93. Confidential Communication Expelling Bahá’í Students in Iran

93

Confidential Communication Expelling Bahá’í Students in Iran

24 August 2007

To selected National Spiritual Assemblies

93.1 The Universal House of Justice has directed us to share with you the enclosed copy of a confidential communication, together with its provisional translation, issued by the director general of the Central Security Office in Iran some time in 2006 and instructing eighty-one Iranian universities to expel any student who is discovered to be a Bahá’í, whether at the time of enrolment or in the course of his or her studies.

93.2 The instructions contained in the above-mentioned letter are promulgated under the provision of “decree number 1327/M/S, dated 6/12/69 [25 February 1991]”.¹³ This, of course, refers to the secret memorandum from Dr. Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, approved by the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the then President of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, calling specifically for Iran’s Bahá’ís to be treated “in such a way that their progress and development are blocked”; its provisions include the expulsion of all Bahá’ís from universities.

93.3 You may recall that when Iranian diplomats were confronted by other governments, the press, or national Bahá’í communities immediately following the press release issued in late March 2006 by Ms. Asma Jahangir, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, about the government’s call for the Bahá’ís in Iran to be secretly monitored, they not only denied absolutely that Bahá’ís are subject to persecution in Iran but also stated explicitly as an example of the freedoms enjoyed by members of the Bahá’í Faith that they are not prevented from pursuing higher education. As an illustrative example, the Right Honourable Clare Short, Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, shared with the Bahá’í community of Birmingham a letter she had received from the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, dated 8 June 2006, in which it is stated that Iranian Bahá’ís “are entitled to equal rights” and, further, “In Iran no individual is excluded from higher education solely because of his/her ideology”.

93.4 The official line taken by Iranian government representatives was echoed loudly again just a few months ago, in March 2007, when a Reuters news agency dispatch cited a spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations as having denounced as “baseless” the concerns voiced publicly by the Bahá’í International Community over the expulsion of Bahá’í university students on the sole grounds of their religious belief, saying, “No one in Iran because of their religion has been expelled from studying”.

93.5 While the 2006 directives from the Central Security Office in and of itself exposes the Iranian government’s blatant disregard for the truth when confronted about its persecution of the Bahá’ís, enclosed are copies of other documents, together with their provisional translations, which likewise lay bare the authorities’ iniquitous treatment of Bahá’í students: a letter dated 17 March 2007 from the security office at Payame Noor University, Province of Sistan and Baluchistan, to the president of this University, pointing out that Bahá’í students are not to be enrolled in that institution and that the names of any Bahá’í applicants are to be forwarded to the Central Security Office; two documents (with identifiers removed to protect the safety of the student concerned) related to the expulsion of a Bahá’í student from the University of Gilan stating explicitly that this expulsion is effected under “decree number 1327/M/S, dated 6/12/69 [25 February 1991], sanctioned by the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council”.¹⁴

93.6 A letter from the Office of Public Information to National Spiritual Assemblies dated 19 July 2007 conveyed the distressing news of the disqualification of Bahá’ís from entrance to Iranian technical and vocational institutes for the coming academic year and consequently called for an intensification in the ongoing efforts to draw attention to the plight of Bahá’í university students. Although there was no change in the application form for entrance to other Iranian institutions of higher education, and Bahá’í students were therefore able to sit for the entrance examination held at the end of June this year, as they had last year, preliminary information received from Iran indicates that of over one thousand Bahá’ís who took the June 2007 examination, only 237 were informed that their marks were satisfactory, and they could therefore choose their majors and select the universities of their choice. Over seven hundred Bahá’í students were told that their examinations would not be graded because their files were allegedly incomplete. However, this was not raised with them beforehand, and they did sit for the examinations, whereas it would be assumed that any student whose file was incomplete would not have been permitted to take the examination.

93.7 While the final outcome of the current entrance examination process is not yet known, considering the foregoing developments and the fact that 130 of the Bahá’í students—about half of those admitted last year—have been expelled before completing their first year of studies, observers might well conclude that there never was any real intention to admit Bahá’ís to university, and the enrolment of those Bahá’í students who were admitted during this current academic year was nothing more than a political tactic intended to quell international protest as well as a tool used to waste the time and energy of the Bahá’í youth and to cause them emotional and financial distress. The letter of the Central Security Office effectively seals the fates of the Bahá’ís who were able to enrol for the 2006–2007 academic year and has cruelly eroded any remaining hopes among the Bahá’í youth that, after decades of being barred from higher education, the doors of the universities in their homeland might now be open to them….

Department of the Secretariat