AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

attendance of Princess Ashraf at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the United
Nations. She was ironically the head of the Human Rights Commission. A struggle ensued
between Iranian students and the San Francisco police. The students were all arrested, and as a
result, the consulate refused to renew their passports. Accordingly, the ISAUS embarked on a
nationwide campaign in their support. 431 Fereydoun Safizadeh, who is now a university
professor, remembered the protest: “Outside Iran, it was on the Berkeley campus for the first
time that I saw active student opposition to the Pahlavi rule in Iran in the summer of 1970. I saw
students fundraising to get fellow students out of a San Francisco prison for attacking the Iranian
consulate.” 432
Protests continued throughout the Western Europe in defense of the bus strike and the
arrests in San Francisco. Iranian students in Great Britain had been politically active ever since
five of their comrades were arrested after returning to Iran in 1965, and they held numerous
demonstrations in early July, protesting in front of the American and Iranian embassies on 12
July. These demonstrations continued throughout the summer of 1970 and included a hunger
strike in August. 433
In August 1970 a situation that involved Iranian students in Germany created some
tension between the shah and the United States. The CIS held a meeting in Darmstadt from 31
July to 1 August. Four hundred students attended and the primary reason for the meeting was to
organize themselves in opposition to the political conditions in Iran. The meeting took place at
Darmstadt Technical College where the group held its meeting and spent the night. The students
were in need of a place to sleep, so they asked a Germany military installation for assistance.
431 ISAUS, Defend the 41; ISAUS, Iran’s Kent State and Baton Rouge, (Berkeley, California: ISAUS, 1973), 6-7.
432 Sullivan, “Interview with Fereydoun Safizadeh” in Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora, 96.
433 Article from Morning Star, 5 June 1970 and article from Morning Star, 11 August 1970 in CIS, both in
Documents on the Pahlavi Reign of Terror in Iran, 190-3, 196.
102