Following the bold exposé by student activists against a deputy president of Zanjan University (carried out by posting his ethical intimidations on YouTube) last month, which took place soon after government authorities had retreated in the face of successful protests at the Teachers Training college in Karaj, I made a prediction that was published in this publication about what was to follow.
I argued that: “Analytic evidence strengthened the view that Iran’s hardline circles may have put ‘revenge’ against the student movement on their agenda. … The analysts of this group believe that the potential of the student movement is very dangerous because of the large student population of Iran, their dispersion around the country (with their presence even in the smallest of towns), and their impact on other social groups (at the least on their own families). And so the student hope of pushing government authorities to retreat from their positions at the institutions of higher education and other student organizations must be prevented at any cost. Because of this view, one can expect that the victory of student activists in imposing their demands on government officials at the Teachers Training College and Zanjan University (particularly in the latter because of the audacious and aggressive nature of their initiative) will lead the extremists to engage in an instructive counter-attack against the student movement.”
Unfortunately, this prediction has already materialized.
The arrest two days ago of Mohammad Hashemi and Bahareh Hedayat, two members of the leading body of the Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat student organization, heralds the height of the new phase of crackdown of the student movement. Prior to this, some 16 other student activists had already been arrested from various universities around Iran that include, the universities in Mashhad, Tehran, Sistan and Baluchistan. The students that were arrested included the spokesperson of the Shahrood Islamic Association Ali Gholizadeh, the former secretary of the Polytechnic University Ali Saberi, students Reza Arab, Ashkan Arashian, Mehdi Ghassemi, Farzad Hassanzadeh, Mohammad Zeraati, Mohammad Mizban Tohid Dolatshenas, and Sajjad Rajabi from Mashhad and Majid Assadi from Alameh Tabatabai University.
The manner in which hardline circles work in the security domain, in fact follows some specific patterns which are predictable under certain conditions.
So if we accept that the recent aggression of the hardliners in the domain of students is within the confines of “deterrent revenge”, one must await new measures against detained student activists. If authorities conclude that they can crush their detainees with the least costs, they will immediately accuse them of treason and thus embark on teaching other student activists a deterrent lesson. This is possible because of the view that the technique of mass arrests of social activists provides a lower per-capita cost in terms of public outcry.
Under these circumstances, the first priority is to ensure that the case of the arrested students is not followed with a news silence or blackout about them. Because otherwise, these students will be off the public radar and will be forgotten all the way until the next academic year begins, after summer. What may happen till then is that the charges that will be brought against them will be so severe that it will not be easy, even for the authorities, to retreat from their accusations. Iranian lawyers have said that a prosecutor in Iran can present a case in a manner that even the Supreme Court may be unable to change the course of the case and issue a judgment or a ruling that is different from the contents of the case.
After all, 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.
