Tehran, 7 March 2007 (CHN Foreign Desk) -- Two Iranian cyclists who started their tour around Africa under the slogan “Tourism and Children of Labor” were stopped while crossing Cameron’s boarder to Gabon and were taken into police custody due to some administrative problems. The two called for immediate intervention of Iran’s Foreign Ministry and Cultural Heritage & Tourism Organization to help to follow up the cause.

 

“We were stopped at Cameron border and the government of Gabon did not let us in,” Khosro Yousefi wrote in a letter to Cultural Heritage News Agency (CHN).

 

Yousefi, accompanied by Mojtaba Davari, said that the government of Gabon refused to accept the documents he presented such as an official statement from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and letters from the Iranian Foreign Ministry and Iran’s Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization and treated them like “war criminals!”

 

“After two days of continuous interrogation at the boarder and despite having entry visa to Gabon, we were deported from this country and handed to Cameron’s police while all our belongings are now missing.”

 

Desperate, Yousefi expresses his deep bitterness over how he was treated in Gabon: “The media here calls me a warmonger and savage while the pains of that eight year war (war waged by Iraq against Iran in the 1980s) is still disturbing my body like a hurricane and the more I shout that I hate war, the less I can have my voice heard.”

 

Yousefi and Davari started their tour around 24 African countries with the aim of bringing the world’s attention to child labor in these countries. The two Iranian cyclists are collecting gifts from these countries to build a center in Iran for the support of superior students that are in financial need.

 

 

 

foreindesk@chn.ir