Rallies Mark Iranian Uprising

As Iranians around the world prepare this week to commemorate the fourth anniversary of student uprisings against Iran’s theocracy, many emigres say that growing popular discontent there and a more assertive attitude toward the Islamic regime by U.S. officials are giving them their strongest hope for change in decades.

The confluence of forces is setting off an explosion of pro-democracy political activity in exile communities, including Los Angeles, home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside Iran.

People who say that they have never attended protests have flocked to rallies like one held Sunday at the Federal Building in Westwood. Another anti-government protest is scheduled there tonight that organizers say will draw thousands.

“I feel my country has gone backward, and a lot of rights have been taken from us, especially women,” said Forouz Adeli, 43, who works at a medical insurance firm in Folsom, Calif.

Adeli, who came to the United States 25 years ago to study nutrition at UC Santa Cruz, said the growing student protests in Iran inspired her to attend protest rallies for the first time. Iranian officials have reportedly arrested 4,000 student demonstrators in the last few weeks.

“We need to let them know we can hear them and we’re with them,” said Adeli, who turned out for the Westwood rally with her husband and two children.

Political rivalries still divide Iranian American opposition groups. The most notable split separates those who support a return to monarchy and those who reject the royalist path as a dictatorship. At Sunday’s rally, arguments broke out early between anti-monarchists and a small group that carried placards of Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Police were eventually called in to escort the pro-Pahlavi group off the Federal Building grounds.

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Support for Regime

The Islamic regime is not opposed by all Iranian Americans, a religiously and ethnically diverse population of Muslims and Jews, Bahais and Christians. Many are foreign-born, highly educated professionals.

Soussan Arfaania, a Los Angeles businesswoman who immigrated here 33 years ago, said the current regime had significantly increased women’s literacy rates, empowered them with the vote and improved health care. More freedoms are needed, she said, but they should come “from evolution, not revolution.”

“The last thing Iranians need is to become destabilized,” Arfaania said.

But the groups opposed to the regime are unifying and organizing as never before. At a nationwide conference held this weekend in Hollywood, for instance, three factions of the Iran National Front agreed for the first time in more than two decades to unify in their goal for a secular democratic republic.

Masoud Kazemzadeh, a Utah Valley State College political science professor who serves as the group’s spokesman, said concern about the possibility of U.S. military intervention in Iran lent new urgency to their quest for unity.

The group, like many Iranian Americans interviewed, says it welcomes U.S. moral and political support for changing the Iranian government, but believes that military intervention would only set back efforts to reform Iran from within.

The National Front conference drew nearly 200 representatives from across the nation who spanned the religious and ethnic spectrum.

Muslims in full Islamic dress sat next to bareheaded women as speakers gave thundering speeches before the red, green and white flag of Iran and a picture of their political guru, the late Mohammad Mossadegh. The popularly elected Mossadegh was deposed in a 1953 coup organized by the CIA after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry. He was replaced by the shah.

At Sunday’s Westwood rally, members of the newly united National Front movement announced that they would join hands with student activists -- including rally organizer Gholam Reza Mohajery-Nejad of the Alliance of Iranian Students. The lanky activist was arrested, tortured and initially sentenced to death for helping foment the 1999 student uprising in Tehran but managed to flee the country.

Along with a parade of poets, scholars and other political activists, Mohajery-Nejad spoke before a crowd of about 500 people, who waved the Iranian flag and sang the national anthem.

The rally featured gruesome photos of what organizers said were political prisoners executed by the Iranian regime and banners with such slogans as “Islamic Regime of Iran = Terrorism.”

It also featured sometimes heated arguments over Iran’s future.

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Heated Debate

As Kazem Alamdari, 56, a sociology professor at Cal State L.A., told a reporter that monarchists tended to support a military overthrow of the Islamic regime, another protester jumped in and hotly disagreed.

The argument quickly drew in several others, who hurled accusations at one another and threw out challenges to condemn the former Pahlavi regime as a dictatorship.

Alamdari came to the United States in the mid-1970s for graduate work and, from campuses here, passionately supported Iran’s 1979 revolution that toppled the shah. But he became alarmed when the newly installed Islamic regime shut down Iran’s universities for two years and began purging secular faculty members.

Recently, he became one of roughly 850 Iranian intellectuals mostly here and in Europe who signed up with one of several new pro-democracy groups: Jomhouri -- “Republic” in the Persian language -- which advocates a secular democratic republic with a strict divide between church and state and equal rights for all.

“You have to admit the dictatorship!” Alamdari said to three young men who argued for bringing all democracy advocates, royalist or otherwise, into a grand coalition to press for a national referendum on Iran’s political future.

“That’s not relevant! Who cares about the past? We’re talking about a referendum now!” said Mohammad Kazerouni, 24, a UC Irvine political science graduate who expects to attend law school in the fall.

The royalists say that their rally tonight will dwarf Sunday’s event and show widespread support for Pahlavi and a constitutional monarchy.

Fouad Pashai, the Los-Angeles based secretary general of the Iranian Constitutional Party, acknowledged that the former shah’s regime was troubled by what he described as some corruption and repression.

But he argued that the younger Pahlavi was far more democratic and the only Iranian leader capable of making the transition from religious to secular rule.

Those nostalgic for a return to Iran’s royalist past say kings have always been an integral part of Persia’s past, starting with Cyrus the Great 2,500 years ago.

Others cite more recent regimes, recounting prosperous times under the late shah.

Shawn Okhovat, a 67-year-old textile magnate in Los Angeles, said Iranian Jews like him were fairly treated by the shah’s regime, encouraged to forge lucrative business deals with Israel and subsequently flourished.

But after the Iranian Revolution, he said, the new clerical rulers confiscated more than $10 million of his assets, including several apartment buildings.

“When [the Pahlavi regime] was in power, we had the best life,” Okhovat said. “If there is another revolution, everybody will go back.”