23.02.2023

Pahlavi has a bad day

Yassamine Mather gives an update on the mixed fortunes of the Iranian exile right, the illusions of the soft ‘left’ and the shortcomings of the internal opposition

Official representatives of Iran were not invited to this year’s Munich Security Conference, held last weekend. Instead there were three exiles (out of dozens who claim leadership of the protests against the government of the Islamic Republic). They included the ex-shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who eagerly participated in a fringe meeting titled, naturally enough, ‘Women, life, freedom’.

Bob Menendez, chairman of the US Senate foreign relations committee, and the German Green Party MEP, Hannah Neumann, also attended. But, as always with Reza Pahlavi, even this side show did not go well. Neumann, chair of the EU delegation for relations with the Arab peninsula, said this:

You must know our limitations. Everyone has a duty. We cannot create a transitional government for the people of Iran. This is not our job. They asked us and the United Nations not to support the government of the Islamic Republic. This is our duty. What will happen during the transition period should be decided by the people inside the country in coordination with the protestors abroad. We are aware of Iran’s protests. We know that different layers of society, including labour unions, student unions, etc, are against the government. We hope to have people from inside the country who were released from prison in this conference next year.

A crushing put-down for Pahlavi. Yet, although her comments were praised by sections of the Iranian exile left, the very fact that she was ready to attend a joint meeting with the would-be-dictator, son of an ex-dictator, says a lot about Alliance 90/The Greens - in other words, the green in the red-yellow-green coalition government in Berlin.

Pahlavi said that the “international community” (a euphemism for the US and its allies) should provide maximum support to “Iranian society”, in addition to maximum pressure on the Iranian government. In fact he and his fellow rightwing exiles have been calling for more sanctions, and many of his supporters advocate a US-led military intervention to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

Claiming concern for regional ecological issues, as well as the water crisis, he said: “We should be able to cooperate with our neighbours in different fields, with the Saudis, with the Israelis, and a different Iran will work with all of these as a partner.” Of course, we always knew what the Americans wanted out of regime change in Iran: a puppet who furthers US strategy in the region, and helps create an Iran-Saudi-Israeli alliance. Just what Pahlavi’s father did in the 1970s.

Earlier this month Pahlavi asked Iranians to give him ‘advocacy’, so that he can represent them when it comes to ‘international contacts’, and this was followed by a number of small, but well organised, demonstrations by his supporters in US cities. From one of these protests a photo emerged and went viral on social media. It showed Parviz Sabeti. Who he? Well, he was head of internal security, the notorious Savak secret police under the shah’s rule. Now aged 86, he was pictured taking part in a ‘pro-democracy’ demonstration in Los Angeles, home for many Iranian rightwing exiles.

Savak

There have been a few photos and videos of Sabeti circulating recently. But on this occasion his daughter, Pardis Sabeti, put her father’s photo on Twitter and Instagram, with the hashtag, ‘Woman, life, freedom’. Without a hint of irony she wrote: “44 years ago on this day, our motherland fell into darkness. Hoping that this year will bring light and solidarity.”

Parviz Sabeti left Tehran airport under a pseudonym in 1979 and the outbreak of the anti-shah revolution. Many former political prisoners accuse him of playing a leading role in the torture or death of many political activists during his 20-year career in Savak. The fact that he can now appear on a royalist demonstration and boast about his past is, first of all, an indictment of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose own torture of political prisoners has overshadowed even the terrible crimes of Savak.

In its early years the Islamic government employed many former Savak agents. However, the religious fervour of some of the regime’s Islamic torturers are legendary. Many political prisoners died as a result. So we can blame the Islamic Republic for the fact that criminals such as Sabeti can shamelessly appear in public on a ‘pro-democracy’ demonstration. But we should also blame Iran’s exiled ‘left’, which nowadays is so soft on imperialism that perhaps it is time to stop referring to them as ‘left’ (even with scare quotes).

True, the soft ‘left’ has been up in arms about the Savak torturer. But my question to them is, what did you expect, when you all fell into the trap of US neocon think tanks, and sponsored charades such as the Iran Tribunal? It was an obvious attempt to promote regime change from above. Why did you think the US National Endowment for Democracy, which describes itself as a keystone of Ronald Reagan’s legacy, was happy to promote and finance the tribunal you set up under the name of a plethora of ‘human rights’ organisations? What do you think the US (under any administration) means when it advocates ‘human rights’?

This is precisely what it means: dictatorship, a brutal secret service - as long as it is their dictatorship, as opposed to an Islamic, Russian or Chinese version. So don’t be surprised: you are the ones who paved the way for the kind of regime change Pahlavi longs for.

Irrespective of whether it is ignorance or sheer opportunism that led you to support such efforts by US neocons, none of you are in a moral position to express outrage when a creature such as Sabeti crawls out of the woodwork. You have misrepresented the genuine struggles of the Iranian people inside the country and you richly deserve their contempt for everything you say and do.

Plots

Last week, the TV network, Iran International, decided to suspend operations in the UK. It blamed threats against its London-based journalists, claiming that the British security forces had warned them of a “significant escalation in state-backed threats from Iran”. Apparently, “Threats had grown to the point that it was felt it was no longer possible to protect the channel’s staff.” The station will now continue its operation from offices in Washington DC.

In fact MI5 and the Metropolitan police said that 15 plots had been foiled since the start of 2022 to either kidnap or kill UK-based individuals perceived as enemies of the Iranian regime. However, it is not clear how many of these were associated with this particular TV channel - dubbed ‘Saudi International’ by many. After all, the largest stakeholder in Volant Media UK Ltd, the company that owns Iran International, is a Saudi subject. The TV network’s supporters claim he is not associated with the Saudi royals or the Riyadh government. But everyone else knows otherwise.

Iran International makes no claim to impartiality. It advocates regime change US-style and promotes only two alternatives: either the shah’s son; or the loony bunch now based in Albania, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq.

Of course, it could be that the Islamic Republic regime is stupid enough to consider this trashy TV channel a real threat. Perhaps it has goons to threaten the staff. But it is also quite possible that, despite claiming to support Iran’s protestors, the foreign office was not keen to host such an overtly provocative propaganda channel and denied it sufficient safety guarantees.

Back in Iran itself, last week demonstrators returned to the streets of major cities on the highly symbolic 40th day following the execution of two protestors: Mohammad Mahdi Karami and Seyyed Mohammad Hosseini.

Meanwhile, the rift between various factions of the regime continues. Javad Emam, a close advisor to former president Mohammad Khatami, criticised the government over its regional policies, claiming that they drive the “country’s Arab neighbours to Israel’s bosom”. He added that the dictatorship was acting against the will of the people, and that those defending dictatorship “are the ones actually causing regime change”.

We also saw the publication of a charter put together by 20 civil-society organisations and unions representing teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, students and petroleum workers, among others. Their demands include the release of all political prisoners; an end to all criminalisation of political, union and civil activities; the public prosecution of leaders and perpetrators of the violence against protestors; unrestricted freedom of opinion, expression and thought, assembly and social media; and policies to preserve natural resources and end environmental degradation.

The charter also demands the abolition of torture, arbitrary imprisonment and the death sentence, and, crucially, a secular constitution. And it calls for sexual and gender equality, a ban on child labour and the repeal of laws that discriminate against minorities. From the government’s perspective, such demands are tantamount to a call for revolution, as the various authors surely well know.

Sections of the Iranian left have hailed this as a major victory and, of course, it is positive that so many groups have managed to draw up, discuss and finally agree a charter. None of the factions of Iran’s Islamic Republic, nor its royalist regime-change alternative, are in a position to respond positively to any of the charter’s substantive demands. However, it is not clear how the various signatories intend to take the current wave of protests forward. There is, ominously, no mention of imperialism and the possibility of a US-led intervention.

Objective circumstances cry out for getting down to the serious business of forming a working class party based on the principles and perspectives of orthodox Marxism.