An Ever-Fleeing Minister and an Enthusiastic Election
While security agents under the command of Minister of Science Dr Mohammad Mehdi Zahedi – whose PhD cannot be 100 percent certain under the present circumstances - were violently driving university students out of their campus, this ever-fleeing minister was talking about “the enthusiastic participation of students at (2009 presidential) elections”.
This run-away minister who never directly faces students and whose first task at any protesting gathering is to locate the nearest exit, sat comfortably at his office at Iran’s Ministry of Science (which appoints university heads), and said, “We really desire that our universities put on a happy face for the forthcoming elections.”
But exactly at the time that this minister from President Ahmadinejad’s administration called for students to “engage in talks and debates about elections and be enlightened so that they could impact the atmosphere of the country,” security agents belonging to Alameh Tabatabai University were transferring students Majid Dari, Mahdie Golroo, Sadegh Shojayi and Saeed Feyz from the university security offices to the revolutionary court to make sure that they understood that “enthusiastic participation” did not mean that these four students return to campus to continue their education. From his perspective “enthusiastic participation” means that students must be repeatedly violently mistreated by the university security agents and that they must be driven out of the campus by these agents so that agents from the national security force could take care of them!
Students are violently woken up in early morning to respond to protests about their living conditions, students who are slapped and insulted and then tortured to remind them what “enthusiastic participation” means. This is how students who in the words of Mahdie Golroo merely want to return to campus to attend their classes are treated.
The lightest protests of students are met with Keyhan-newspaper-type interrogations, bans and condemnations. And while these students address only universities, the responses they are subjected to come from commanders who view them as threatening as the threats from the “Zionist regime.”
And while many students have been denied their right to continue their education, some are in prison and still others are either in captivity or under fear, they are expected to display “enthusiasm” over the forthcoming elections which are supposed to return Ahmadinejad to another presidential term, so that he can have a minister with Mohammad Mehdi Zahedi’s qualities and a university president such as Sadredin Shariati whose agents slap women students and drag their bodies on university grounds.
These students are expected to talk only when they are allowed to by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They are expected to raise their voice and call out only when he asks them to, not when they feel they have to. These students are expected to join in the calls of the security-military administration regarding the expulsion of university lecturers and professors because they are labeled to be “liberals” while everybody else calls them the treasures of this land.
Mahdie is expected to remain in her cell today and other days while her face is swollen because of the slaps she has received from security agents so that those like Sadredin can continue to reign over the campuses. In the same fashion that Zahra Bani-Yaghoob is expected to remain in her prison cell and be humiliated so that the country’s current administration that relies on exercises it calls “peace and security” paves the ground for an “enthusiastic” election. But the point is that these gentlemen have forgotten that a show of “enthusiasm” can be presented during the elections, but what cannot be faked is “wisdom” which shall prevail over these unfortunate times.