On occasion of new academic year, Maryam Rajavi calls on Iran's youth to resist

In a message on the occasion of the new academic year in Iran, Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the Iranian Resistance's President-elect, saluted more than 20 million Iranian students and urged them to take a more active part in popular demonstrations and uprisings against the mullahs. She further encouraged them to spread a spirit of trust and solidarity among the people and confront the mullahs' advocacy of vengeance and mistrust.

Mrs. Rajavi said that there was a shortage of more than 300,000 classes and 328,000 teachers in the elementary level, alone. More than 90% of the school girls in villages were deprived of the opportunity to continue their education to high school, she added.

Concomitant with the destruction of the foundations of the country's educational system, the Resistance's President-elect emphasized, the mullahs have devoted an enormous budget and major resources to repression at the schools and universities.

She added: Creating 800 command headquarters for the students' Bassij in 280 institutions of higher education, allocating 40% of annual admissions to universities and colleges to the agents of the regime, systematically expelling professors, conducting body searches of students, setting up 17,000 bases for the para-military Bassij in schools across the country, and launching various schemes for control and spying on students, are but parts of the regime's extensive efforts which reveal the decadence of the mullahs' regime and the extent to which they are hated by the students.

In another part of her message, Mrs. Rajavi offered an account of the major student strikes and protests, some 1,000 over the last academic year, and reiterated that the showdown between the Resistance and the mullahs' regime was imminent and that Iranian youths and teenagers had a special role to play in this turning point.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran - Paris
September 23, 1997

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