Iranian activists in Europe promote democracy, countering Monarchist narratives

Iranian activists and opponents of the ruling theocracy have been very active in recent weeks in various European capitals, including Paris and Brussels. Their demonstrations amplify the message of a nationwide uprising that began in their homeland in September. Those protests and accompanying acts of defiance continue to this day despite heavy crackdowns that have resulted in hundreds of protesters being killed and thousands jailed.

While pushing for a democratic alternative, the activists are urging European policymakers to abandon their long-held tendency toward appeasement of the Iranian regime and to adopt a much more robust policy. In recent weeks they have specifically been calling on the EU to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization. This measure has been recommended on numerous occasions over the years by Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi.

By contrast, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late Shah of Iran, has openly on several occasions has tried to reach out to some factions within the IRGC, which is widely recognized as being primarily responsible for the crackdowns that have been taking place over the past five months. Pahlavi, whose father was deposed in the 1979 revolution, has been trying to make himself visible in discussions about recent and ongoing protests against the country’s theocratic dictatorship. At the recent Munich Security Conference, he was one of three so-called opposition activists to appear in lieu of official representatives of the Iranian regime, whose invitations were withheld as a consequence of its crackdowns on dissent and its support of Russia in its unprovoked war upon Ukraine.

Pahlavi’s presence at such events has met with considerable backlash from various Iranian expatriates, particularly those who are current members of pro-democracy activist groups. Many such activists have taken part in large-scale rallies across Europe in recent weeks, including one in Paris that was scheduled to mark the February 11 anniversary of the Pahlavi dynasty’s overthrow. Despite efforts by the Shah’s son to rehabilitate his family’s image, the Iranian expatriate community generally maintains a favorable outlook on this aspect of the 1979 revolution while also condemning the theocratic dictatorship that took the monarchy’s place.

That sentiment was well-reflected in this month’s Paris rally, and it has been equally well-reflected in the slogans of the uprising taking place inside the Islamic Republic. Among them are “death to the dictator” and “death to the oppressor, bit it the Shah or the Leader.” These slogans also underscore the fact that the uprising has transcended its initial focus on the death in custody of Mahsa Amini last September.

The 22-year-old Kurdish woman was arrested and fatally beaten by “morality police” for wearing her mandatory head covering too loosely. But this spark quickly gave rise to a movement that has been widely described as perhaps the greatest challenge to the theocratic system since the time of the 1979 revolution.

Former Member of the European Parliament Struan Stevenson, who is also the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change, concluded in his recent book “Dictatorship and Revolution: Iran – A Contemporary History” that both the monarchy and the theocratic dictatorship “deny universal human rights, consider the people to be immature and in need of guardians, and derive their legitimacy from sources other than the ballot box and democratic rule of law. Both have committed gross violations of human rights such as arbitrary detentions, summary trials, cruel and inhuman punishment, torture, and political executions. Both have effectively instituted one-party rule, denied pluralism, suppressed many segments of society, denied freedom of speech or association, prohibited a free press, and disenfranchised citizens.”

Reza Pahlavi has naturally offered public condemnations of the human rights violations associated with Tehran’s response to the current uprising, but this commentary is not taken seriously by democratic activists who remain keenly aware of his family’s own abuses. He has never publicly disavowed those abuses; on the contrary he has from time to time referred to his father’s reign as honorable.

According to Iranian activists, for almost half a century, the Pahlavi family and its secret police, SAVAK, brutally murdered and tortured political activists and intellectuals, including authors, academics, artists, and poets, while torture was a “national pastime” for the Shah’s regime. The same is true of the mullahs’ regime today, and so the Iranian people are powerfully committed to putting both forms of dictatorship behind them.

The activists in the Diaspora stress that the Iranian people, with their chants against both the Shah and the Leader, reject the past and the present in favor of a democratic future and seek a secular, democratic, and representative republic that respects human rights and the rights of women and minorities.

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