“Do you think I will see Iran again?”
The question is suspended in the air – Quiet, fragile, heavy, with desire. My father asks him in the twilight of his life, while he fights against cancer that seeks to weaken him. It is not his voice alone, I hear, but the echo of millions: those who fled the earth they loved, and those who remain behind, still waiting for the day when Iran could be Iran again.
He fled to London in the aftermath of the 1979 Revolution, just escaping the node flowing from a theocracy which replaced a fallen monarch. My father served this monarchy with loyalty, believing that for all of her autocracy faults, she was modernized, socially liberal and politically reformable: the very antithesis of the Islamic Republic.
Once my father left Iran, he never returned. In exile, he testified to a regime which mercilessly imprisoned, tortured and murdered. A regime that cut him off from his soil, but could not break his hope.
And what about others? Those who stayed. Our families and loved ones. Those who have endured the repression and five decades of almost constant insecurity. They also ask: When are we going to collect our country from this long dark night?
I grew up between nostalgia for a lost homeland and the reality of exile. Songs outside the Embassy of the Islamic Republic, the clicking of Persian tea locks during dissident rally in our extinguished government housing, the news of the bomb attacks and assassinations that stole friends and other dreamers. This haunting mixture of sorrow and challenge we shaped. And now, while the war darkens our sky, we feel it again: sorrow for the innocent people, the hope for the fall of the executioners.
Speaking with civil society leaders in Iran, it seems that little Iranian blamefully blame foreign hands for this war. Although there is a diversity of votes in a country, many Iranians finally believe that the Islamic Republic has never been a guardian of the nation, but a guard of his own revolution. Even his revolutionary guards have no name from Iran – only a violent ideology that devours his children and invites them to war.
In a joint statement, the winners of the Iranian Nobel Nobel Narges Mohammadi and Shirin Ebadi, the filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof, and the votes of civil society urged world leaders to stop the enrichment of uranium and end the sample blood of the innocent people in Iran and Israel.
Inside the country, optimism and terror fight for the soul of a people.
For decades, many of us have pleaded with world leaders: to reject both appeasement and war with the Islamic Republic. There was another path – to strangle the regime and empower the people. Few chose him. Too many people have asked the question, “”Do the people of Iran really want change? As if they did not hear the waves of singing Iranian demonstrators, “death to the dictator” and “death in Khamenei” in the streets.
Since the start of the fighting, several of the architects of the terror regime have been killed in their bunkers and beds. But with them, perished a poet, an athlete and children – the brilliant promise of tomorrow extinct alongside the darkness of the old guard. Many of us are looking in anxiety while our compatriots abandon their houses, desperate for a safe refuge out of the reach of oppression and destruction.
As requests the dissident rap artist, Toomaj Salehi: “How are more than 9 million people – without fuel, often without sufficient savings to move, and without residence in another city – planned to evacuate Tehran?”
The Iranians see through the hollow indignation of the regime officials who cry for civilians today, but overthrew the blood of 1,500 demonstrators in 2019, more than 500 others during the woman, life, the freedom of 2022 and countless others on four decades of tyranny.
And yet, the regime clings to its authoritarian scenario: to close the Internet, censors its news. Instead of offering citizens’ protection or security refuge in the midst of war, it forces university students to take their exams as if nothing had changed and intensifies its repression against freedom of expression.
The illegitimacy of the Islamic Republic is bare not only in its horrible human rights file, but in its strategic failures. In the words of Kylie Moore -Gilbert, “repress dissent, put innocent in prison, do operations abroad – Iran simply does not seem to get out of his own way.” And recently, Israeli spies and pilots have managed to paralyze the Iranian capacities of the United States.
The real defenders of peace reject the two wars of aggression and terror in all its forms. Indifference to this latter undermines any real commitment to the first.
No external power will save Iran. The age of foreign saviors is over. We do not live in a world of singular empires or simple alliances. Each nation must take care of its own garden. But no soil separates. For almost half a century, the regime in Iran has poisoned more than its own land – its burn has spread to Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon.
The fate of Iran will be, and should be written by Iranians – not in foreign capitals or closed rooms, but in their own streets, with their own voices and through their own struggle. And as long as those who dream of liberal democracy remain divided, as long as personal ambitions, old wounds and ideological divisions are like a common goal – I fear the answer to my father’s question.
For the good of a free Iran, a stable region and a world in peace – because we urge restraint and membership in international law – we must also ensure the sovereignty of the Iranian people, not their oppressors.
