In a rare show of dissent, Iranian students at the University of Tehran gathered outside school gates, demonstrating against the government as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke there yesterday, according to the British Broadcasting Corp.
The BBC reported on eyewitnesses who said police used tear gas to suppress demonstrators. After Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia, Iranian student leaders challenged him over the academic freedoms from which American students benefit.
They got their wish as the president spoke in the country’s capital. Unlike the engagement in Morningside Heights, at the event in Tehran the campus was locked and journalists were prohibited from entering campus.
This protest comes as information has spread about omissions of Ahmadinejad’s speech during its broadcast in Iran. Many of Ahmadinejad’s criticisms of people willing to negotiate on nuclear issues were omitted, as they were seen as critical of previous Iranian President Hashimi Rafsanjani.
According to the BBC, the two opposing groups were composed of about a few hundred students each. The anti-government group chanted, “Death to the dictator.” When protesters tried to break into the hall where Ahmadinejad was speaking, law-enforcement officials used tear gas to quell the crowd.
Yesterday’s demonstration was one of the first anti-government protests since December 2006, when Ahmadinejad was met with student dissent when he spoke at Amir Kabir Technical University. Outside the Amir Kabir engagement, students set the president’s picture on fire.
These protests echo the fear expressed by Tehran native and CUNY architecture student, Mahdi Hosseinzadeh, who stood outside Columbia’s gates on Sept. 24, holding pictures of his two imprisoned friends. “They [my friends] are imprisoned for being part of an Iranian student movement. When Ahmadinejad took them, first they put them in jail for no reason—then they come up with political reasons.”
Hosseinzadeh added that Ahmadinejad was his professor in the Iran University of Science and Technology. “He was a good teacher,” he said, “not a good person.”
Joy Resmovits can be reached at joy.resmovits@columbiaspectator.com.