...

Baha'i educational programme targeted in raids in Iran

Politics Materials 23 May 2011 12:28 (UTC +04:00)
A coordinated series of raids have been carried out in Tehran, Karaj, Isfahan, and Shiraz against the homes of several Iranian Baha'is, active in a community initiative to provide a higher education programme for young members who are barred from university. Initial reports indicate that as many as 30 people may have already been arrested.
Baha'i educational programme targeted in raids in Iran

Azerbaijan, Baku, May 23 /Trend/

A coordinated series of raids have been carried out in Tehran, Karaj, Isfahan, and Shiraz against the homes of several Iranian Baha'is, active in a community initiative to provide a higher education programme for young members who are barred from university. Initial reports indicate that as many as 30 people may have already been arrested, the Baha'i official statement says.

"All of the targets were homes of individuals closely involved with the operations of the Baha'i Institute for Higher Education," said Diane Ala'i, representative of the Baha'i International Community to the United Nations in Geneva.

The Baha'i Institute for Higher Education (BIHE) was established in 1987 as a community initiative to meet the educational needs of young Baha'is who have been systematically denied access to higher education by the Iranian government.

According to Ala'I, the Institute has been a remarkably creative and entirely non-violent response to the Iranian government's on-going effort to stifle the normal human development of the Baha'i community.

"The Iranian authorities - not content with debarring Baha'is from Iran's universities, solely on account of their religious beliefs - are now cruelly seeking to shut down the community's efforts to provide its youth with higher education through alternative means. The government's actions are utterly unjustifiable," she told.

This is not the first time that the BIHE has come under attack by the Iranian authorities, the statement reads. One of the biggest blows was a series of sweeping raids carried out in 1998 during which some 36 members of the BIHE's faculty and staff were arrested, and much of its equipment and records - located in more than 500 homes - was taken. Other actions against the operations of BIHE were carried out in 2001 and 2002.

These attacks and Iran's policy barring young Baha'is from entering higher education have been met with strong condemnation by governments, academics, UN agencies, civil society organizations and others.

Among the numerous actions taken, university professors and chaplains around the world have sent letters of protest to the UN Secretary-General and the leaders of Iran; the President of the prestigious Princeton university in the United States raised the matter with the Iranian representative to the UN; in June 2006, Spain's House of Deputies passed a strongly-worded resolution on the situation; Wolfson College, Oxford, also passed a resolution in November 2007, as did the University of Winnipeg in Canada.

These latest raids appear to be another concerted attempt to attack BIHE, which the authorities have long sought to do, Ala'I believes.

"We are calling upon governments and educational organizations throughout the world to register with the government of Iran their strong disapproval of its systematic, ongoing efforts to deny to young Baha'is their fundamental human right to access higher education," she told.

Tags:
Latest

Latest