Ali Younesi, 20, has a reputation as a genius among students and professors of Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, where he studies physics and computer engineering. In 2018, he won a gold medal in the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics in Beijing after securing a medal in the national Olympiad.
On April 10, he left home early in the morning to coach high school students for the tests to join Iran’s science Olympiad team. On his way to the school, he vanished. Alerted about his disappearance, Younesi’s family desperately tried to locate him during the day. At midnight, he returned home badly beaten, with his face covered in blood, accompanied by 12 members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Without producing a warrant, the men confiscated all phones and computers they found in the house and detained Younesi’s parents. The parents were interrogated for several hours and released the next day, while Younesi was taken to prison. Later, it became known that his friend Amir Hossein, another student at Sharif University and a winner of science Olympiads, was also arrested.
Informal charges mentioned to Younesi’s parents during the interrogation contained a traditional combo of “collaboration with hostile states” and “anti-government activities.” According to their families, Younesi and Hossein have been focusing on their studies and did not participate in any political actions, neither in person nor online. It is not clear, however, what qualifies for anti-government activities in Iran these days.
Poor management of the COVID-19 pandemic (that Iran has blamed on the United States and Israel) has led to sharp criticism of the country’s leaders by Iran’s intellectual elite. On March 29, 100 Iranian academics signed a letter to the supreme leader, accusing him of being “the No. 1 culprit in the COVID-19 pandemic becoming a national disaster.”
Overcrowded Iranian prisons, with their unsanitary conditions, have become the breeding grounds for the coronavirus. According to the report submitted by Iran to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, the country had 189,000 prisoners at the beginning of this year. Since late February, Iran has reportedly granted coronavirus furloughs to 100,000 prisoners. None of the scholars sentenced to long prison terms on bogus charges, however, have been released.
Among recently sentenced academics that Iran does not mind sacrificing to the disease are prominent female scholars whose work annoyed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and environmentalists wrongly accused of collecting information for Western intelligence services.
Ahmadreza Djalali, a world-renowned expert on disaster medicine who resided in Sweden before his arrest in Tehran in 2017, is eager to help his compatriots with the pandemic, according to his wife. Instead, he is rotting in an Evin prison after being wrongly accused of espionage and sentenced to death by Iran’s Revolutionary Court. More than 100 Nobel laureates appealed on his behalf to Iran’s supreme leader. The call from human rights organizations for Djalali’s release to help fight the pandemic fell on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, safety fears over COVID-19 fueled unrest in eight Iranian prisons. Thousands of inmates around the country staged protests in March and April after hundreds contracted the disease, and many died. Prison guards used live ammunition to suppress the uprising, killing dozens of prisoners and injuring hundreds.
Threatened by the unrest, Iran has adopted the political doctrine to never let a good crisis go to waste. During April, the Basij Force, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps charged with enforcing domestic security, has arrested 3,600 citizens for “spreading rumors about coronavirus.” More arrests are forthcoming, which will fill prison slots vacated by furloughed petty criminals with disloyal citizens.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made a visible crack in the Iranian theocracy. Authorities are reshuffling prison populations to keep dissatisfied college-educated citizens in check. This policy will fail. Every new arrest and every coronavirus-related death of a prisoner of conscience will make the crack wider.
Eugene M. Chudnovsky is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York and co-chair of the Committee of Concerned Scientists.
