On Campuses, Spreading the Word in Support of Iranian Students
By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer
Fairfax, Virginia - Abolfazl Jahandar is back to being a student: He's improving his English in the United States. But
on a cold December night at a university near Washington, he was telling American students what happened to him when he
was a student activist in his native Iran.
"On Monday, August 21st, 2006, I was arrested. I was told that I needed to get in the car to give them some
explanations. And of course these explanations lasted two and a half years," he said.
Jahandar spoke at Virginia's George Mason University on December 7, which Iran marks as Students Day - the anniversary
of the slaying of three student demonstrators by Iranian police in 1953. Iran in recent years has seen clashes between
students and security forces of the Islamic republic. The George Mason event was one of 18 staged around the world in
support of Iranian students who have been punished for expressing their views.
Jahandar offered the American students a straightforward account of his activism and punishment, and noted, "I know
people who experienced much harsher conditions than I did." He said he was focused on student issues until a deadly 1999
assault by plainclothes militias on university dorms in Tehran; then he focused on broader human rights concerns as
well. By the time of his arrest, he was a blogger with ambitions: "I was hoping to train people who were interested in
blogging so that we could develop citizen journalism, and that's when I was arrested," he said.
Jahandar said he was blindfolded and put into solitary confinement, then interrogated and told, "If you don't confess
yourself, we will force you to confess." When he asked his interrogator about laws that protect the rights of prisoners,
he said he was told: "Here, there is no such thing as law. We are the law. We are in charge, and we can issue any
sentence we want. The last word is ours."
He had no contact with his parents for weeks; prison officials told them that he was not being held and suggested they
check hospitals and the morgue. He was interrogated for a year before trial; he was beaten - a kick in the back injured
a vertebra, an injury that still causes him pain - and was refused proper medical care. Like other inmates, he suffered
from inadequate food: "One of the good memories for prisoners is the last time they had chicken," he said. And he was
tried without having the chance to meet with his lawyer beforehand.
"In my trial, I said that every confession that I have made has been under pressure and torture," he said. "But the
judge didn't accept the fact that I was retracting my confessions and issued a sentence" of 33 months and 20 days in
prison. Jahandar was released a few months early for treatment of his injured back.
"Today, at least 80 students are in prison, and there are many more political prisoners who are in prison for their
views," Jahandar said. "Prisoners bear with all these difficulties with the hope that human rights groups won't forget
them. Our support to these prisoners affects the behavior of prison guards, and it does diminish the oppression and
torture of prisoners."
The George Mason University event was one in a series for students sponsored by the Washington-based Abdorrahman
Boroumand Foundation.
"We will keep doing this because, slowly but surely, we will get their attention," said Roya Boroumand, the foundation's
executive director. "I think the student movement is the hope for the future, and young people in Iran are 70 percent of
the population. We have a stake in them being safe, but American students also have a stake, because these are going to
be their interlocutors of tomorrow, and if they perish in prison or demobilize, they will not be effective in their
country and they could not help our two countries come together and live peacefully."
The foundation has put together a traveling exhibit about students persecuted in Iran, along with a video, Interrupted
Lives. "Wherever we are invited, we will go, as long as we can, so we can give visibility to this important issue - and
to get these people out of jail," Boroumand said.
The student-to-student connection is important, she added: "Young people have time, and they empathize. Events like this
in Iran are impossible."
After Jahandar's talk, students signed letters of support to imprisoned student activists and sometimes added their own
messages, which Boroumand said would be translated into Persian. She said the letters would be sent to prisoners in
Iran, with copies to their families, and that the letter-writing campaign can bring the prisoners more respect and
better treatment from authorities.
The university's chapter of Amnesty International also sponsored the event. Senior Sarah Faragalla, one of the chapter's
leaders, said it was another in a series of efforts to get students mobilized and active. "I think students are
particularly interested in anything that concerns students around the world," she said. "I think that people are
increasingly relating to other students no matter where they are."
Ali Afshari, another former Iranian student activist and political prisoner now living in Washington, said the Students
Day events around the world, coordinated by a network of groups called Students4Iran, focused on issues beyond the
imprisonment of student activists. Students4Iran also is highlighting gender, religious and ideological discrimination
in the admission of students and in the hiring of professors at Iranian universities, as well as growing attacks on
intellectual freedom on campuses. The Iranian government announced in October that it will revamp the teaching of
sociology, psychology, economics, law and other social sciences "because the content is not consistent with Islamic
values," Afshari said.
He said supporting Iranian students' rights is crucial because students have been at the heart of Iranian reform efforts
for more than a century. He called the Students Day events "a relative success" in the early stages of the effort to
build worldwide support for Iranian students.
Ultimately, Afshari said, the network should allow student groups around the world to exchange materials and approaches
that work in support of efforts in Iran and other countries "that are struggling for democracy, for democratic
transition, like North Korea, like Zimbabwe, like Venezuela, like China."
Afshari said he spent three years in prison, including 400 days in solitary confinement. "That encouraged me, because I
understand the difficulty and the hard situation of those who are in prison now," he said.
ENDS