Students protest Iran’s election results at Pitt

Iranian students gathered along Bigelow Boulevard last Thursday afternoon to protest the dubious… Iranian students gathered along Bigelow Boulevard last Thursday afternoon to protest the dubious election results in Iran. The following is an account of their protest:

Rose wanted to speak but couldn’t say her real name.

“I’m going to Iran next week to visit family,” she said. “I’m scared of getting in trouble.”

She wore a surgical face mask over her mouth to conceal her identity, but she exposed her teeth momentarily as she adjusted the mask to breathe better.

Her three brothers live in Tehran and have been attending the massive protests against the heavily disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran.

A week and a half ago, Ahmadinejad beat reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi in the the country’s presidential election. But a speedy vote count, secret police movements on the election night and a breakdown in results that don’t match those predicted have thrown the election’s results into question, causing thousands to protest throughout Iran.

Rose said she was worried for her brothers’ safety, because she has heard reports on the news and from her family that Iranian police are using force to stop the protests.

A recent Ph.D. graduate at Pitt now pursuing postdoctoral studies, Rose couldn’t attend the protests with her brothers or warn them of potential dangers.

But she was able to stand in protest with the small Iranian community of Pittsburgh on Bigelow Boulevard and make sure that passersby received her message.

“The most important goal for me is to tell people he is not really our president,” Rose said. “Do not recognize Ahmadinejad as our president.”

Rose stood in a crowd of about 40 protesters, most of whom were born in Iran and said they just wanted to show their support for relatives back home and to show the community the differences between the Iranian government and its people. They crowded the William Pitt Union side of Bigelow Boulevard and held up signs showing their support.

“Down with the dictator,” some of the signs read. “Ahmadinejad Get Out!”

“Ahmadinejad should pay the price for all the lives we lost,” another sign read. “Our crime is seeking freedom.”

One sign read, “Honk for democracy,” and many people driving by responded accordingly. When drivers honked, the protesters shouted, “Mash’allah,” which means “God bless you.”

“In our culture, if someone says something you like and you don’t want it to be jinxed, you say ‘Mash’allah,’” Sorna Javadi, a Pitt graduate student who moved to the United States with his parents when he was 14, said.

Javadi said he was angry about this election. He was convinced that the majority of people in Iran voted for Mousavi and that the Iranian government rigged the election.

He held up a sign showing a picture of Ahmadinejad that has been altered to add the signature black hair and mustache of Adolf Hitler.

“We’re trying to say that Hitler is reincarnated in the body of Ahmadinejad,” Javadi said.

Javadi supported Mousavi in the election like many young Iranians who saw him as a more reformist choice than Ahmadinejad. Javadi even voted for him, or at least tried.

Many polling stations were set up across the United States and across the world to allow Iranian citizens living abroad to cast their vote, including a station at Penn State, to which Javadi drove the day of the election.

But when he arrived at 6 p.m., only two hours after the election had officially started in Iran, he heard that Ahmadinejad had already won. So he had no reason to vote.

“Forty-five million votes counted in two hours!” Javadi exclaimed. “That’s another big mystery.”

Even though Mousavi was not an ideal candidate for many young Iranians, Javadi wanted him to win.

“Mousavi represents a new way in Iran, different from the old way of Ahmadinejad,” Javadi said. “Ahmadinejad’s definition of democracy is, ‘You do what we say and don’t complain.’”

A few feet away from Javadi, another student expressed her anger about the election by trying to lead a chant: “It was not an election! It was a selection!”

This 27-year-old Pitt civil engineering student also wanted to remain anonymous. Her family members and friends live in Tehran, and they are all Mousavi supporters.

“My friends keep telling me about the rallies, and they sound beautiful,” she said.

She has not decided about when or if she wants to return to her native country, but she said she still cares about its future.

“Our reputation is so screwed up currently,” she said. “The reformist candidate will give us a better reputation worldwide — something that Iran deserves.”

This 27-year-old said she doesn’t like the current laws in Iran, calling them “twisted and male-oriented.”

“[In the United States], I feel I am more equal to a man,” she said. “In Iran, they make us wear mandatory veils that cover the skin.”

At the protest, she wore shorts and a short-sleeve shirt, exposing her skin. She continued to lead chants in support of her Iranian friends and family back home.

Across the street in front of the Cathedral fountain, Amir Moghimi passed out fliers to educate passersby about the protest.

Moghimi’s mother is American, and his father is Iranian. He’s lived in the United States off and on for a total of 10 years and spent the rest of his time in Iran.

“When you live in one society, you think you know the way things work,” Moghimi said. “People accept things without thinking about them, in both America and Iran.”

But Moghimi has noticed more than differences between his two cultures.

“The core values that all people have in their families are immutable — maybe masked in different traditions, but basically the same,” he said.

Moghimi said he saw people risking their lives for these values in Iran, and he wanted to show the world how much he supports them.

He said he voted for Mousavi because he saw him as a more moderate alternative than Ahmadinejad.

“Ahmadinejad is a hard-line, right-wing, fundamentalist conservative, and all the usual problems of hard-line, right-wing, fundamentalist conservatives apply in this situation,” he said.

Back in the crowd of protesters, Omid Moghimi clapped when another car honked. Moghimi, who is a junior at Pitt, completed most of his primary schooling in Iran, where he lived before he and his family moved to the United States.

Moghimi said he felt suspicious of Ahmadinejad’s victory, because he thought Ahmadinejad failed to fulfill his original campaign promises from his last election victory, in 2005.

Last summer, Moghimi traveled to Tehran. He had been out of the country for only two years, but much had changed.

“Electricity was being cut off for two hours every day — during the hottest hours of the day,” Moghimi said.

He also said car and gas prices increased dramatically, and people didn’t have enough money to pay for rice, tea, meat and spices — staples of the Iranian diet.

“Ahmadinejad’s first election was run on an economic platform,” Moghimi said. “He was going to put Iran’s oil money on people’s tables, but he didn’t do anything.”

Besides feeling angry about Ahmadinejad’s economic failure, Moghimi said he feels angry about Ahmadinejad’s human rights record. Moghimi said he wants to see a return of basic freedoms in Iran, especially the right for women to walk down streets in any clothing they choose.

Moghimi’s father, a university professor, will soon teach a course at Tehran University, but more than 100 faculty members there have resigned in protest of the election results.

Moghimi said he doesn’t know what will happen in Iran, but he knows what he wants.

“The No. 1 difference between America and Iran is that here you feel like you can do pretty much whatever you want,” he said.