Iranian-Armenian Christians Detained On Visit
Elisa Shahvardian, an Armenian Christian, has been detained along with her husband during a visit to her family.
Elisa Shahvardian, an Armenian Christian, has been detained along with her husband during a visit to her family.
The couple were apprehended by Iran's Ministry of Intelligence agents on August 24, taken from a friend's residence in Tehran, and transported to Evin prison.
Elisa was eventually released on bail. Her husband, Hakop Gochumyan, remains detained in Evin, exceeding four months since their initial arrest during their visit to Iran with their two children.
The family had personal belongings confiscated including Christian books. While the children were entrusted to an aunt, Elisa and her husband faced prolonged interrogations in solitary confinement.
Despite their tribulations, neither Elisa nor Hakop received official charges, a clear violation of international human rights standards.
Elisa, accused of participating in "illegal Christian activities," steadfastly refuted in a post on X any wrongdoing during their visit to Iran. Christianity, Judaism and Islam are legal in Iran where minorities such as Bahai are not.
Iran Briefing, a group of investigative journalists, have speculated that authorities have been mining titanium, present in the northwestern lake, which could explain why the once thriving salt-lake has dried up.
Although there has been no official response to these claims, the Urmia region in West Azarbaijan province does possess a titanium mine and magnesium recovered from lake brine can be used to refine it.
A 500 million Euro Titanium mining project was announced in a village near Lake Urmia, approximately ten miles to its west, in January.
The reformist Etemad newspaper published satellite images of Lake Urmia in November and reported that in the past year, “80% of the lake's water has dried up”, which “equates to the death of the sixth-largest saltwater lake globally."
Some experts have ruled out the possibility of reviving the lake which has been illegally salt mined for years, with rumors last year of lithium mining. “It is not in the government's interest, will, or power to revive Lake Urmia,” Roozbeh Eskandari, a hydraulic structures and dam construction expert, told Iran International.
Nikahang Kowsar, an environmental analyst, blames the IRGC, calling it "an environmental menace willing to destroy Iran’s water resources just to line its own pockets,” citing the building of dams "to finance the Quds Force budget,” Nikahang Kowsar told Iran International last month, branding the IRGC "Iran's water mafia".
“This is how the cost of building a dam like Gotvand [south of Iran] can increase from $1.5 billion to $3.3 billion, and nobody even dares to ask where all the money has gone when the contractor did such a poor job,” wrote the analyst in an article for Middle East Institute.
In 2020, the US said that any sales to Iran of titanium, among other metals including chromium, nickel and 60% tungsten, were sanctionable as they are useful to Iran's nuclear, missile, and military programs.
Ali Salajegheh, the head of the Iranian Environmental Protection Organization, on Thursday neither denied nor approved the mining claims but said, "They need to be investigated."
Meanwhile, the hardliner Fars News Agency, affiliated with the IRGC, quoted an academic as saying the “rumors” are not true.
Behzad Hessari, a professor at Urmia University and the director of the environment department of Urmia Lake Research Institute, told Fars: “Methane gas is high in regions like the frozen forests of Siberia. Due to climate change, the ice is melting and the stored methane gas is released. This is not true for Lake Urmia.”
The lake's shrinking, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, risks both ecological and human implications. Once home to an array of wildlife, its decline increases the dust from the exposed lake bed reducing air quality, risking increased cases of respiratory illness among the local population.
In an interview with Khabar online on Monday, teachers expressed concern about the plans to "shift schools away from their primary function", resulting in a "dead end" for children.
Teacher Mohammadreza Niknejad told Khabar Online that “authorities have failed in the education sector” as students do not accept today's school teachings. Furthermore, he added that ideological and religious studies have taken over most of the content of the school curriculum, even science, causing students to lose interest in the subject.
In line with the government's propaganda policies and the order of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei the content of textbooks has changed in the last few years. In November, Reza Morad Sahraei, the Minister of Education, insisted on the need for gender-specific school curricula and confirmed changes in textbooks.
Sahraei also stressed the Islamic Republic's rejection of both the "Eastern perspective" and the feminist perspective, deeming the latter to be "deviant." A second teacher, Narges Malekzadeh, also noted the role students played in last year's protests and warned of future demonstrations: "If we do not maintain communication with students, they may become frustrated and protests may happen again."
Teachers staged a mass demonstration since the government did not take any tangible measures to identify and pursue the perpetrators, or to explain what was happening to their terrified parents and students. According to Amnesty International's report in April, since November 2022, thousands of schoolgirls have been poisoned and hospitalized in Iran. A trend that also continued at the beginning of this academic year.
In response to teachers' and students' protests, the government introduced a program of mass dismissals at schools known as the 'purge'. A tightening of security was also implemented around teacher recruitment. There is now a six-month selection period for teachers in non-government schools, in addition to the standard 15 days.
To compensate for the lost staff caused by the “purge”, the Education Ministry integrated religious teachers into the school system. Under a program called “Amin”, they recruited 21,000 seminary graduates to teach in 7 thousand schools. Ministers in President Ebrahim Raisi's administration have praised the "revolutionary" nature of the education ministry. In September, it was reported that Iran's Minister of Education had replaced over 20,000 principals.
The presence of religious teachers as part of the "Amin" program has become common at schools, however, students have a “negative attitude toward them and also they have a negative attitude towards students,” Malekzadeh explained.
In addition, the Education Ministry announced in December that seminary-affiliated schools will be established as part of the ministry's "Mosque, School, and Home" initiative.
In October, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his intention to open Russian schools in Iran, though questions remain as to the nature of the proposed curriculums and their place in Iran's evermore religious Islamic curriculum.
