[robocup-small] What happened to Parsian Robotic?

Parsian Robotic webmaster at parsianrobotic.com
Sat Jul 7 10:26:30 EDT 2007


 Dear Robocuppers

First of all, we must apologize all of them who really do their best
to help us reach the competitions, unfortunately the same problem
happened again for 'Parsian' and we didn't get the US visa at the
proper time, this was the main reason that we didn't show up again in
'2007 RoboCup Small Size League'.

Last year, we were a Robocup new comer and we were the last team which
was qualified for the completions,  as we get qualified about 20 days
before the start date, Germany embassy in Tehran rejected our visa
request.

This year, even though we were one of earliest qualified teams, that
story happened again!

We started the process of applying for US visa in first decade of
March. It took us one and a half month to get our permissions to quit
Iran. After that and in late April we started our efforts to schedule
an appointment for US Visa. As Iran and US doesn't have any political
relationship, we must schedule the appointment with a 3rd country US
Embassy.

Unfortunately this process took more than 1 month! None of US
embassies in UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi) and Turkey (Ankara) agreed for an
urgent/regular appointment time. Finally we scheduled an appointment
with US Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus at May 31st, one month before the
competitions.

8 people out of our 11 team members accepted to get US Visa during May
31st interviews. We were told to go back home and wait for FBI
clearance check results.

The US embassy in Nicosia sent our request to Washington 15 days later
(!) according to information which we get from US Department of State.

We were all under extreme high mental and working pressure during
June; we must prepare our robots when we were not sure about the trip.
In addition it was really hard to book a flight when you do not know
when you'll receive the clearances. I must mention that according to
US Embassy laws in Cyprus, all of us must go back to Cyprus to pick up
our visas.

The received clearance web page
(http://nicosia.usembassy.gov/NIV/Clearance%20Status.htm) gets updated
just once a week! So we called US Department of State in Washington
many times during June to check our clearance status!

Finally at June 28th, 5 clearances got ready. We decided to come to
competitions directly from Cyprus after picking up our visas. We
scheduled to arrive in Atlanta in July 5th.

At that time we really didn't even think about any other problem. But
unfortunately Cyprus embassy in Tehran rejected our Visa Applications
because the US Embassy in Nicosia website didn't get updated! The US
embassy staff in Nicosia rejected our requests to update their website
instantly. Finally they updated the page at July 5th with about 6 days
delay!

That was all happened to us during past 4 months. We were victims of
United States foreign policy against Iranian citizens.

It was the second year that we missed the Small Size League. We were
too eager to see all of you in Atlanta. We will do our best to try
more for another year.

At last we must thank again all RoboCup 2007 OC members, specially
'Mr. Tucker Balch' and 'Mr. James Bruce' who helped us a lot in this
way, even though we finally didn't reach US, their help was too much
valuable for us.

We hope this situation would change in future …

- With best regards from Tehran
- Parsian Small Size Robots Team Members
- July 7th 2007


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