Washington —
Iranian-American activists seeking to oust former Iranian officials from U.S. academia to hold them accountable for the Islamic republic’s poor human rights record say a U.S. college that suspended one former official last month needs to do more.
Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA) also tells VOA that the suspension of Mohammad Jafar Mahallati at Ohio’s Oberlin College has emboldened the nonprofit group to target a second former Iranian official for removal from another U.S. higher education institution.
Oberlin told U.S. media earlier this month that it put Mahallati on indefinite administrative leave on November 28. It provided no reason for the move.
Mahallati served as Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. from 1987-89. He then left the Iranian government for teaching and research roles at several U.S. and Canadian universities, including New York’s Columbia University in the 1990s, before joining Oberlin as a religion professor in 2007.
AAIRIA activists, who include former political prisoners and relatives of executed dissidents in Iran and other human rights advocates, had campaigned for years for Oberlin to remove Mahallati. They accuse him of covering up Iran’s 1988 mass killings of jailed dissidents while he served as its envoy to the U.N.
In an October 2020 statement to The Oberlin Review, a student-run weekly newspaper at the college, Mahallati said: "I categorically deny any knowledge and therefore responsibility regarding mass executions in Iran when I was serving at the United Nations.” He did not respond to a VOA email sent to his gmail address on December 15 seeking further comment for this report.
AAIRIA member Lawdan Bazargan, whose brother was among those killed in the 1988 mass executions, discussed Mahallati’s case in the latest edition of VOA’s Flashpoint Iran podcast. She also elaborated on AAIRIA’s next demands of Oberlin and her group’s goal of securing the removal of former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian as a scholar at New Jersey’s Princeton University.
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