Iran's students speak out: students played a key role in the 1979 revolution. Until recently, they had been largely silenced under Ahmadinejad's regime.

• Author: Fathi, Nazila
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

BACKGROUND

University students in Iran have been a political, force at least since 1979, when they helped spur the Islamic Revolution and seized the U.S. embassy. Mostly silent in recent years, they have begun protesting against the hard-line President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and perhaps fomenting additional, resistance to his rule.

When Iran's President spoke recently at one of Tehran's elite universities and protests broke out, Babak Zamanian could only watch from afar. He was on crutches, having been beaten up during another student demonstration a few days earlier.

But the significance of the confrontation at Amir Kabir University of Technology, which forced President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to cut short his speech, was easy to grasp even from a distance, said Zamanian, a leader of a student political group: The Iranian student movement, which played a key role in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and planned the seizure that same year of the American Embassy in Tehran, is reawakening from its recent slumber and may even be spearheading more widespread resistance against President Ahmadinejad.

"It is not that simple to break up a President's speech," says Alireza Siassirad, a former student organizer, explaining that an event of that magnitude takes careful planning. "I think what happened at Amir Kabir is a very important and a dangerous sign. Students are definitely becoming active again."

The students' anger had been stoked by a blatantly political purge of university professors and students, a crackdown on basic personal freedoms, and worries that the government's economic mismanagement and international provocations are threatening their future. Since the protests, many of the student demonstrators have gone into hiding, fearing for their lives. (Thousands of antigovernment protesters have been jailed over the years.)

HARD-LINE DEMAGOGUE

The student protests erupted after local elections in December in which Iranians turned out in droves to vote for the President's opponents. The results were seen as evidence that the students' concerns are shared by many Iranians.

Internationally, Ahmadinejad is known as a hard-line demagogue who has angered most of the world by saying Israel should be wiped off the map, by hosting an international conference of Holocaust deniers, and most of all, by pressing ahead with Iran's suspected nuclear-weapons program in defiance of the United Nations and most Western countries.

Iran has also been denounced for its...