Unrest among Iranian students

By Heraclitus

Here's a story from the BBC about a wave of student protests against the current hard-line government dominated by clerics and other religious conservatives. More generally, the article details some of the attempts by the Iranian government to control speech and thought at Iranian universities by banning student groups and newspapers, intimidating students, and forcing professors into retirement. The students are referring to these as purges.

Iranian students say there is a second cultural revolution under way in the universities with scores of professors forcibly retired and politically active students being threatened with expulsion.

Student anger exploded with an unprecedented show of defiance when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went to Tehran's Amir Kabir University on 12 December.

Pictures shot on a mobile phone showed angry students chanting against the president, accusing him f being a fascist and a puppet of the hardliners.

They held portraits of Mr Ahmadinejad upside down to mock him and then set them on fire.

The day before the president visited, the university was in turmoil with students shouting "Death to the dictator".

Iranian television only showed a few seconds of the disturbance. Later Mr Ahmadinejad put a brave face on it saying the protest showed there was freedom of speech in Iran compared to his tudent days under the Shah.

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It was the president who appointed a cleric for the first time since the revolution to head Tehran University -- he country's most political and prestigious university.

Mr Ahmadinejad told journalists the chancellor should be friendly with the students, moving among them and visiting their dormitories --otherwise he should give up his job to someone else.

The first time the new chancellor entered the university, students protested by knocking off his turban - a sign of extreme disrespect for a cleric.

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Students complain the international community is not paying enough attention to the worsening human rights situation in Iran because of the obsession with the nuclear issue.

"The Islamic Republic has managed to focus the international community's attention on Iran's nuclear case and the possibility of an Israeli attack. That has diverted attention from the human rights situation in Iran," says Mr Nesbati.

He believes it is possible that one day Iranian officials will solve the nuclear crisis but "in the mean time they will have crushed all their internal critics".