Warning from Hundreds of Student Activists: Putin’s Voice Echoes Through Military Ranks Across the Country

More than 500 student publication activists issued an open letter to Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, warning about the securitization of the social and university environment.

News websites reported that in this letter, published on the occasion of Student Day, objections were raised to security-based handling of student gatherings that had supported workers and civil protesters.

The signatories of this letter warned about the consequences of “widespread suppression of every independent civil institution and every legal peaceful protest” in Iran and told Hassan Rouhani that the police force, Ministry of Intelligence, and Ministry of Interior have “engaged in a regrettable competition with parallel security institutions to silence voices and breath, while you continue to merely deny.”

The letter signatories continued by criticizing the government’s disregard for recent civil protests, saying that instead of accountability, “the sphere of suppression has expanded day by day to the point that today we hear not just Putin’s voice echoing from military ranks in universities, but throughout the entire country.”

In another section of the letter, student publications, criticizing the actions of parallel security institutions, noted that “news of arrests by the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence branch and widespread summons to the judiciary and the formation of legal cases is so frequent that any simple civil activity now brings with it the fear of security and legal confrontation.”

The signatories criticized the Rouhani government for not only being “silent and passive” in response to these actions, but also because “a government whose slogan and claim was not to create a militarized university, has today not only militarized the university but the entire social sphere.”

One day before the publication of this letter, student professional councils from 35 Iranian universities had issued a statement on the occasion of Student Day warning about increased security pressures against student activists.

This statement criticized the suppression of students following the December 2017 protests, which were accompanied by the arrest of more than 300 students across the country, and subsequently led to long-term prison sentences, flogging penalties, and travel bans for students.

Source: Voice of America