Millions of Iranians Are Sharing the Same Desire--to Leave the Country

He is one of the millions of Iranians who have tried to get out--legally or illegally--and now he is resigned to stay, not because he wants to, but because the running took so much out of him.

It was that night 18 months ago, lying half submerged in a drainage ditch near the Turkish-Greek border as four guards with lanterns stood over him in the dark. It was the knowledge that they would shoot him--everyone had told him to expect it--if they heard him stir in the darkness below and realized they had trapped an Iranian runner.

He cannot allow his real name to be used, so he asked to be called Ali. The lucky ones, he said, the ones who could pay $7,000 for a bootleg Western visa in Istanbul, or a fake passport, or those with blood relatives in Frankfurt or London, have already gotten out. Each day, thousands of Iranians try to leave their country, and there are indications that Tehran’s leaders have begun to realize that 10 years of war and revolution have driven many of Iran’s best and brightest to flight.

Nearly 1% of Iran’s population--450,000 people--now resides in a single American state, California. There are similarly large communities of expatriate Iranians in Britain, France and Canada.

Iran’s deputy leader, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, asserted recently that he had a list of 3,000 Iranian medical doctors living in America who would like to return to Iran but have not thus far because they fear its unpredictable revolutionary government.

‘They Fear to Return’

“There are Iranians living abroad who are not against the Islamic republic,” Montazeri told an audience in the city of Qom. “Their spirits are longing for Iran, but due to mistakes made, they fear to return.”

As the country’s “moderate” and “radical” factions debate whether to seek foreign loans or accept assistance from foreign experts as they begin to rebuild their war-ravaged nation, the issue of how to mobilize Iran’s once formidable and now far-flung class of technocrats, engineers, doctors, scientists and intellectuals has become a national priority.

For Ali, there is no choice. His experience in illegal flight has forced him to come to terms with life in revolutionary Iran.

He can still remember the night he lay in that ditch, preparing for death before he had reached his objective, the Maritsa River border with Greece. That took its toll, he said, lying on the floor of his living room to demonstrate how he had cowered in the darkness, under the feet of the Turkish sentries.

It was one of several dreadful moments during a difficult, solo journey to Turkey in 1987 to find a way out. After first driving overland to Bulgaria, where the border guards refused him entry, he returned to Istanbul and eventually paid $300 to a man who promised to show him how to cross the frontier into Greece.

Crossed in a Rowboat

On his first try, he successfully crossed the Maritsa River in a rowboat. He turned himself in to the Greek army and sought political asylum. But the local army commander, for reasons that he never specified, decided not to oblige Ali. Instead, the Greek soldiers bound Ali’s hands, blindfolded him, rowed him back across the Maritsa River and dumped him on the Turkish shore.

Determined to try again, Ali returned to the river the next day. This time there was no boat. He was forced to swim for it, and when he did, he froze in midstream, stricken by the sudden dread that if the same Greek soldiers caught him again, they might bind him and throw him into the deep waters instead of dumping him on the bank.

As he made his way back to Istanbul, Ali’s luck abandoned him again as a suspicious Turkish policeman arrested him. For the next nine days he was interrogated in an underground Turkish prison where every day he heard the screams of men under torture and wondered whether he would ever get back to Iran alive.

“You can see I am still kind of nervous,” Ali said during a visit to a local restaurant, his eyes darting around the room, trying to determine if anyone seated at a nearby table was trying to listen.

Two summers ago, he said, he just got “fed up” and decided to leave. His younger sister had died of heart disease at 22, and he blamed Iran’s revolutionary government for the stress that killed her. She had defied the hejab, the conservative Muslim belief that women should clothe themselves in black full-length garb, and she had spent a week in prison.

Unsuccessful Marriage

Ali, in his early 30s, returned to Iran in 1982 from Europe, where he left behind an unsuccessful marriage. But when he arrived in Tehran, he found little cheer in life under the Islamic republic, where day-to-day existence had become drab or harsh for generations of Iranians--those whose tastes had been Westernized and who did not feel the same call to religion that energized the young and zealous ruling class and their neighborhood enforcement cadres.

The Western-style bars, restaurants and discos of an earlier era under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi are long gone. Many of Ali’s friends now entertain themselves by smoking opium, he said. Some have tried the cheap heroin that was readily available on the streets until the recent government crackdown.

Ali prefers “putting up a few lagers,” which means that he adds a pinch of sugar to the non-alcoholic Islamic beer sold in the stores; after about six weeks, the beer develops a little alcoholic kick.

“If you went from the bottom to the top of this street,” Ali said gesturing to his neighborhood, “almost every family wants to get out and is willing to sell everything they have--everything--to pay for a visa or a passport” or whatever would ensure a successful emigration.

Flight has become the preoccupation for many in this war-weary society. Long lines are commonplace outside the Swedish, Dutch, Danish, French and other European embassies, and the West German Embassy alone accepts 300 to 400 visa applications a day.

Ghastly Stories

Just across the Persian Gulf from Iran, in the Arab enclave of Dubai, lives a young man named Farooq who got out two years ago. He now sells Persian carpets in a shopping mall and looks forward to the day when the government will grant an amnesty to draft evaders such as he. He could not face going to the front, about which there were ghastly stories of chemical-weapons use and “human wave” assaults by Iranian forces.

Meanwhile, Ali, back in his family’s apartment, said, “I don’t think revolution is such a bad thing. Sometimes it is needed--even though I hate this regime.” He can’t really see the future, he said, but he finds some peace by going to the mountains with “my mates” and by drinking a few lagers now and then.

He lifts weights to stay in shape, but he insists that he will not run again.

He understands when people tell him they want to leave, like his sister, whose husband has promised to take her to America, and his cousin, sitting at the end of the table, who wants to study medicine and “is looking for an American husband.”

“But,” he said, “there’s no way I’m going to stay.”