Letter-writing campaign pushes for Iran sanctions

    As Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke to leaders at the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Tufts students were hand-delivering letters to local legislators' offices, pushing for a stronger stance against Iran's nuclear ambitions.
    The campaign is a collaboration between students from Tufts, Harvard, Brown, Brandeis and Boston Universities to push their representatives in Congress to support a bill authorizing the president to levy economic sanctions and other penalties on foreign firms that sell, ship or insure gasoline and diesel fuel to Iran.
    Across these New England schools, the organizers rallied students to sign letters addressed to their political representatives. The campaign condemns the Iranian nuclear program and supports the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act of 2009 (IRPSA) as a means to respond to Ahmadinejad's speech to the General Assembly.
    A bipartisan group of 27 senators introduced the IRPSA on April 28. The act aims to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions by implementing sanctions on all foreign entities that sell refined petroleum to Iran. A corresponding measure has been introduced in the House.
    "In the past, [students] would march and send a delegation to New York, but we wanted to do this letter-writing campaign as an activity with much more visible results," said sophomore Aaron Tartakovsky, who led the mobilization effort at Tufts.
    The chief organizers of the campaign, including Tartakovsky, met over the summer at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington, D.C. and stayed in touch afterward. Last week, they decided to respond to Ahmadinejad's visit and rapidly mobilized to rally support.
    "We wanted to prove that a grassroots organization of students can make a big difference," Tartakovsky said.
    Tartakovsky and sophomore Julian Jaeger, who assisted in the effort, delivered the letters on Wednesday to the offices of Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). Tartakovsky estimates that they collected more than 200 signatures from Tufts students over three days, while across the involved campuses organizers collected a total of about 2,000 signatures.
    The letter to Markey served as a thank you in appreciation of the fact that he had already signed on to the legislation. Junior Hannah Leshin, who also worked on the campaign, felt that the gesture of appreciation was important.
    "We are telling congressmen that we do listen and that we do care," Leshin said. "We are indicating that it is important to us that he signed this bill."
    Markey expressed his support for both the IRPSA and the students' initiative.
    "I commend the students at Tufts University for getting involved in an issue as important as nuclear nonproliferation," Markey told the Daily in an e-mail. "I have long fought against the spread of nuclear weapons and I believe that [the IRPSA] will help support diplomatic efforts by the United States to put compelling international pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear enrichment program — a program that is clearly aimed at developing a nuclear weapons capability. I sincerely appreciate the students at Tufts for their interest in this critical issue."
    Kerry has yet to throw his support behind the IRPSA, according to Tartakovsky. The letters to him petitioned for his co-sponsorship of the legislation.
    "We are showing him that there are concerned Americans and Tufts students who want to work with Congress to ensure that Iran does not get nuclear weapons," Tartakovsky said. "The substantial number of letters make it clear that there is a very strong voice behind this.
    "Whenever a large constituency of students in the region you represent demands action, there's bound to be a result," he added.
    But senior Alex Akhavan, the vice president of the Persian Students Association, said that he has mixed feelings about the sanctions, especially when he thinks of family members in Iran.
    "It's a tough issue, because, yeah, I do have family in Iran, so I obviously don't want the whole economy to stumble and affect people that I care about," Akhavan said. "But I don't support the regime, and hopefully the silver lining of it could definitely be more pressure on the regime or maybe more people coming out against the regime, basically like what we saw this summer," he added, referring to the protests that followed Iran's controversial presidential election in June.
    James Kennedy, co-leader of the Institute for Global Leadership's New Initiative for Middle East Peace, said that sanctions are generally ill-advised and more valuable politically than economically.
    "I tend to think that usually Congress passes sanctions for causes like this because of domestic pressure," said Kennedy, a senior. "Going against Iran is a cause that will sell in a lot of constituencies."
    But even though sanctions will continue to antagonize Iran, Kennedy thinks the IRPSA's specific approach of attacking foreign businesses that deal with petroleum might prove uncommonly effective.
    The organizers of the letter-writing campaign were motivated by a conviction that an Iran with nuclear arms would pose a great threat to the international community and would disrupt the geopolitical balance.
    "It's a really big deal on an international scale," Jaeger said. Should an attempt to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons fall through, he said, "it will pose a problem not just to America and Israel, but to all the countries in the region as well."
    Tartakovsky added that the Iranian government's crackdown on the populace following the country's June presidential election provided further reason to impose sanctions on the regime.
    Leshin, Jaeger and Tartakovsky said they received very encouraging responses as they canvassed for signatures. They also saw their initiative as an opportunity to educate people.
    "For the most part there was pretty widespread support for it," Tartakovsky said.
    The three Tufts organizers considered the campaign a success, pointing to media coverage — on college campuses and abroad — and the sheer number of signatures collected.
    "I think it's a great outcome," Leshin said. "Students want to see Congress stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Thousands of letters were signed, which is not something that happens every day. It will have a significant impact."
    The trio hopes that the campaign will have served as an example of how students can exert influence on lawmakers.
    "People are proud to support a grassroots campaign when they see how even as students we can have such a great impact at such a high level," Jaeger said. "We are giving people a voice and a chance to make a difference. Even if they don't know much, they are very happy to learn about it."