands behind his back and beat him black and blue. "They harbor a 'teach them a lesson' vindictiveness," he says. "They are very, very brutal."
Zamanian is among thousands of political activists and journalists free on bail but banned from leaving the country. Yet, he may count himself lucky; a young man and woman recently were reported to have died in custody, claimed by authorities as suicides.
Zamanian recounts the litany of abuse and torture during a recent rendezvous in a downtown Tehran cafe, visibly nervous that he might have been followed. He lives with the uncertainty of being tossed back into prison at any time. His life is in limbo. He faces a never-ending series of court dates and interrogations. His phone is tapped, his movements probably watched. (During the course of this interview, he disconnected his cellphone battery, worried his location might be tracked or conversation overheard by Intelligence Ministry spies).
In the year since Zamanian took part in protests, student movements in some Iranian universities have been gathering steam. On Dec. 7, 2007, Students Day in Iran, hundreds of leftist university students marched at university campuses with portraits of Che Guevara. Smaller groups of Marxist students held similar protests in several other cities. Other groups soon joined, including students from Islamic schools.
About 50 students have been arrested since then, according to estimates by defense lawyers. The security officials have reportedly called them "rebel students," and family members have been told that their children "had acted against national security." Security officials in the past year have hit out at groups like the labor movement, women's rights advocates, and students, labeling them centers of conspiracy. The universities similarly have been targeted within the past year. Nonconformist lecturers have been dismissed, student associations closed, publications banned, and a range of other actions taken to muzzle student leaders.
According to the Office for Fostering Unity, a leading reformist student organization, 43 student organizations critical of the government have been closed down, at least 130 student publications banned, and hundreds of students detained since the Ahmadinejad government came to power. During this time, they say around 550 students have been summoned to disciplinary hearings, and more than 100 prominent lecturers have been dismissed or forced to retire.
Last year, the Iranian minister of intelligence, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi, reiterated the official view that Iran's enemies were planning to use the students' and women's movements as the vehicle for a "soft coup."
Iranian dissident students and human-rights observers expressed shock at the news last month of the death in detention of two young Iranians, Ebrahim Lotfallahi, 27, a prominent student activist from Sanandaj, and Zahra Bani-Ameri, a 27-year-old female physician.
While the Iranian authorities are eager to dismiss these deaths as suicides, human-rights observers blame the Intelligence Ministry, which reportedly conducts interrogations of political detainees and is said to use violence to obtain confessions. "The sudden death in detention of two apparently healthy young people is extremely alarming," said Joe Stork, Middle East deputy director at Human Rights Watch. "The government only heightens our concern by quickly passing them off as suicides."
Local student and human-rights activists are concerned about the safety of many other young Iranian students in prison, recently arrested for antigovernment protests.
A leading dissident, a former professor in the University of Tehran who asked that his name not be used, actively supports the student movement. Often, at great personal risk, he shelters politically active students, on the run from the Basij, or the state-sponsored militia, in his apartment in northern Tehran.
He is deeply concerned about one of his students, Saeed Habibi, the former head of a student group called the Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat, or the Union of Islamic Associations. Habibi was arrested nearly two months ago and is rumored to have tried to commit suicide in prison. Details about his condition have been sketchy, and the former professor is concerned Habibi might meet the same fate as Lotfallahi and Bani-Ameri. Habibi was arrested with others on students' day last year.
"We're not fighting to make a country where there's freedom of speech," the aging professor says, sipping from a cup of green tea in his apartment, "but, in fact, a country where there's freedom after speech."
Since 70 percent of the population is under 32 and society is strongly influenced by the young, he says, muzzling young student voices will backfire badly on the government in the future.
Naser Zarafshan, a prominent defense lawyer who represents several imprisoned students, says there are three kinds of cases he's dealing with in an atmosphere of intimidation: the few students who have been granted bail but are still in detention; those who are still under interrogation and have not been allowed out on bail; and those for whom information is still quite nebulous even weeks after their arrest.
"The judiciary has set bail amounts of 300, 500, and 1,000 million Iranian rials [the equivalent of $33,000, $54,000, and $108,000 respectively]—an amount many of these students just cannot afford to pay," Zarafshan says.
Most of the students are being kept in Evin prison's notorious Section 209, where detainees are held in solitary confinement. Section 209 is solely controlled by Iran's Intelligence Ministry, and even Evin authorities don't have access to this section. Some others are being detained in tiny lockups of the intelligence agency in central Tehran called Daftar-e-Peygiri, or Tracking Office.
Clashes between student groups and the authorities came to a head at the beginning of May 2007 during anti-Ahmedinejad protests. And three fellow students of Zamanian's—Ahmad Ghasaban, Majid Tavakkoli, and Ehsan Mansouri—are currently in prison, accused of writing incendiary articles insulting both Islam and Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in student publications at Amirkabir University last year.
"That's absolutely false," Zamanian says, convinced that the offending articles were planted to remove alleged ringleaders of the anti-Ahmadinejad protests at Amirkabir. "My friends were tortured to make false confessions."
He's convinced the recent crackdown on students is to muzzle any defiance in the run-up to the March presidential elections, in which Ahmadinejad is seeking a second term in office.
(This story was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington.)
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