Women look at a smartphone outside the main gate of Tehran University in Iran in April. The Iranian government has intensified its crackdown on smuggled satellite services and virtual private networks, which are used to bypass restrictions.Vahid Salemi/The Associated Press
The moment Amirreza Foroughifar’s phone rang, he bolted out of class. It was March, not long after the United States and Israel began co-ordinated military strikes on Iran, and it had been more than a week since Mr. Foroughifar, an Iranian international student at Toronto Metropolitan University, last spoke with his family back home. If he missed the call, he did not know when the next one would be.
“It was just a matter of life and death for me,” Mr. Foroughifar, who is also the advocacy lead of TMU’s Iranian Students Association, told The Globe and Mail in May, more than two months into the war. Though far removed from ground zero distance-wise, his mind remains with his loved ones left in Iran.
Iran has been largely cut off from cyberspace in one of the longest internet shutdowns in the world. The current blackout began Feb. 28 after the start of hostilities and the air strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then-supreme leader of Iran. As well, the Iranian government has intensified its crackdown on smuggled satellite services and virtual private networks, which are used to bypass restrictions.
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Iranian students in Ontario say they can only communicate with their families through landline calls, which are more expensive than online messaging platforms. And it’s a one-way communication, said Karan Kaviani, the president of the Iranian Students Association at TMU. They cannot call into Iran; only their families can call them, but even that is unreliable.
And there’s no way to return home for many Iranian international students, at least until the war ends, Mr. Kaviani said. They fear the risk of arbitrary detention, persecution and retaliation if they were to go back to Iran, especially those who’ve been involved in political advocacy.
Feshar – a Persian word that means “pressure” – keeps coming up in conversations that University of British Columbia associate professor Neda Maghbouleh has with her Iranian students. They come to her office, seeking solace and talking about their heightened anxiety and stress as the conflict back home continues. She understands their worries since she herself is of Iranian heritage.
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Students feel the need to be alert and awake with their loved ones in Iran, who are 10 hours ahead of Pacific Time, said Dr. Maghbouleh, a Canada Research Chair in race, ethnicity, migration and identity.
It is the silence that troubles Mr. Foroughifar. “You don’t know whether that silence is because of the blackout or because something genuinely has happened to your family,” he said.
Iranian international students in Canada also have to deal with the lack of access to funds from their home country and they say they are struggling to pay their tuition and student fees.
Transferring money from Iran to Canada is complicated. Owing to international sanctions, Iranian banks have been mostly isolated from the global banking network since 2012. Most Iranian banks are delisted from Swift, the financial communications provider responsible for connecting banks across the globe and enabling international transfers.
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To work around this, Iranian immigrants use currency exchange shops, said Mr. Kaviani and Mr. Foroughifar. The service provides an Iranian bank account to which their parents can transfer Iranian rials. Then, shops in Toronto hand them their money in cash, Mr. Kaviani said.
When the internet blackout was implemented, the money exchange shops had their communication with Iran interrupted and were not functional. Though they are operating again, the transfer process still involves long delays.
It takes Mr. Kaviani anywhere from 10 to 14 days to complete the money transfer process — from initiating a transaction at an exchange shop, contacting his family to transfer rials to the shop’s Iranian bank account, having the shop confirm the transfer and getting his Canadian dollars in cash. And transactions often get cancelled depending on the fluctuations of the Iranian currency.
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In April, Iranian student associations at TMU, York University, University of Toronto, Queen’s University and Western University released a statement asking that Ontario’s Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security “temporarily convert affected students to domestic tuition rates” and freeze deadlines and late penalties for tuition and student fees.
They did not receive a response until after The Globe made an inquiry with the ministry, Mr. Kaviani said.
A ministry spokesperson told The Globe that colleges and universities have the discretion on who is eligible for domestic or international tuition fees.
Each of the five universities included in the April statement told The Globe they are providing resources to alleviate students’ financial worries and support their mental well-being. The universities are also offering academic considerations for the affected students.