Here is the letter we sent to ‘RoboCup Small Size League Mailing List‘ to discuss the problems led to our absence in this year RoboCup competitions.

Subject : What happened to Parsian Robotic?

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 3^rd 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 31^st, one month before the competitions.

8 people out of our 11 team members accepted to get US Visa during May 31^st 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 28^th, 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 5^th. 

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 5^th 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 7^th 2007