Where have the detained students been taken?

Where have the detained students been taken?

Where have the detained students been taken? Concerns about the unknown status of the detained students have intensified, especially after the incident at the girls’ school in Ardabil and the strange remarks of the Minister of Education. Attacks on schools, beatings, and arrests of students, and even the arrest of a principal who refused to cooperate with security forces, is an unprecedented event in contemporary Iranian history and unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran that has occurred these days.

Denial of beating and death of Ardabili students

Alongside the release of videos and news of security forces entering some schools to arrest students, the incident at a school in Ardabil, which was said to have resulted in the death of one student, another going into a coma, and the arrest of several others, has led to many reactions. However, the director-general of education and the director-general of security for this province have denied any news of police or security encounters at schools or the death of a student in this regard, calling it a complete lie.

Nevertheless, the released videos and images at least show that the situation in one of the city’s schools was not normal. The video shows a group of students chanting slogans while an ambulance is also present at the school.

Another video has been released showing an ambulance leaving the school, along with an image of an unwell student. The names of two students, along with the obituary of one of them, have also been published, but the education and provincial officials have yet to provide any explanation for these videos or the reason for the student’s death.

Nonetheless, Sina Ghanbarpour, a social journalist, wrote on Twitter that he contacted his friends in Ardabil, who were worried about the missing students. Apart from angry parents heading to the Meraj school and clashing with the school officials, they demanded clarity on the missing students. In this context, a joint statement attributed to a group of students and residents of Ardabil has been published on social media.

The statement mentions that the beating of students followed their refusal to chant dictated slogans in a compulsory rally. On social media, the names of two schools and their female principals have been linked to recent news events.

Teacher’s Union attack on the Minister of Education

The painful point is that the Minister of Education claimed he did not have accurate statistics on the detained students or did not want to disclose them. The same minister confirmed that some detained students had been referred to psychological centers for correction and education to prevent them from becoming antisocial personalities. Mohammad Bathaei, the Minister of Education in Rouhani’s government, also merely requested in a tweet that an experienced teacher or educational psychologist be present during student interrogations.

The Iranian Teachers’ Union also condemned the anti-cultural statements of the Minister of Education regarding the transfer of protesting students to correctional and educational centers and his ignorance of the number of detainees. The statement said instead of defending the sanctity of schools and students, you justify the illegal entry of security forces into schools and even the arrest of students on the streets. What defense did you make for the honorable principal who refused to hand over CCTV footage to security forces and was arrested in front of the students?

The Teachers’ Union, with strong condemnation of these foolish actions, which they believe will lead to the militarization of educational environments and the stripping of the scientific and cultural nature of classrooms, further wrote that if this process contrary to law and custom continues, teachers, families, and trade unions feel it is their duty to defend the sacred institution of schools in any way they deem appropriate.

The place for protesting students is not the correctional and educational center

But according to the Ham Mihan newspaper, in recent days, verbal and written orders have been given to principals to remove students from school one by one at intervals to prevent gatherings. School officials have been told that if a school has two doors, the number of students should be halved and exited individually from both doors with time intervals. For classes that did not have a teacher at certain hours, external forces, usually introduced by the Basij, are used to talk to students in classrooms.

Published reports indicate that detained students in protest gatherings have been transferred to correctional and educational centers. This is while these centers are for holding delinquent children under 18 years old. Nowhere in the law is it written that a student or child should be detained and transferred to a correctional and educational center for chanting slogans.

Mohammadreza Niknejad, a teacher and teachers’ union activist, also referred to the Minister of Education’s remarks, saying that the correctional center is a place for delinquents, not for education and counseling. He said, we know that pressure on school principals and assistants is very high now. Schools have an old disciplinary code that they must follow, but now many meetings are held with school principals. In regions, it has been hierarchically told to principals that they are responsible for schools and should act independently.

Maryam Kian Arthi, a lawyer, also told the Ham Mihan newspaper that she visited the Tehran correctional and educational center last Tuesday and found many teenagers under 18 there who had been arrested in recent protests. She said that among all those teenagers, they were only able to take on the legal representation of 15 of them.

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