Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1998, pages 33-34

Special Report

Iran-U.S. World Cup Match: What the World Saw, What Iranians Saw and What Participants Recall

By Richard H. Curtiss

“If there was a World Cup for propaganda coups it would have been won last night by the Iranian National Council of Resistance, who defied a FIFA edict banning political sloganeering at the USA-Iran match here and turned one end of the Stade Gerland into a political rally. Dissidents 1, Ayatollahs 0.” —The Daily Telegraph, London, June 22, 1998.

“I’d like to invite you to a little victory celebration Saturday night,” an Iranian acquaintance told me. I knew he’d been in France the previous Sunday, for Iran’s 2 to 1 World Cup football victory over the United States, and since he also works in the Washington, DC office of the largest Iranian resistance group, I assumed the celebration would be more about politics than sports.

When my wife and I arrived half an hour late at the darkened party room of a Northern Virginia apartment complex, the occupants were intently watching a film with a particularly noisy sound track. It showed the 44,000-capacity Gerland Stadium in Lyon, which U.S. television viewers had seen at the time of the June 21 game. But, despite the glimpses of red, white and green Iranian and red, white and blue American colors, the video seemed to be of a totally different event.

In fact, as it turned out, it was a lot closer to what fans in the stands saw on that sunny Sunday than were the brief television clips seen on U.S. news shows. Not mere hundreds but thousands of Iranians in the stands were wearing T-shirts bearing the faces of People’s Mojahedin leader Masoud Rajavi, or of his wife, National Council of Resistance leader Maryam Rajavi. They were chanting, in unison, the same message on the T-shirts: “Iran Rajavi, Rajavi Iran.”

Then the camera would shift from tight shots of the fans to a long view of the stands in which giant orange banners were unfolding, saying “Viva Rajavi, Viva Rajavi.” Elsewhere large banners bearing Maryam Rajavi’s face would unfold and, after a few moments, disappear. Similarly, large Iranian flags appeared and disappeared, but these bore in the center white strip a lion and sun, symbol of the resistance, rather than the symbol of the present Islamic revolutionary government.

American and Iranian fans got along famously.

Later in the game giant yellow banners saying “Down with Khatami” began appearing and then disappearing. Throughout there was an incredible din from the massed chants—paced by drums, whistles and bugles.

There was even a sudden din in the room in which I was sitting when the film showed pairs of white balloons, bearing posters of Maryam Rajavi, being released to float upward from the stands. Some stuck for a time to the ceiling over the stands. Then one, almost as if it were guided by some heavenly remote control, broke loose to drift briskly across the middle of the field, hover for a moment over the Iranian players in a pre-game huddle, and then gently settle to the ground in the exact center of the field between the two teams. Poised to begin the game, the Iranian players looked away uncomfortably and the American players stared uncomprehendingly at the object that had dropped out of the sky between them. Then a referee, carefully, almost daintily, picked it up and carried it to the sidelines, and the game began.

People in the party room clapped, cheered and some seemed on the verge of tears as they saw again on videotape the almost miraculous manifestation that many of them had witnessed in person in France, and that apparently all of the millions of Iranians who watched the game live on television had seen only six days earlier.

When the lights came on I learned there were some 150 Iranian and Iranian-American residents of Northern Virginia in the room, of whom about half had traveled in person to Lyon for the game. Listening to their excited and often humorous accounts of their adventures in France, over a pot-luck meal of Iranian food followed by some dancing by the men to recordings and videos of choral groups from the Iranian resistance army based in Iraq, was like reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet—four novels written and published at different times, but each recording the same series of events as seen from four separate vantage points. The background for all four scenarios of the U.S.-Iran soccer game was the fact that although they do not have diplomatic relations, the luck of the draw had paired the U.S., not yet a major force on the world football scene, and Iran, which because of its 1979 revolution followed by eight years of war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988 had not had a team in the World Cup finals since 1979.

French police, distracted though they were by keeping notoriously unruly northern European football fans from tearing up their cities, nevertheless turned out in force in Lyon. They were concerned that bad blood might remain from Iranian resentment of long-term U.S. backing of the shah prior to 1979, and American resentment over the holding of U.S. Embassy employees in Tehran hostage for 444 days after the 1979 revolution.

A Pleasant Surprise

In scenario one, as seen by television viewers and newspaper readers throughout the world, French police got a pleasant surprise when both Americans and Iranians seemed far more open and friendly toward each other than are their governments. Players exchanged pre-game gifts and posed together instead of separately, as is customary, for pre-game photographs. Although the game was close, with the Americans dominating much of the play but the Iranians getting the winning score, both sides exhibited extraordinarily good sportsmanship on the playing field. Their respective fans, some of whom found themselves seated in adjacent sections in the stadium, got along famously, even exchanging hats and souvenirs as the game unfolded.

Some press accounts noted in passing that American fans, many of whom had done some boisterous fraternizing with Iranians in the streets of Lyon before the game, found as the game began that the Iranians were of two sharply opposed political persuasions, and that neither was much concerned with the Americans among them.

Although the football federation cameramen tried to focus almost exclusively on the playing field, and avoid showing the political action in the stands, alert television watchers might have noted the Rajavi T-shirts among fans in the front rows, or caught a glimpse of the giant banner proclaiming “down with Khatami.”

If that was the scenario to the world at large, as the same film reached Iranians watching the game on television it was somewhat changed. First, the “live telecast” they were seeing actually was delayed for three minutes—though no one told the Iranian viewers—so that the authorities could edit out whatever they considered unseemly. Nevertheless, a few bits and pieces of what was happening off the field got through. This included the gentle descent on the midfield of the balloons bearing the Rajavi photos, since if it had been edited out Iranian spectators would have missed the beginning of the game. Sharp-eyed Iranian viewers also spotted some of the Rajavi T-shirts.

The censors cut out, however, a long sequence of a fleet-footed young man who ran onto the field carrying a Rajavi picture and then eluded the officials who tried to chase him off, literally running circles around them while thousands of Iranians in the stands cheered him on. What Iranians at home didn’t see, however, was the handful of players who, after the game, did not return directly to their locker room but quietly slipped around a cordon of French security guards to greet the Rajavi T-shirted fans, who by then were ecstatic both over the Iranian victory and by being acknowledged by the team they had been cheering on.

There was still a third scenario. That was the videotape I watched in the Northern Virginia party room. It was beamed repeatedly into the privately owned satellite receivers, which are illegal but nevertheless widespread throughout Iran, from the transmitters of the Peoples’s Mojahedin and its allied roof organization, the National Council of Resistance. Just as the regime’s version showed very little of what was happening in the stands, the resistance version showed very little of what was happening anywhere else. The noisy scenes of resistance flags, banners, T-shirts, chants and slogans were interrupted only for interviews, from the stands, with Iranians attending the game.

Among the interviewees were two former members of Iran’s 1978 World Cup team who described why they had joined the resistance. Another interviewee, a 72-year-old man who said he had come from Iran for the game, reported being stunned to find all the resistance T-shirts among the spectators, and promptly donned one himself.

For me there was also a fourth scenario, comprising the personal anecdotes of those who were there. Perhaps to prevent defections, the Iranian government seemed to have used most of its block of 3,000 tickets for security personnel. There were perhaps 3,000 Americans present as well.

Although French authorities admitted to turning back thousands of Iranian resistance sympathizers at the Dutch, Belgian and German borders (the Mojahedin say at least 6,000 of their supporters were refused admittance into France), nevertheless nearly all of the remaining tickets found their way into the hands of Iranian resistance supporters from all over Europe, including some 2,500 who traveled from the United States to Lyon.

The Layered Look

As fans entered the stadium, security personnel removed anything political they were carrying. Those I spoke to in Virginia described dozens, perhaps hundreds of plastic trash bags being filled with confiscated T-shirts. But, by wearing one, two or more Rajavi T-shirts under their outer clothes, stuffing banners under the other contents of women’s purses, and perhaps with a little collusion from attendants in the case of the giant banners, few of those in the stadium seemed to have arrived empty-handed.

They also practiced guerrilla tactics. When a banner or flag was unfolded, stadium personnel or French police would start up the aisles to confiscate it. Many were seized but sometimes, as security personnel approached, the offending items were quickly folded up and passed hand- to-hand through the stands, only to be displayed again elsewhere.

Masoud Rajavi had issued a statement prior to the game ordering his followers to refrain from violence, which explains why whatever scuffles took place were brief and injuries virtually nil. One tall and stunningly beautiful Iranian-American woman in her 20s admitted to my wife that she “lost it” when she found herself sitting among some women from Iran with “the mullahs’ flag.”

“I was so angry I grabbed it away from them and then I realized they were Iranian security personnel. They beat me up and I suppose I had it coming for ignoring Mr. Rajavi’s non-violence order, but I would do it again,” she said with evident satisfaction. “When you’ve spent nearly your whole life in exile and then you get an opportunity to strike back, you do it.”

It was a mood seemingly shared by all in the room, most of whom had lost one or more relatives or friends to the executioners of the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors. Among those present were the sister and nieces of a prominent Mojahedin woman official assassinated by agents of that regime only three years ago in Turkey, and an Iranian Olympic gold medal winner who had donated his medal to the resistance. Despite their individual tragedies, some of the young men at the Virginia gathering did a final impromptu dance repeating, with broad smiles, the slogans they had shouted so joyously in France only six days earlier.

When I asked Ali Reza Jafarzadeh of the National Council of Resistance of Iran where all the people in the room, including two musicians, had come from, he said, “mostly from this neighborhood. There probably are other celebrations going on wherever there are groups who have returned from the game.”

Although I recalled that last year some 7,000 Iranian NCR supporters living in the United States gathered in Denver for a demonstration, I still found it hard to believe that there could be so many Iranian resistance supporters living in just one suburb of the U.S. national capital. But I changed my mind as we drove away from the apartment complex. Strung out along the sidewalk were most of the guests—talking antimatedly or carrying sleeping children as they walked to their nearby homes and apartments.

The World Cup experience has made it clear that Americans are ready to support any rapprochement their government makes with Iran. This time, however, the U.S. must be careful not to repeat its previous mistake of becoming too committed to one regime or party. The break in 1979 was, unfortunately, a U.S. break with all Iranians. To heal that breech, the rapprochement must be with all Iranians as well, and not just with the group holding power at the time diplomatic relations are restored.