Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

Student protesters chant, 'What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!' as they rally at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg on Tuesday. About 50 people gathered to object to Iran's election results and the government's crackdown on protesters in that country.

Najma Yousefi (center), a Virginia Tech doctoral student from Tehran, Iran, addresses protesters Tuesday in front of Burruss Hall on the Tech campus in Blacksburg.

Nema Heydarian, president of the Iranian Society at Purdue University, holds a banner during a protest on Virginia Tech's campus Tuesday.

BLACKSBURG -- More than 50 protesters, many of them Virginia Tech students from Iran, gathered Tuesday on the edge of the university's Drillfield to show solidarity with their fellow Iranians protesting the country's June 12 presidential election.

Clad in green, holding signs, singing songs and chanting "Free Iran" at midday, they expressed hope that the protests would lead to another election and, perhaps, a revolution.

"The people of Iran are different from the government of Iran," said Alireza Salmanzadeh, a doctoral student from Tehran who helped organize the event. "We do not agree with what the Iranian government is doing. We want to have a democracy in Iran, not an Islamic, nondemocratic government."

The protest, which lasted more than an hour, grew in size and volume as passers-by joined. Protesters sang the country's unofficial national anthem and a solidarity song, "Yare Dabestanie Man," which means "My Classmate."

They chanted in English, demanding democracy and "change for Iran" and in Persian, exhorting others to not be afraid.

But many protesters, fearing government retribution against themselves or their families in Iran, chose not to give their names.

As the protest was going on, President Obama was at the White House delivering his harshest criticism yet of the Iranian government's crackdown on protesters and supporters of Mir Hossein Moussavi. Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated Moussavi in an election that many have called fraudulent.

Protesters had mixed opinions of the restraint shown by Obama in criticizing the Iranian government.

Najma Yousefi, a Tech doctoral student who gave a speech at the end of the protest, said Obama has been withholding his comments because of Iranian government attempts to attribute the movement to foreign influences. Yousefi called such attempts "despicable."

Nima Heydarian, a graduate student at Indiana's Purdue University and leader of the school's Iranian Society, was in town visiting a friend and joined the protest. He said Iranians don't expect the international community to "fight our fight" but to offer support.

"The American people believed in Mr. Obama, an inexperienced politician with just a dream," he said. "We only ask that he does the same for us."