TEHRAN, 9 October 2007 — Iranian students staged a noisy protest against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the country’s top university in Tehran yesterday, likening him to the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Riot police barred the group of about 100 chanting male and female students from leaving the Tehran University campus, where Ahmadinejad was giving a speech to mark the start of a new academic year.
The demonstrators at Iran’s top academic institution were calling for the release of students detained since May for publishing writings considered insulting to Islam, the semi-official Fars news agency reported. The gate of the campus was chain-locked by hundreds of regular police and then guarded by riot police equipped with hard helmets, plastic shields and in green uniform.
Meanwhile, a cacophony of horns greeted Iran’s reopening yesterday of its border with northern Iraq as trucks rolled across again two weeks after Tehran shut its frontiers in protest at the US military seizure of an Iranian national. More than 400 queuing trucks, some stacked with goods, others empty, crossed at Bashmakh in the mountains north of the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah as merchants looked to make up for tens of thousands of dollars in lost trade.
“Bashmakh border point was open at 9 o’clock,” Rostum Kukai, a security guard told an AFP correspondent at the crossing, one of five crucial economic arteries leading from Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region into Iran.
According to Kurdistan Trade Minister Mohammed Raouf, the closure has cost the autonomous Kurdish region one million dollars a day in lost trade due to goods being held up at the border. Omar Ali Arrif was heading back to Iran via Bashmakh with a convoy of 13 empty trucks to pick up the construction materials and tiles that he supplies to 10 stores in Sulaimaniyah and Arbil, the main city in Iraq’s Kurdish north.
“The closure of the borders for two weeks cost me more than 20,000 dollars. I have to pay for the transport vehicles and workers even if the frontier is not operational,” he said. Queues of trucks had formed at the border points from early Sunday after an announcement from Iran’s semi-official news agency Fars that the crossings would reopen that day.
