Iran’s New Revolutionaries Watch, Wait and Work

by Richard H. Curtiss

When the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979 to join the resistance against the Shah’s regime, he had prepared the way for a long period with daily telephone calls first from exile in Iraq and later from exile in France. The calls went to followers all over Iran who taped his sermons on cassette recorders, and then circulated hundreds of copies to other opponents of the Shah. The result was that when he returned from years in exile, his message was as familiar to Iranians as if he had never fled his country to avoid arrest by the Shah’s SAVAK secret police.

Now, once again, opponents of the Iranian regime are living and working in both Iraq and France. But this time the regime they are working to overthrow is the one established by Ayatollah Khomeini, who died in 1986. And instead of relying on telephones and tape recorders, its opponents are broadcasting radio and television programs not only to Iranian communities all over the world, but even into Iran itself.

No Less Brutal

Their message is that Khomeini’s clerical successors have imposed on Iran a rule every bit as brutal as anything devised by the Shah’s torturers and executioners. And today its victims no longer are just the Shah’s followers, many of whom were executed by Iran’s revolutionary regime, and many more of whom fled the country after the Shah went into exile.

The victims today are the same young idealists and revolutionaries who organized the mass demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people in Tehran in 1978 and 1979 that forced the Shah to flee. Following their victory, and the establishment of what was to be a democratic government based on a coalition of all the parties that overthrew the Shah, Khomeini’s henchmen began undermining all those who had marched with him, and then even many of his own followers who objected to the tactics being used.

One of those early defectors from among Khomeini’s supporters was then-Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, who had returned with Khomeini from the latter’s exile in France, but who realized that his own life was in danger from Islamist radicals determined to set up a one-party dictatorship with the Ayatollah at its head. Bani Sadr was offered safe passage out of the country by Massoud Rajavi, head of an opposition group first to the Shah and then to the Iranian mullahs, the People’s Mojahedin. Rajavi and Bani Sadr were smuggled into an Iranian airforce transport manned by an all-Mojahedin crew and piloted by Col. Behzad Moezi, who at one time had been the Shah’s personal pilot. The pilot then took off on a scheduled military mission, but soon reported to ground controllers that he was having mechanical difficulties and would land as soon as he could find an airfield where he could refuel.

Out of Range

Then he shut off all communications and headed for the Turkish border. When radar operators discovered that the flight still was airborne they threatened to bring it down with a Phoenix missile. But the pilot was flying the Boeing 707 transport at maximum speed and it soon was over Turkey and out of range. The Khomeini government did not discover who was aboard the errant aircraft until Rajavi and Bani Sadr held a joint press conference in Paris.

Since then a number of Iranian opposition groups have formed the National Council of Resistance of Iran. It has elected Mrs. Maryam Rajavi as the first president of Iran after the fall of the present government. Mrs. Rajavi first achieved prominence in resistance activities inside Iran, and later escaped and married Massoud Rajavi in exile.

Massoud Rajavi now spends much of his time in Iraq, where he heads the National Liberation Army of Iran. The NLA consists of armored and other military forces that participated in ground operations inside Iran against Iranian government forces at the close of the Iraq-Iran war. The force still is ready in Iraq to assist resistance forces inside Iran should a new attempt break out there to overthrow the Islamic revolutionary government.

Mrs. Rajavi is based in Paris, the headquarters for resistance political activities. One of those activities has been the creation of a major broadcasting facility in a suburb of the French capital, where between 25 and 35 people are engaged in preparing radio and television programs in Farsi.

The radio programs are broadcast to Iranians living outside Iran over 68 separate stations, mostly in Europe. The Paris facility also produces radio programs to be beamed into Iran via satellite. For one month during 1996 such programs were beamed into Iran for one hour daily from transmitters near the Iranian border. Those broadcasts also told Iranians the frequencies not only of the regular radio programs, but also of television programs available to owners of TV satellite dishes, which officially are banned in Iran, but which still exist there.

Staff members of the Paris radio and TV studios prepare newscasts and features recounting to Iranians the domestic and international news that is denied them at home. Broadcasts also include cultural and artistic programs, and discussions and features on the art, literature and history of Iran.

The radio programs go out directly over 10 different frequencies, and the television broadcasts over a European television satellite. There also are resistance programs broadcast from near Iran’s borders, which frequently pick up reports prepared by the European center. Not surprisingly, the Iranian government seeks to jam all of the frequencies used.

In the Paris studios there is a reproduction center that copies the programs for mailing to stations as far away as the United States. There also is an Internet address (http://www.iran-e-azad.org) which records 30,000 visits monthly. IBM and Macintosh-compatible computers also can play the radio programs right though the computer.

Some of the broadcasters, writers, producers, librarians, researchers and administrators at work near Paris are survivors of both the Shah’s and the Islamic revolutionary regime’s torture chambers. Others are sole survivors of families decimated by the years of fighting in Iran and the executioners of two dictatorial regimes. Yet the atmosphere in the extensive studios, which bear no identifying outside markings or signs, is one of quiet but purposeful activity, and relaxed informality.

Clearly these resistance workers, some of whom bear the visible scars of their ordeals, are dedicated people. After many years of separation from their families in Iran or scattered around the world in exile, they believe that, someday, they will return once again to their homeland. Having learned the hard lessons of the breakup of the anti-Shah coalition, they are determined that this time their efforts will yield a multi-party democracy in Iran which will grant freedom to members of all political parties and of all religions, and the same absolute gender equality that has developed within organizations that comprise the National Council of Resistance.