City boy

In the last week over 40 students of the Amir Kabir University in Tehran have been called to meet the University Disciplinary Committee, six of these students have since been banned from attending the classes and the dormitories.

One of these students was Bijan Pouryousefi, a committee member of the student activist body ISA, has been banned from attending any classes for two months which comes at a crucial point in his degree and delays his graduation by a year.

Following is a translation from an interview with Bijan yesterday:

Q. How did you recieve the news for your exclusion?
Bijan: On Monday (May 14) I received a call from the disciplinary committee who told me that I have some letters which I need to collect. I went over to the student affairs office where I recieved two letters, one which was for attendance at the disciplinary office on the Tues (May 29) and the other that told me that I have been banned from attending classes and also the dormitories and my student loan was also stopped. However I can appeal to it.

Q. Do you know the reason for this order?
Bijan: Last winter they also called me to go to the disciplinary office where I said I would like to defend myself in front of the committee which was one of the rights given to me. However this was not allowed. I objected and said these are my rights in your own conditions! but I was told that I have 5 allegations attached to me and they wouldn’t even tell me any of them. The reason for the orders to be given out now is that this is another attempt by the university as part of their crackdown on our efforts and to put an stop to our activities. I have ten days to appeal to the order.

Q. How will you be appealing if you can not exercise your right to defend yourself?
Bijan: I don’t know. I am going to try again, but I doubt it will be successful. I have to say that the project for the Second Cultural Revolution is to remove all student activists from the scene. They are forcing us to prolong our degree by a year to six years!

Q. Will you be able to pass your degree like that?
Bijan: No. I had two months to pass 30 units in my final year of my degree. However by doing this they have deprived me of my degree, they are using this “soft” method to fail student activists. They have given similar orders to Mr. Salmanpur, Hakimzadeh and others, who are also in their final year. This is exclusion from the university.

Q. You said you have been banned from the dormoteries too, are you not from Tehran?
Bijan: Yes, I don’t have anywhere to go. By doing this, they are excluding me from Tehran too!

Q. What does it mean to exclude a student from the dormitories while there are such high prices for rooms in Tehran?
Bijan: This is the attempt of the regime to exclude any students who are critical of the regime. This is a tool of crackdown. It might not be violent, not like how they treat the protesters in the streets, but to a student with a low income who is banned from dormitories in Tehran so he has to go back home to another city is a type of crack.

Q. Do you think their behaviour towards these 40 students who they have called to the office, is in order to set an example for others and calming down the students?
Bijan: One of the reasons is so others wouldn’t enter the scene [student activism]. But this won’t work in Amir Kabir. Ten years ago when we weren’t student, we heard that Ansar Hezbollah on motor bikes attacked student gatherings with batons. These got worse through the years. In fact, the freshers to the university are much braver than us. Even with us gone, these new students will carry on. It will never stop. Just look at the events of the past two weeks, with all this pressure and imprisonment, we still carry on.

For the last three days, the Amir Kabir University students have continuously protested against the fellow students who have been imprisoned: