Divisions roil Iranian-American protest movement

Amir nonetheless has scars from the torture he endured by the hands of SAVAK, the key police drive that used violent repression to crack down on dissent when Iran was dominated by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Rising up in an impoverished space of southern Iran, Amir turned concerned in leftist political exercise as a scholar. He wrote for an underground paper, learn banned books and attended rallies.

These actions marked him as a dissident, and he was detained by SAVAK in 1974. Talking with Al Jazeera by cellphone, Amir — who requested that his full identify be withheld for his security — recalled being overwhelmed with cables and electrocuted for hours at a time.

Afterwards, when he used the restroom, he noticed his face, distorted and bloody, in his reflection within the water.

Given the brutality he confronted for his activism, it got here as a shock to Amir that he discovered himself dealing with supporters of the shah in what appeared an unlikely place: a protest in the USA.

Demonstrations erupted in Iran and internationally after a 22-year-old Kurdish lady named Mahsa Amini died in September after being arrested by Iran’s morality police.

Impressed by the protests unfolding in his house nation, Amir, who has been residing in the USA for many years now, determined to affix rallies deliberate in his space.

However the demonstrations have underscored for Amir the bitter divisions throughout the Iranian diaspora, together with between those that see each the shah and the nation’s present non secular leaders as authoritarians and people who look again on the shah with fondness.

“Now, earlier than I attend a rally, I search for which organisation is internet hosting it,” Amir mentioned. “If there are going to be folks supporting the shah, I don’t need to be round them.”

Bitter divisions

If indicators bearing the picture of the late shah or his son Reza Pahlavi had been onerous for Amir to abdomen, the presence of one other determine at a latest US rally left him aghast: Parviz Sabeti, a former high-level SAVAK official.

Sabeti attended the rally on February 11, and images of that day set off a storm of controversy, with some saying that his presence undermined requires a democratic Iran.

“I believed this was unbelievable,” mentioned Amir, who noticed the images circulated over social media. “Once I noticed him [Sabeti], it was like he was mocking us. The beatings, the torture, all of it got here again. It was like I used to be in jail another time.”

Assist for the shah is tough to quantify, and the Iranian-American group accommodates all kinds of views on Iran’s political state of affairs.

A petition calling for the youthful Pahlavi to guide the protest motion has garnered greater than 450,000 signatures on the web site Change.org.

Talking with the information outlet Politico on the Munich Safety Convention in February, Pahlavi mentioned he shouldn’t be held chargeable for the actions of his father. “Folks perceive how essential my position might be in a transition,” he mentioned.

However for these like Amir, the strain to choose between supporters of the shah and the present Islamic Republic is a false alternative.

“My hope for Iran is that individuals will have the ability to learn what they need, to say what they need. The Iranian folks don’t need to dwell beneath a dictator, whether or not the shah or the present authorities,” he mentioned. “I need freedom for the Iranian folks, that’s all.”

Schisms over how the US ought to take care of the present authorities have additionally been a supply of rivalry and, at occasions, hostility.

Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-born analyst and reporter who lives in exile in the USA, mentioned such debates have grow to be more and more fraught because the protests kicked off, with some seeing any engagement with the Iranian authorities as a type of lodging.

“These are sophisticated points, and there’s a lot of disagreement throughout the diaspora,” Mortazavi instructed Al Jazeera in a latest cellphone name. “However there was an effort by extra hardcore anti-regime activists to smear anybody who speaks critically about, say, the influence of US sanctions or in favour of diplomacy as a supporter of the regime.”

Mortazavi mentioned she and her household have been subjected to a wave of rape and dying threats over what critics characterise as her “advocacy” for the federal government, an accusation she strongly denies.

“Folks really feel annoyed as a result of the forces of repression within Iran are past their management,” she mentioned, “so that they go after scapegoats.”

Mortazavi mentioned among the most ferocious on-line exercise is pushed by what look like bot accounts. She believes the presence of those automated accounts signifies the involvement of states with an curiosity in pushing a extra hawkish strategy to Iran.

Because the administration of former US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from a deal that had prohibited Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, the United Nations has expressed concern that Iran is transferring nearer to acquiring the supplies mandatory to construct one.

Iran, nonetheless, has lengthy denied experiences it plans to construct a nuclear weapon.

Even inside Iran, the way forward for the present protest motion stays an open query. Many critics contemplate the demonstrations to be essentially the most strong problem to the present authorities in years. However a harsh crackdown has killed a whole bunch of protesters, in line with foreign-based human rights organisations, and Iranian safety forces have been accused of torture and compelled confessions.

It’s a playbook that strikes Amir as acquainted.

“I left Iran in 1981 as a result of I knew what sort of folks they had been. They had been the identical because the shah,” he mentioned, referring to the Muslim leaders who seized energy after the shah’s ouster in 1979. “The folks of Iran didn’t desire a dictatorship.”