By Yassmine Mather
Iranian students have called for a rally against "despotism and outdated concepts of religion" this Saturday despite a government ban on all student demonstrations. Tehran university students have said they want to press on with a rally to mark national student day on 7 December.
The day marks events in the bloody 1953 repression of student protests, when during demonstrations against a visit by then-US vice-president Richard Nixon (a guest of the late Shah) three students were killed.
For more than five days in mid-November, thousands of Iranian students demonstrated, calling for the release of all political prisoners and against a death sentence passed by the clerical rulers of Iran against a reformist Islamist academic, Aghajari. He is alleged to have committed blasphemy during a speech this summer.
Aghajari, a close ally of the "reformist" faction of the regime had questioned the issue of "imitation of Islamic guidance" (Marjae Taghlid), a pivotal part of Shia Islam. He is reported to have told his audience at a lecture in Hamadan that humans are not monkeys and therefore do not need to imitate anyone.
Thousands of students demonstrated in Tehran, Oroumiyeh and the Universities of Hamadan, Kerman, Isfahan and Tabriz. The students shouted slogans against Khamenii, Iran's supreme clerical leader and the previous president Rafsanjani.
"You can cut our tongues... you can take us to jail as you have jailed many other students and scholars, but you can't capture our hearts, you can't prevent freedom of expression and thoughts," a student leader said.
A week later, on the fourth anniversary of serial political murders in Iran, a commemoration of the first two victims, Dariyoush and Parvaneh Forouhar saw a major demonstration of tens of thousands, demanding that the authorities deal with this dossier. The meeting heard the families of the victims of serial political murders demanding an independent international inquiry by the UN's Human Rights Commission into serial political murders in Iran.
Given political tension in the region and the current policy of the UK government to appease religious dictators in Iran while preparing war against Iraq, it is important that the left supports the student protest movement in Iran and supports Iranian students' calls for:
- political freedom in Iran, including the right to challenge Islamic concepts,
- unconditional release of all political prisoners
- an independent judicial investigation of "serial political murders" in Iran.
