Iran International
President Ebrahim Raisi Wednesday delivered a traditional Student Day speech at Tehran University to an audience highly vetted to keep protesting students out.
Students have reported on social media that university security and government security forces vigilantly vetted students before allowing them to attend the speech which uncharacteristically was not broadcast live by state media. They claim members of the paramilitary Basij were brought in from other universities and elsewhere to fill the event hall with supporters.
At the same time, students in a dozen universities held protest rallies amid pressures by security forces and Basij vigilantes.
Surrounded by bodyguards and security forces, Raisi also walked through the campus to give a message of “normality” to the event. In his speech and in response to questions from the constantly cheering vetted audience, Raisi praised his own government’s “achievements”, made promises of economic improvement, accused protesters of “enmity with the country”, and claimed the opposition wanted to wage a civil war in Iran, like in Syria.
In the past three months, over 200 Tehran University students were arrested and 20 are still in detention. Some students have been sentenced to prison terms, others have been put on a list of non-grata students or have been banned from attending classes and using dormitories. According to students, the university released a new list of non-grata students ahead of Raisi’s visit.
“One had to sign up and provide a lot of information beforehand [to get the entrance permit], apparently some were denied, for unspecified reasons, even after signing up in advance,” a tweet said.
Another tweet said someone from among the vetted audience had protested to Raisi for not giving a high position to the ultra-hardliner former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalil. “As if what protesting students want is [a position for another regime loyalist]”, the tweet said.
Raisi’s speech on Wednesday was preceded by a noisy appearance at Tehran’s Sharif University Tuesday where students, including a female student who had defiantly taken her hijab off, grilled the capital’s hardliner mayor Alireza Zakani about corruption, the Islamic Republic’s support for the Taliban, backing the Lebanese Hezbollah and other controversial issues.
Sharif students booed the mayor when he blamed foreign countries for fomenting protests in Iran, staged a protest on the campus, and saw him off with chants of “Death to the Dictator”, “Death to Khamenei”, and “Rascal”.
Raisi said he had been advised not to attend Student Day events at universities, “or at least Tehran University”, presumably due to the current climate in the country, but had nevertheless decided to deliver his speech there. Apparently, he made his decision after vetting those in attendance.
Presidents’ Student Day speeches at Tehran University, the country’s oldest university, and how they are received by students, has considerable significance in Iran's political scene.
On the first anniversary of his election in 1997, reformist President Mohammad Khatami delivered a speech at Tehran University to highly enthusiastic students during which he warned about hardliners’ use of religion to restrict citizens’ freedoms. It is religion that will eventually be crushed if it is pitched against freedom, he said.
In December 1999, however, he had a difficult time with angry students whose campus had been attacked and ransacked by vigilantes and security forces loyal to the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who arrested scores and killed several students in July of the same year.
In a Student Day message Monday, Khatami from his retirement praised the “Women, Life, Freedom”, the trademark slogan of the current protests, expressed sorrow for the “shed bloods”, warned that freedom should not be trampled in the name of establishing security, and criticized the arrest of students and pressure on their teachers.
His successor, hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never made an appearance at Tehran University for Student Day speeches. Moderate Hassan Rouhani also had a hard time at Tehran University in 2016 when Basij militia students assailed him even told him not to think of a second term of presidency.
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Last week, Black Reward, a hactivist group released tens of files containing IRGC-linked Fars News Agency's exclusive security briefings for the Guard’s Commander Hossein Salami, compromising some closely held secrets.
One immediate victim was Abbas Darvish-Tavangar, a long-time hardliner media man and analysts who was the second in command at Fars.
One of the outlets that published the files for the public, the online Iranian Studies Library, noted that the security briefing bulletins were prepared exclusively for Salami by a team headed by Tavangar. Individual bulletins were prepared in between 120 to 140 pages daily.
As pointed out by an insider commentator Abbas Abdi, the agency came up with conflicting explanations including denying the existence of the bulletins. "They said the briefings as published contained lies, rumors and inaccurate information. Later they said Salami did not need such information and that they have been prepared by a single rogue element. Some others called the bulletins 'dirty political weapons,' and levelled all sorts of accusations against the bulletins' authors. All that made the matter even more complicated."
Abdi asked a series of important questions. If the content of the bulletins were wrong or if Salami did not need them, why their compilation and publication continued. Does this mean that the news dissemination system is faulty even at such a high level? Also, no matter if the content was true or false, was Salami influenced by the information? The intended audience may have been badly misled by this and other similar bulletins. Have they been the basis of decision making by the intended audience?
If the information was false, did someone deliberately misinform the IRGC commander or the producer of the bulletins simply lacked the editorial judgement and skill for collecting the information? In both cases, using such briefings could have been dangerous, Abdi pointed out.
Referring to the "top secret" classification of the bulletins, Abdi noted that they might have included right, wrong, and unverified information. This does not mean that everything in the bulletins were top secret. But the IRGC assigned the classification to prevent others from finding out its sensitivities and priorities.
Meanwhile Abdi added that the hacking prompted the IRGC to deny the bulletins' contents. He concluded that an organization that is surprised by revelations about its behind-the-scenes operations certainly has a problematic structure.
In another development, conservative commentator Mohammad Mohajeri warned that state officials should treat all such briefing bulletins in a way as if their contents are not true unless it is proven otherwise. He pointed out that false information may be deliberately put at officials' disposal to mislead them.
Mohajeri also pointed out that some of the contents of the hacked bulletins are half-truths and half lies, and this is even worse than giving false news to someone. However, considering Mohajeri's background as one of the former editors of the ultraconservative Kayhan newspaper, and his links to the core of the regime, his comments may be an effort at damage control.
On the other hand, Mohajeri called for an end to the publication of similar bulletins, calling them "biased," although he also opined that the briefings could be helpful if they were authored in a professional way. He said bulletins were being prepared and disseminated to officials for at least thirty years now, and some of them are utterly created to channel their audience's behavior and decisions in a certain direction.
Iranians are well acquainted with the concept of political graffiti and used it extensively during the days that led to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, but these days they are using the medium to overthrow the Islamic regime.
According to documents released by hacktivist group Black Reward last week, the authorities are gravely concerned about the propagation of the phenomenon on the backdrop of nationwide protests and strikes that have rocked the foundations of the clerical regime during the past 80 days.
The confidential briefing papers to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and ranking members of the Revolutionary Guard, acquired by hacking into the database of IRGC-affiliated Fars News Agency, revealed that the authorities seem unable to deal with the enormous number of political slogans on walls and the persistence of protesters to renew them after they are painted over by the cities’ sanitation departments or volunteer members of Basij paramilitary force. In one of the documents, the city of Zanjan was mentioned as an example where almost all its walls are covered with slogans against the regime. Something especially worrying for the regime is the slogans directly targeting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, referring to him as a “bloodthirsty dictator” or a “despot” whose days are numbered.
Iranians know the significance of slogans against Khamenei, whose zealot supporters are prepared to kill anyone for even criticizing him, let alone wishing death for him. But now, according to the leaked documents, even schoolchildren are using slurs to talk about him. Profanities against the Supreme Leader which were only chanted in the worst protest-riot situations in the past have become mainstream, while protesters are continuously coming up with new and ingeniously rhyming slogans with even stronger profanities. This degree of profanity is unprecedented in Iran where four-letter words are normally avoided in most social and even private contexts, particularly in the presence of women and children.
The regime’s agents are busy everywhere painting over the slogans or doodling over them to conceal the zeitgeist of society, but people are greater in numbers and bolder in action. For every graffiti that is painted over, more or bigger graffiti appear the following day. The most frequently used slogan is the motto of the uprising: Women, life, liberty – words that describe people’s aspiration that no amount of paint can hide them.
Walls have become a new frame for people to make their voices heard. As American linguist George Lakoff explains in his book Don't Think of an Elephant!, that when you frame the debate, you have already won. Its rough translation on street walls of Iran is that however the regime paints over its walls, it cannot change the fact that most Iranians do not want the regime.
According to an article in Etemad newspaper, the calls on Tehran’s municipality's service requesting to remove writings from walls have recently increased 60-fold. The paper cited sociologist Hossein Imani Jajarmi as saying that such an increase “is directly tied to the recent unrest.” Describing political graffiti as a common tool to express economic and political woes as well as racial and gender discrimination, he said the spread of graffiti during the past few months can be a sign of ineffectiveness of the regime’s coercive and military measures.
Over 1,500 instances of political graffiti were found at Pompeii, offering a glimpse into the workings of Roman politics at the local level. Similar to how graffiti shed light on how politics was in the city of Pompeii until it was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in 79 AD, the walls of Iranian cities testify as to how the people fought their way to “Women, life, liberty.”
The state-run television (IRIB) confirmed the arrest of Abbas Darvish-Tavangar, a high-profile hardliner journalist and politician in its Monday evening 20:30 program, hours after rumors of his arrest were reported by a reformist newspaper.
Mentioning Darvish-Tavangar only by initials, the program said as a journalist who often participated in meetings with top officials and had access to some news but had “forged” reports and created false briefing papers “without authorization”.
“Unauthorized” reports and newsletters refers to a series of document that a hactivist group, Black Reward, said on November 25 it had acquired by hacking into the database of Fars News Agency claiming it had obtained confidential newsletters sent by the news agency to the office of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other top officials.
Black Reward made scandalous documents as well as recordings of some confidentially held meetings available to the public and media. Several of the documents and recordings contain material that are highly damaging to the image of the regime and its officials including Supreme Leader Khamenei.
Iran International published a report at the time on a sensitive document that showed pervasive concern among officials over ongoing anti-regime protests.
IRIB’s 20:30 is known for being largely produced by security organizations. The program often contains so-called “confessions” of those arrested on security charges and propaganda against opposition and dissident figures and spreads unsubstantiated accusations political groups and activists and even ordinary citizens.
Some social media users have suggested that the regime has taken action against Tavangar, a quite controversial figure, to portray the documents as written by a rogue person and unused by officials.
Abdollah Ganji, the former editor of the IRGC-linked Javan newspaper who is now chief editor of Tehran municipality’s Hamshahri newspaper, in a tweet on December 2 claimed that as a former member of Fars News Agency’s policymaking council he had never seen any such briefing reports. “This sort of work is done by someone who, incidentally, worked at Fars,” he wrote while trying to attribute the leaked papers only to Tavangar.
Tavangar, apparently, also secretly recorded some meetings, including a meeting between a Revolutionary Guard general and a group of media managers or representatives from outfits affiliated with the IRGC. The audio file obtained by the hactivist group revealed IRGC and its Basij militia’s concern about security forces’ capability to quell the unrest widely spread across the country.
One of the documents quoted Khamenei as saying that he did not expect anti-government protests that have engulfed the country in the past three months to end soon. The newsletter claimed Khamenei had ordered security and intelligence bodies to issue a joint statement about the protests.
The leaked material show Khamenei plays a major role in decisions that lead to the violation of human rights and the secret operations of intelligence agencies against dissidents including the order to “disgrace” a top dissident Sunni leader, Mowlavi Abdolhamid Esmail-Zehi, in the restive Sistan-Baluchestan Province instead of arresting him. This could be interpreted as a character assassination order.
The IRIB program that confirmed Tavangar’s arrest was produced by Ameneh-Sadat Zabihpour who critics often refer to as “interrogator-journalist” for her alleged direct role in forcing detainees to make false self-incriminating “confessions” under duress to be used in the program. She and her colleague Ali Rezvani were recently designated by the US treasury for violation of human rights and other collaboration with security forces.