TEHRAN, Iran - Hundreds of university students protested demanding the removal of an administrator they accuse of sexually harassing a female student in a northwest Iranian city, media reported Monday.
The protest at the university in Zanjan came after several students broke into the unnamed administrator’s office Saturday to stop him after hearing that he was harassing the young woman, the pro-reform newspaper Etemad reported.
The female student had been called to his office over a disciplinary hearing she was involved in, the paper said, without elaborating. According to the report, she fled when the students broke in and students took the administrator to university security.
Later on Saturday, several hundred students gathered in a university sports hall demanding the resignation of the official and members of the university’s board of directors, Etemad and the semi-official student news agency ISNA reported from Zanjan, 180 miles northwest of Tehran.
University president Alireza Nedaf addressed the protesters, thanking them for their vigilance and urging them to obey the law in their protests. He said the incident was under investigation, telling students, “If corruption takes place, we always desire the support of the students in eliminating any type of corruption.”
Iran’s universities are a center of political activity, with occasional protests despite heavy controls under hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In December, several anti-government protests erupted at universities in Tehran over the arrests of student activists.
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.
