Gagged and growing

Babak Zamanian, a tall, lanky 23-year-old mining engineering student at Tehran's Amir Kabir Polytechnic, vividly remembers the last time he raised anti-Ahmadinejad slogans.

“Death to the dictator!'' he had called out on that freezing winter day in December 2006. He was leading a notable crowd of Iranian students as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivered a speech at his university — a hotbed of student protests in Tehran.

A few weeks later, he was arrested by the authorities, blindfolded and tossed into Section 209, the notorious solitary confinement block in Evin prison run by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

And then began a four-month ordeal of physical and psychological abuse by interrogators bent upon getting him confess to collaborating with the CIA, on camera. When he refused, they tied his hands behind his back and beat him black and blue. The brutality was corrupting. It left him scarred and broke his spirit.

“They harbour a ‘teach-them-a-lesson' vindictiveness,'' he said, remembering the litany of abuse and torture during a rendezvous with this writer in a downtown Tehran café. He was nervous that he might have been followed. “They are very, very brutal.''

Babak is among the thousands of political activists and journalists freed on bail but banned from leaving the country. He lives with the uncertainty of being tossed back into prison at any time. His life is in limbo — 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 mobile phone battery, worried that his location would be tracked or conversation overheard by intelligence ministry spies).

Against repression

Nearly a year after Babak took part in protests, student movements in some Iranian universities have been gathering steam, much to the chagrin of the Ahmadinejad government, which is attempting a clampdown on them.

On December 7, 2007 — Students Day in Iran — hundreds of Leftist university students marched on university campuses in Tehran with portraits of Che Guevara to protest Ahmadinejad's repressive policies. Smaller groups of Marxist students held similar protests in several other cities.

Other groups, including students from Islamic schools, soon joined and the protests spread like wildfire across Iran.

According to estimates by defence lawyers, nearly 50 students have been placed under arrest since then. The security officials have reportedly called them “rebel students'' and family members have been told that their children “had acted against national security''.

Throughout last year, security officials hit out at groups such as the labour movement, women's rights advocates as well as students, labelling them centres of conspiracy. The universities fell into the category of hotbeds of subversion and were especially targeted during the last year.

Non-conformist lecturers have been dismissed, student associations closed, publications banned and a range of actions taken to muzzle student leaders.

According to the Office for Fostering Unity — a leading reformist student organisation — 43 student organisations 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.

Dring this time, they say, about 550 students have been summoned to disciplinary hearings and more than 100 prominent lecturers have been dismissed or forced to retire.
Last year, Minister of Intelligence Gulam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi reiterated that Iran's enemies were planning to use the students' and women's movements as the vehicle for a “soft coup''.

Students dissidents and human rights observers expressed shock at the recent death-in-detention of two young people — Ebrahim Lotfallahi, 27, a student activist from Sanandaj, and Zahrah Bani Ameri, 27, a female physician.

While the authorities dismiss these deaths as suicides, human rights observers think otherwise. They hold the Intelligence Ministry responsible for the deaths as it reportedly uses violent methods to extract confessions from political detainees.

Sudden deaths

“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 students in prison, recently arrested for anti-government protests.

Saeed Habibi, the former head of the student body Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat, or the Union of Islamic Associations, was arrested following a demonstration on Students' Day. He is rumoured to have attempted suicide in prison. Details about his condition, though, have been sketchy.

His teacher, a former professor at the University of Tehran and a leading dissident who actively supports the student movement, is deeply concerned about Habibi. He fears Habibi may also meet the same fate as Lotfallahi and Bani Ameri.

“This is like modern-day slavery,'' said the ageing professor, who shelters politically active students on the run from the Basij, or the state-sponsored militia, in his apartment in northern Tehran.

He says: “Iran is the only country in the Middle East that holds presidential elections. Yet democracy here is a sham. We're not fighting to make a country where there's freedom of speech but a country where there's freedom after speech.

'' As 70 per cent of the population is below 32, and the society is strongly influenced by the young, muzzling of young student voices will backfire on the government, he says.

Smother by detention

Naser Zarafshan, a prominent defence lawyer who represents many of these imprisoned students, says there are three kinds of cases he has to deal with: cases of those who have been granted bail but are still in detention; students who are under interrogation and not granted bail; and those about whom information is nebulous even weeks after their arrests.

“The judiciary has set bail amounts of 300 million rials, 500 million rials and 1,000 million rials [$33,000, $54,000 and $108,000 respectively] an amount many of these students cannot afford to pay,'' Zarafshan says.

Most of the students are being detained in Section 209. 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-Ahmadinejad protests. Babak Zamanian's three other fellow students — Ahmad Ghasaban, Majid Tavakkoli and Ehsan Mansouri — are still in prison, accused of writing incendiary articles insulting Islam and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in student publications at Amir Kabir University.

“That's absolutely false,'' Babak says, convinced that the offending articles were planted to remove alleged ringleaders of the anti-Ahmadinejad protests at Amir Kabir University. “My friends were tortured to make false confessions.''

He is convinced that the recent crackdown on students was a bid to muzzle any defiance in the run-up to the elections this month, in which Ahmadinejad is seeking a second term in office.

This story was reported with a grant from the Pulitzer Centre on Crisis Reporting, Washington.
Anuj Chopra is an independent writer based in
Bonn, Germany.