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July 2, 2009

Speaking out

Rachel Brown

For the past two weekends, Dalton State College students Jesus Pulido and Stefanie Bramblett have driven to Atlanta where they joined hundreds of other protesters in front of the CNN Center to speak out against violence against demonstrators in Iran.

One of the most memorable moments of last Sunday’s protest was when an Iranian woman who had family members in the country met the two with tears in her eyes, Bramblett said.

“She just cried. She couldn’t believe that we took out our time to support them,” Bramblett said. “We were some of the few that were not Iranian.”

Iran has been rocked with protests and government attempts to halt them since the country’s June 12 presidential election in which incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared victorious by a landslide over reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi.

Mousavi’s supporters say the election was fraudulent. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have joined street protests to demand a new election. Iranian police and militia members have used tear gas, batons and water cannons to break up the protesters. There have also been reports of violence by protesters. At least 20 people have died, and government and opposition sources blame the deaths on each other.

The Guardian Council, an electoral authority the opposition accuses of favoring Ahmadinejad, said Monday that it had found only “slight irregularities” after randomly selecting and recounting 10 percent of nearly 40 million ballots.

It’s not up to United States citizens to interfere in the outcome of Iran’s elections, but people everywhere should be concerned when human rights are denied, Pulido said. He and Bramblett are psychology majors.

“It’s about people being able to express themselves,” said Pulido, who is from Mexico. “You should always, if you have the ability to do it, speak out.”

The students said they heard about the protests in Atlanta from a member of the American Friends Service Committee, an organization that opposes United States involvement in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The purpose of demonstrating near the CNN Center is to get news coverage that has the potential to be delivered throughout the world, they said.

Bramblett said she knows the Iranian government won’t listen to a small group of protesters in Atlanta any more than they’ll listen to their own people. She hopes the small showing of support is enough to encourage peaceful protesters not to quit.

“The last thing I want is for the people in Iran to give up,” Pulido said. “I think (Ahmadinejad’s administration) is just a pure blatant military coup that has taken over a people who are oppressed continuously.”

Bramblett is president of DSC Students United for Peace, a campus organization that opposes violence. The organization supports American troops who are deployed to fight but favors finding other ways to deal with the situation in the Middle East, she said.

She said she and Pulido are the only two students from the college who participated in the protest as far as she knows. They are planning a third trip to Atlanta for another protest near Lenox Square Mall and invite others to go with them. People 4 a New IRAN, a nonpolitical, nonreligious student group of human rights activists in Atlanta, organized the protests, the students said.

Pulido can be contacted at (706) 618-1166 or jpulido@daltonstate.edu, and Bramblett can be reached at (706) 618-2846 or stefaniebramblett@yahoo.com.



The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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