We’re asking our countrymen to cast votes by putting their ballots in an envelope marked ‘free elections’

Sunday, June 2nd, 2013 by Olivia Ward Foreign Affairs Reporter, Published on Sat Jun 01 2013

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Source: The Star

© Randy Risling / Toronto Star

Reza Pahlavi’s life was split in two at the age of 17: he was a trainee fighter pilot at a U.S. air base in Texas when his father was swept from the throne of Iran on a wave of public anger.

Now 52, the elegantly-tailored heir to the Peacock Throne lives in suburban Washington with his family, travelling frequently to Europe and outwardly at ease with a cosmopolitan life style.

But inwardly, he is an exile who has never left Iran.

“Iran has been my daily life,” he says. “It’s all I have after 33 years. If I were to step off the plane right now in Tehran my chances of survival are next to zero. But the moment I could return I’d be on the first flight.”

While living under a constant death threat, Pahlavi has campaigned to do just that. Not as a shah-in-waiting, he says, but a “watchdog for the people,” helping to create a new country of respect for human rights, freedom and equality: the son of an autocrat whose credo is democracy.

In Toronto this weekend to meet with Iranian exiles and Canadian politicians, he is the spokesman for the new Iranian National Council— a loosely based umbrella group of regime opponents from Iran and the diaspora — created as the first step toward ending the Islamic regime that overthrew his father in the 1979 revolution that propelled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

Pahlavi is here in advance of a June 14 election that is already denounced as a sham, with candidates hand-picked by the regime and the opposition shut out or locked up.

His plan is to launch a process to delegitimize the regime and move toward democracy.

“We’re asking our countrymen to cast votes by putting their ballots in an envelope marked ‘free elections,’ and send them to all embassies of democratic countries in Iran and the office of the UN,” he said. “Those abroad can send them to all the relevant people there.”

It’s beyond a boycott, he insists: a wake-up call to the world that Iran’s rulers have lost the right to stay in power.

“At the end of the day, the regime is using this election to satisfy their purpose. They want to show the world that the people support them and their nuclear agenda. That is the head game they’re playing.”

Pahlavi argues that the threat from a possible Iranian nuclear bomb is serious, but an attack by Israel or the U.S. to halt the program, which Iran insists is for peaceful purposes, would be disastrous.

“It’s a mistake for the West to think that it can reason with Iran. This is a regime that wants to export its religious ideology and destroy its arch enemy, even if it needs a nuclear arsenal to do so.

“But we are telling the world an attack is not going to do any good. It would not stop the drive for nuclear weapons, but only delay it. And all our efforts for democracy would go down the drain and our potential allies in Iran would be put on the defensive.”

The West’s focus on Iran’s nuclear program alone misses the point, Pahlavi insists. It is only a symptom of a regime that is deeply opposed to democracy and human rights, and so will continue to be a danger.

The only solution, he says, is for other countries to forge ties with the opposition, and eventually to recognize the Iranian National Council as the legitimate voice of Iran. A step that at the moment appears distant, if not unlikely.

However Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s recent move to open a dialogue with opposition members in Iran and the diaspora, he says, makes Canada “a leader in this process, and a model for the world.”

During Pahlavi’s visit he was to meet with Ontario politicians and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

The council has made headway in uniting the fractious opposition since the violent crackdown on the 2009 protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election victory.

As an “underground movement” operating through electronic communications and word of mouth, Pahlavi says, it has already drawn support from within the regime — “we have former diplomats, media people, branches of the military, including the Revolutionary Guard.”

Welcoming defectors from the regime is the best way to avoid a “Syrian scenario” and ensure that it will crumble from within, Pahlavi argues. Without partisan ties, the movement is broad enough to create a legitimate alternative united by a dedication to democracy.

Its first test will be the upcoming election, whose outcome has added urgency as the nuclear issue reaches critical mass. Most of the candidates are hardliners, and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei shows no sign of softening his policy.

Does Pahlavi see a future role for himself as a constitutional monarch?

Some Iranians would welcome him back as a stabilizing force. Others are still bitter toward the former shah they blame for a regime of widely resented corruption and repression. His son’s vision is of closing that dark and broken circle.

“In a democracy, it doesn’t matter if there’s a republic or a monarchy,” Pahlavi says. “If I can be part of a generation that, for the first time since Cyrus the Great, can say our future was decided by the free will of the people, that’s the greatest achievement I could hope for.”