Who is Iran’s exiled crown prince, a rising figure in growing protests? – National

He has been in exile for almost 50 years. His father… Iran Shah – was so widely hated that millions took to the streets in 1979, forcing him from power. Nevertheless, the crown prince of Iran Reza Pahlavi tries to position itself as an actor in the future of its country.

Pahlavi successfully incited protesters to take to the streets on Thursday evening, part of a massive escalation of demonstrations sweeping Iran. Initially sparked by the Islamic Republic’s struggling economy, the protests have become a serious challenge to its theocracy, battered by years of nationwide protests and a 12-day war launched in June by Israel that saw the United States bomb nuclear enrichment sites.

What is not known is how much support Pahlavi, 65, actually enjoys in exile in the United States, in his native country. Do the protesters want a return of the Peacock Throne, as his father’s reign was called? Or are the protesters simply looking for something that isn’t Iran’s Shiite theocracy?

Pahlavi launched calls, rebroadcast by satellite news channels and Farsi-language websites abroad, for Iranians to return to the streets Friday evening.

“Over the past decade, the Iranian protest movement and dissident community have adopted an increasingly nationalist tone and tenor,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which faces sanctions from Tehran.

“The more the Islamic Republic has failed, the more it has emboldened its antithesis… The success of the crown prince and his team has been to draw a stark contrast between the normalcy of what was and the promise of what could be, and the nightmare and current predicament that is the reality for so many Iranians. »

Pahlavi’s profile grew further during President Donald Trump’s first term. Yet Trump and other world leaders have been reluctant to accept it, given the many cautionary tales in the Middle East and elsewhere that Western governments placed their trust in exiles long removed from their home countries.

Iranian state media, which for years derided Pahlavi as out of touch and corrupt, blamed “monarchist terrorist elements” for Thursday night’s protests in which vehicles were set on fire and police kiosks attacked.

Born on October 31, 1960, Pahlavi lived in a world of golden luxury as the crown prince of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Mohammed Reza had inherited the throne from his own father, an army officer who had seized power with British support.

Mohammed Reza’s rule was cemented by a CIA-backed coup in 1953, and he cooperated closely with the Americans, who sold the autocratic leader billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and spied on the Soviet Union from Iran.

The young Pahlavi was educated at the eponymous Reza Pahlavi school, located within the grounds of the Niavaran Palace, north of Tehran. A biographer of his father noted that the crown prince once played rock music in the palace during a New Year’s Eve visit to Tehran by then-US President Jimmy Carter.

But the fall of the Peacock Throne was looming.

While successfully overcoming rising oil prices in the 1970s, deep economic inequality took hold under the Shah’s rule and his feared intelligence agency SAVAK became notorious for the torture of dissidents.

Millions of people across the country participated in protests against the Shah, uniting left-wing secularists, unions, professionals, students and Muslim clergy. As the crisis came to a head, the Shah was doomed by his failure to act and poor decisions while secretly battling terminal cancer.

In 1978, Crown Prince Reza left his homeland to attend flight school at a US air base in Texas. A year later, his father fled Iran at the start of what became the Islamic Revolution. Shiite clerics eliminated other anti-Shah factions, establishing a new theocratic government that executed thousands after the revolution and remains one of the world’s leading executioners to this day.

After his father’s death, a royal court in exile announced that Reza Pahlavi assumed the role of shah on October 31, 1980, his 20th birthday.

“I can understand and sympathize with your suffering and inner torment,” Pahlavi said at the time, addressing Iranians in a speech. “I have shed the tears that you must hide. Yet, I am sure, there is light beyond the darkness. Deep in your heart, you can be sure that this nightmare, like others in our history, will pass.”

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But what followed was nearly five decades of exile.

Pahlavi attempted to gain influence abroad. In 1986, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had provided the prince’s allies with “a miniaturized television transmitter for a clandestine 11-minute broadcast” in Iran by Pahlavi who pirated the signal of two stations in the Islamic Republic.

“I will return and together we will pave the way for the happiness and prosperity of the nation through freedom,” Pahlavi was quoted as saying on the show.

This did not happen. Pahlavi lived largely abroad in the United States, in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while her mother, Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, lived in Paris.

Circles of hardline Iranian monarchists in exile have long touted the dream of a return to power of the Pahlavi dynasty. But Pahlavi was prevented from gaining popularity by a number of factors: bitter memories of his father’s reign; the perception that he and his family are disconnected from their home country; and the repression in Iran which aims to silence any feeling of opposition.

At the same time, younger Iranian generations born decades after the end of the Shah’s rule grew up in a different experience; social restrictions and brutal repression by the Islamic Republic and economic turmoil due to international sanctions, corruption and mismanagement.

Pahlavi has sought to make his voice heard through videos on social media, and Farsi-language news channels such as Iran International have highlighted his calls for protests. The channel also broadcast QR codes that led to information for members of the Iranian security forces wishing to cooperate with him.

Mahmood Enayat, chief executive of Volant Media, which owns Iran International, said the channel aired the ad by Pahlavi and others “on a voluntary basis” as part of “our mission to support Iranian civil society.”

In interviews in recent years, Pahlavi has floated the idea of ​​a constitutional monarchy, perhaps with an elected rather than hereditary ruler. But he also said it was up to the Iranians to choose.

“This regime is simply unreformable because its nature, its DNA, is such that it cannot,” Pahlavi told The Associated Press in 2017. “People have given up on the idea of ​​reform and think there has to be fundamental change. Now the big question is how that change can happen.”

He has also been criticized for his support of Israel, particularly after the June War.

“My goal right now is to liberate Iran, and I will find any way possible, without compromising national interests and independence, with anyone who is willing to give us a helping hand, whether it is the United States, the Saudis, the Israelis or whoever,” he said in 2017.