Mehdi Amini-Zadeh is a ”starred” student. A 28-year-old with a studious look, he won a place last year to do a masters degree in political science at Mofid University in Qom, Iran’s holy city. But when he went to register the day before classes began, he was told he had been refused entry to his course. ”They said the order had come from the intelligence ministry. I later realised that another 21 students in Iran had the same problem. They were all ’starred’.”
We are drinking tea in a small Tehran cafe where the mugs are decorated with red hearts. Under dim lights, surrounded by shelves stacked with books and a bar that serves everything but alcohol, Amini-Zadeh tells me of his tireless lobbying to get off the student blacklist. He has three stars, the highest number. He has met politicians and written letters, so far without success.
What lies behind his misfortune is his background as a student leader. In the late 1990s, as a civil engineering undergraduate, he was a member of the general council of the Office to Foster Unity, the umbrella organisation of the mainstream Islamic Associations, which helped stage the student protests that rocked Iran and turned into the worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic revolution that drove the Shah from power.
The July 1999 turmoil started as a peaceful Tehran University rally against the closure of a reformist newspaper, Salam, and proposed restrictive press laws. But a brutal reaction by police and armed vigilantes loyal to hardline elements of the regime set off several days of rioting that spread from Tehran to other major cities.
Amini-Zadeh says it was at dawn, after the original protest, that the police broke down doors, destroyed computers and beat up students in the Tehran University dormitories. There was a demonstration against the dormitory attack, followed by continuing rioting and protests. The troubles ended after six days but they took with them much of the youths’ rebellious flame.
Student leaders now look back at the 1999 unrest as a turning point. For them, it was a demonstration of the hardliners’ fierce determination to subdue the reform movement led by Mohammad Khatami, the gentle, smiling cleric the students helped elect as president in 1997. It was also the moment when idealistic activists like Amini-Zadeh started to lose faith in Khatami’s ability to deliver on his cherished idea of reconciling the Islamic Republic with democracy.
Khatami once called the student movement ”a rising star in the dead of night”. But his muted support for their demands shattered their hopes, making them question whether he had the mettle to implement political reforms. Still more depressingly, it made them ask whether Iran’s parallel system of elected and even more powerful unelected institutions, all answering to a supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, could ever be reformed from within.
Many students continued to work for the reformist movement, helping it gain control of municipal councils and win the parliamentary elections in 2000. But with the hardliners relentlessly fighting back, more powerful than the parliament or the presidency, the reformists’ dreams went unfulfilled. Their agenda, heavily focused on political change, frustrated many Iranians, who were mainly looking for a better life in a country that has the second-highest oil reserves in the world, but where young people cannot find work after graduation.
It was not surprising that the combination of repression and disillusionment allowed the conservatives eventually to make a political comeback - culminating in the 2005 election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the maverick president backed by radical elements in the regime, who came out of nowhere to win popular support with his simple promise to bring the oil money to ordinary people’s homes.
It is sometimes difficult for outsiders to understand the power of Iran’s students - or why the Iranian regime is so wary of them. Students helped overthrow the Shah and then played the leading role in the US embassy hostage crisis. In what Iranians refer to as their own subsequent ”cultural revolution”, universities were closed down for three years while ”cultural imperialism” was purged and replaced with Islamic teachings and thousands of new textbooks.
The ”cultural revolution” was imposed with the help of the Islamic Associations of students, a collection of groups in various universities led by religious zealots. In time, disenchanted with the revolution, they evolved into the reformist student movement of the 1990s that spawned leaders such as Amini-Zadeh and helped bring Khatami to power.
Today the student movement is exhausted and in disarray. But not even Ahmadi-Nejad can ignore them. Students staged a noisy demonstration against him when he visited Tehran’s Amir Kabir University of Technology in December. Since May, eight students from the university have been arrested, following publication of a cartoon ridiculing Ayatollah Khamenei and other articles that were seen as insulting to Shia clerics. The students say they are innocent and are being set up by their opponents, in retaliation for the protests against the president’s visit. The country’s population is young - more than half are under 25 and the voting age is 16 - and no one can forget how often students have upended the status quo.
When Ahmadi-Nejad took the reins of government in the summer of 2005, many Iranians feared he would suppress dissent and quickly reverse the social gains made under Khatami. Politicians today say the political atmosphere is ”heavier”, open criticism of the regime’s foreign policy can be costly and the local press applies a stronger dose of self-censorship. Recently, the government has arrested Iranian-Americans working for US institutes, claiming they are part of an American plan for ”soft revolution”.
There are regular, almost seasonal, attacks on women who allow their veils to slip back on their hair. But, fearful of a youth backlash, Ahmadi-Nejad has largely left the social freedoms achieved under Khatami untouched. So in spite of the crackdowns, women still do allow their headscarves to slip and wear short, tight coats. You can spot young couples holding hands in public and there is none of the sexual segregation imposed in Saudi Arabia.
But the government remains particularly nervous about students. Universities, while quiet, are closely watched. Organisations labelled ”radical” by the regime are not allowed to function. Students suspected of troublemaking are sent to university disciplinary committees. Rallies are discouraged. For the first time, Tehran University has a cleric for a dean, and some reform-minded professors who might have stayed long past the retirement age under the Khatami presidency are believed to have been quickly retired over the past year.
”The security forces are very sensitive about networking and organising - this is their Achilles’ heel,” Abdollah Momeni, another former student leader, told me. Still active in the graduate branch of the Office to Foster Unity, Momeni is a passionate 30-year-old, a fast talker with an often sarcastic, defiant tone. A few months ago at Tehran airport, on his way to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to deliver a paper on the future of the student movement, he was stopped by what he says was an intelligence agent, and told to turn back. A conservative website later thanked the intelligence ministry for blocking his trip, and accused MIT of plotting to teach Iranians how to stage an east European-style ”velvet revolution”.
”The student movement is one of the forces that can make the regime vulnerable so there are high restrictions on students. Old vetting procedures are coming back, there are closures of publications, limits on who can continue his education,” he says. ”But the risks involved in political activities have also increased and that leads to less activism. Students supported an idea called reform and that idea has failed. So they are disillusioned. And there is confusion after the failure, confusion about alternatives.”
To get a better sense of students’ mood, I make my way to the main campus of Tehran University, known as the ”mother university” and home to 30,000 students. It appears, at first sight, no different from a US university, except that what looks like a sports ground turns out to be a giant open space for praying.
On the wall of the dentistry faculty, I notice a painting depicting a young man with a machine gun, a martyr in the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. ”Do not permit the forerunners of jihad and martyrdom to be forgotten in the labyrinth of everyday life,” reads a quote from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revered father of the Islamic revolution.
The students I meet seem more concerned about jobs and marriage than revolution, or even reform. Marzieh, 22, is covered from head to toe in a black chador, though her trendy black sunglasses give away a more fashionable side. ”What everyone is thinking about now is getting a job,” she says. ”Politics is not a real concern, though this is a politicised university and everyone knows what’s happening in the country. In the past the Islamic Associations were the strongest at the university, but now there isn’t a single strong body. It’s nothing like the past. That kind of excitement is gone.”
At the faculty of law and political science, I meet Amir, a 27-year-old who looks out of place with his light hair and western preppy look. He tells me he’s preparing to start a doctoral programme, and that he’s been around Tehran University since the late 1990s. He was at the dormitory in 1999 and remembers the mayhem, the beatings, and the massive crowds that later poured on to the streets from the university gates.
”Even Khatami whom we loved so much wasn’t able to defend our demands at that time. Every day we saw intellectuals and students taken to jail and there was no one to stand up for them. So gradually we became disillusioned, we withdrew, and the regime used the opportunity to dominate.”
A leader of an Islamic Association at the university was suspended recently and others were given warnings, he says. ”No one says you can’t have political activities, but students are warned it’s not desirable, or they are summoned by disciplinary committees.” He resigned from his Islamic Association recently, convinced there was no future for them in today’s Iran. ”Now I prefer to work for non-governmental organisations outside the university, especially through the internet, and I have my own blog.”
A powerful student force at Iran’s universities these days, says Amir, is the Basij Islamic militia. Created by Khomeini and since then under the command of the elite Revolutionary Guards, the Basij helped suppress students during the Khatami years. In 2005, they voted for Ahmadi-Nejad. But with their favoured leaders in full control, even the Basijis have mellowed. ”In the late 1990s the university was always the scene of conflict between the Basij and the Islamic Associations. But now there are no real activities for the Basij to oppose.”
Professors, too, say they have noticed the change in Basij behaviour. ”They don’t behave like a battalion, they have roundtables and conferences, they invite me to speak, and they look tolerant,” says Hamid Reza Jalaei-Pour, a Tehran University sociology professor who is writing a book on the student movement. In his apartment, he tells me that former student leaders like Amini-Zadeh and Momeni are now a tiny, quirky minority out of touch with the mainstream.
”They talk together but they don’t have an office because the conservatives won’t let them use student facilities any more.” But he warns me not to dismiss Iran’s student movement. Though most of the Islamic Associations called for a boycott of the 2005 presidential election, they told students to vote in the more recent local council polls, in which the reformists did well and the president’s allies were beaten.
How far can the reformist students go? ”The future of the student movement depends on the behaviour of the state. You can’t have a new movement emerge if the state is controlling everything. Movements also develop when the political price is low. So either a democratic government allows it or the government has to collapse. Otherwise the price is too high.” Part of the dilemma, explains Jalaei-Pour, is that women now make up 62 per cent of the university student body. ”Women are not radical in their politics. They are more conservative, they study and they go home.”
Iran’s student movement occasionally still manages to cause a stir. Students talk with excitement about the protest against Ahmadi-Nejad when he visited Amir Kabir University of Technology. The most radical of Tehran’s universities, Amir Kabir was never likely to greet the president with open arms, and his insistence on giving a speech there enraged students.
Though the visit was carefully organised and the hall packed with loyal Basij students, the president’s young critics forced their way in, chanting ”down with the dictator” and ”forget the Holocaust and think about us”. (Ahmadi-Nejad has, notoriously, questioned whether the Holocaust took place.) A few even dared to burn his portrait.
I visit Amir Kabir on a cool winter afternoon in Tehran - and I immediately feel the tension. A guard tells me to wait for an escort. A bearded minder arrives more than half an hour later. As a colleague and I walk in, a student points to our escort and quips: ”Don’t lie to them.”
The minder is polite and happy to take me to the Basij office, where two students, who say they are ”non-active” members of the organisation, agree to speak, but only outside the building. Mohammad, an aerospace engineering student, puts on a brave face when I ask about the president’s visit. ”We feel proud that our president came to a more politically oriented university and was willing to answer questions. Students who were critical had a chance to ask questions. He was unhappy that the students behaved in such a way that satisfied people hostile to this country. But he later invited representatives of students to go to his office and have a private meeting with him, though they refused. He also said all students who criticised him were like his children. Anyway, criticism is good.”
I ask the minder to take me to the office of the Islamic Association, which I suspect organised the protest. He says the office of one Islamic Association is closed for the day; the other has been closed permanently.
I stop to chat to a group of 20-year-old students who giggle when I ask whether they had attended the president’s speech. ”It was excellent,” says one of the girls. ”We weren’t let in at first. The Basij students from other universities had filled the space. But we forced ourselves in, we were naughty and the president tolerated us. We were chanting ’death to the dictator’ and the others [the Basij] were chanting ’Ahmadi-Nejad we love you’. It was a battle of slogans.”
A colleague contacts some of the Amir Kabir student leaders by telephone and we meet at a restaurant nearby. Ali Azizi, a tall, composed engineering student, explains that the Islamic Association he represents had an election last year but the university rejected the result, declared the organisation illegal and bulldozed its building. ”We protested. We gathered students around us. To stop us, the university stopped me and two others from continuing our education for one term, after a disciplinary committee summoned us and accused us of staging the unrest.”
He and two of his friends say it was their association that organised the protest against Ahmadi-Nejad, an event they consider a highlight in their student struggle. ”Ahmadi-Nejad was trying to show that the protest wasn’t serious and that he could handle it, and there were many more Basij students in the hall than critics of the president. But he couldn’t talk for five minutes without being interrupted. And he couldn’t do anything to us afterwards because Iran is under international pressure,” says Ali.
Amini-Zadeh, the ”starred” former student leader, tells me such protests show students still have a voice. ”It’s the students who raise violations of human rights and defend the rights of political prisoners. Ahmadi-Nejad was told ’no’ in the most blatant way and it was the first direct challenge to him.” But Amini-Zadeh acknowledges that students need a new cause. ”During the Khatami period the strategy was clear: you have to win elections and try to reform parts of the system. But that turned into a failed strategy. The problem we have now is that we don’t have an alternative. Ahmadi-Nejad is rejected at Amir Kabir but no one says what the alternative is. It’s not just the problem of the student movement but the problem of the whole political system.”
Some of the former student leaders are thinking hard about strategy. Momeni, for example, says the way to regain students’ trust is to take up the causes that directly affect their lives, rather than trying to sell them unattainable dreams. ”In the past we attached great importance to freedom and democracy, and during the last eight years that was part of the discourse of society. For the new generation, individuality, personal freedom, jobs, are more important.”
Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East editor.
