Year 86 was a year full of up and downs lots of turbulence and filled with small to large scaled events. A brief review of student’s movements and events in last year, apparent the fact that in year 86 there were only few days with no events or activities happening at universities. More than 210 gatherings and protests in last year was an honor for the student’ motion.
Furthermore, last year was a year full of pressure, privation, limitation, arrest, torture and tough issued sentences for students. Some believe since existence of universities in Iran, there has not been a stage, either before or after the revelation, in which students and universities be under this huge amount of pressure coming form government.
New year started while in Amir Kabir university forging student’s publications was uprising. Studying the events in last year proofs that a huge part of student’s activities, publications, disciplinary sentences, detentions and etc are related to this event and are joined either directly or indirectly with detention of 3 innocent students.
Last year 95 students has been arrested for at least one week, among them Saeid Derakhsahndi, Abolfazl Jahandar, Ehsan Mansouri, Majid Tavakoli, Ahmad Ghasaban and Yaghoob Mehrnahad have been in prison for almost all days of last year and are still in prison. Yaser Goli, Sabah Nasri, Hedayat Ghazali, Behrooz Karimizadeh, Peyman Piran, Ali Kantoori and Asadolah Shabakhsh are another group of students who are still in prison since few last months.
Also, in last year, 309 students were dealing with problems like being forced to stop studying, not being allowed to enter university, being called to disciplinary committee, being called to court and being arrested (for less than one week). Expulsing more than 40 professors and banning more than 90 student’s publications are other pressures have been put on universities. Other significant events of last year are ripping a girl student of Razi University in Kermanshah by the university’s preservation assistant and also ripping a girl student of Azad University in Aushtian by her investigator. Yet among all these death of Ebrahim Lotfolahi in Sanandaj‘s detention centre (ruled by the information ministry), death of Zahra Baniyaghoob in detention centre of disciplinary force in Hamadan, killing Somaye Kakavand, a law student of Maybod university in Yazd, by a disciplinary force officer and issuing execution sentence for Yaghoob Mehrnahad in Zahedan were the most acrimonious and saddest days in year 86. Furthermore, 36 students of Damghan University, Mashhad University and Sari University have been died in the universities car accidents.
one must not forget that one aspect of “security” cases is the image that they carry for the groups that advance such issues. Therefore, before fake charges take to the news-media and become public, those who have had a hand in arresting the students must be weakened. Otherwise, after the severe charges are made public, repeated and are tied to the image of the actors, even the intervention of the head of the judiciary (as history demonstrates) cannot be of much help to the detainees.
How can we tell the judiciary officials of Iran that according to law juveniles can stay alive and continue to live with appropriate and suitable punishment? How must one make this request from the judiciary a public and wide-spread demand and point out that killing a juvenile who has not wholeheartedly committed an act does not solve any of the real problems facing the country?
it is easy to predict that the success of student activists in imposing their will and demands on government officials at academic institutions, such as the Teachers Training college and Zanjan University (where the students boldly took the initiative into their own hands), would result in a backlash by extreme right-wing officials who would plan an “instructive” counter-attack against the student movement.Hopefully such a reaction will not come. But from an analytic perspective, one must not negate it altogether.
This is the reason that the moment imprisoned students step out of prison, it becomes clear to every one why they were put behind bars: for simply criticizing the president. It becomes instantly clear why they were subjected to interrogations and what questions were asked of them. These are the events that portray the image of this country. Students, social activists and journalists are certainly not on the list of those that dent this image. The publication of the arrest of students because of their criticism of the president brings forth a caricature image of Mahmud Ahmadinejad which does not match the claims that he made at Columbia University or the image that the regime strives to present about its standing.
There are at least 70 young people on death row who at the time of their arrest were under the age of 16. In the past 12 months, Iranian organisations claim that 80 feminists have been arrested and 20 of them have been sentenced from three to five years in jail. A total of 54 journalists have ended up in prison, several were released without trial after serving jail time, while others remain behind bars. In the past 12 months, 34 newspapers and magazines, among them the feminist magazine Zanan, have been shut down.
