Students across Iran are planning to lead a huge day of protest this week against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, in a defiant commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the US embassy takeover by radical students in Tehran.
Thousands of green fliers and posters, drawn by anonymous artists, are circulating on the Internet, inviting ordinary Iranians to join the student protests, planned for Wednesday.
Organizers have condemned the repressive measures taken by Ahmadinejad’s government since the disputed election results of the summer, which gave the Iranian president a second term and led to unprecedented demonstrations on the streets of Tehran and elsewhere. Opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi appeared to back the protests on Saturday, posting a statement on a reformist Web site, Mousavi said he would press ahead with his efforts for political change.
Referring to the Iranian date of the seizing of the US embassy in 1979, Mousavi said: “The 13th of Aban is a ... rendezvous so we would remember anew that among us it is the people who are the leaders.”
Iranian police chief, Ismail Ahmadi-Moghadam, has warned demonstrators to stay off the streets, but activists predict one of the biggest days of protest since the green marches.
A student of civil engineering at Amir Kabir University in Tehran, who wished to remain anonymous, said: “The officials are very afraid of the student movement, that’s why they are preparing to crack down on Nov. 4. The protests in Iran have not cooled off, they’re just beginning.”
Iran’s students were on vacation during the failed “Green Revolution” of June, when hundreds of thousands of protesters attempted to overturn the official election result, which gave Ahmadinejad a crushing victory over Mousavi.
In recent months, however, despite the high-profile presence on campuses of security police, universities have become centers of underground protest and organization. Dissent has also been expressed in schools. One teacher in a Tehran school said that such gestures of rebellion were widespread.
“It is amazing,” he said, asking not to be named. “In the school where I’m teaching, students show their opposition in any way that they can find, whether it’s by wearing a green wristband, green shirt, doing homework in green pen or writing slogans in toilets, on their desk or on the blackboard.”
In an interview published on the Amir Kabir University student news Web site, Morteza Simiari, a leader of Iran’s Student Organization, Tahkim Vahdat, said: “The students who are protesting in universities today are the people who were out there in the streets in June and July and were mistreated. Universities are part of society and what is happening now shows that people do not believe the results of the election.”
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