The Red & Black – Demonstrators gathered on Friday evening at the Arch to speak out against the Iranian government and call attention to its ongoing crackdown on protestors amid widespread unrest in Iran.
The demonstration aimed to raise awareness about the situation in Iran and amplify Iranian voices at UGA. Attendees carried Iranian flags and signs reading “Free Iran” and “Regime change for Iran,” handed out pamphlets and chanted slogans like “Save Iran, save the world.”
Estimates of the number of people killed in Iran have fluctuated. The U.S. based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), whose figures have been accurate in previous rounds of unrest, has estimated that over 6,000 people have been killed. The Iranian government has put the death toll far lower, at a little over 3,000. Iran’s government in the past has undercounted or not reported deaths from unrest.
A Norway-based Iran Human Rights group has warned that death tolls in Iran could exceed 25,000, according to the BBC.
These rising death tolls, arrests and widespread internet outage, which some claim is meant to stem the flow of information about the government crackdown, in Iran has led to unease within the Iranian community at UGA.
“I have family in Iran, and I’ve heard first-hand accounts of the brutal crackdown, and it’s been going on for almost 50 years,” Eva Safaie, a Persian-American graduate student at UGA, said, “A lot of my family fled when the revolution first happened, and it’s absolutely disgusting, and something needs to be done, and so many people are unaware of it.”
“The brutal crackdown by the Islamic regime in Iran was missed mostly in, I would say, leftist media,” Amin, a Ph.D. student at UGA said. “Many are just neglecting the fact that 40,000 people were killed during this protest … I can call it a revolution, not a protest now.”
Information on the number of people killed is still limited. But based on data from human rights organizations, over 6,000 people are said to have been killed in the protests and more than 17,000 recorded deaths under investigation, according to HRANA
Solmaz Es’haghloo, a Ph.D. candidate studying textile sciences, believes that the university could be doing more to support Iranian students during this time.
“Everyone is just under pressure,” Es’haghloo said. “They don’t feel fine right now, the graduate students or Iranian community here, and … we want [UGA] to be more empathetic or just understand the situation.”
The post Demonstrators at UGA call for a regime change in Iran appeared first on Human Right Activists In Iran.
