Akbar Ganji with former students: I am not going to keep silent

ReleaseGanji:

Wednesday April 5, 2006, Tehran-Advar News: On Wednesday evening some members of the Islamic Organization of Graduates of Iran (IOGI) met with Akbar Ganji at his home.

In this visit, which was organized in the occasion of Ganji's freedom and the Iranian new year, the guests expressed their happiness for Ganji's proud freedom, and moreover praised his resistence and perseverence in six years of prison.

At the beginning of the visit, Mr. Aliakbar Mousavi Khouini, IOGI's chair, offered his congratulations for the Iranian new year and hoped that the new year would be a year of prosperity and happiness for Mr. ganji and Iranian people. He also gave a briefing of the situation in the last few months of Ganji's sentence and the efforts for defending his human rights.

In this visit, some of the audience expressed their views about some of Ganji's opinions.

Akbar Ganji rejected the claim that he was going to keep silent after his release and announced: I won't keep quiet. In the start, Ganji thanked everyone who, during his hunger strike, had supported him, some of whom had endured hardship in doing so.

He said that presently the two models of "constitutionalism" and "republicanism" are being considered by reformists, and expressed his wish to gradually publish more details of his Republican Manifesto.

In this visit, Ganji frequently emphasized that no demands will be achieved without paying a price. He said he had expressed this view many times to his friends early in the reform movement, but they thought differently and that led their theories to defeat. READ MORE

Ganji stressed that the necessity of paying the price in order to achieve a goal is rationally inevitable, and added: our society's intellectuals today must know that nothing is gained through playing with words and concepts. He said: all the countries who have achieved such ideals as democracy, freedom etc. have also paid the price and this principle has no exception.