Sally Neighbour
From: The Australian, May 24, 2010

KAVEH Akbari serves dainty shortbreads with scented black tea in cut crystal glasses in his mother’s living room in Sydney’s Brighton-Le-Sands. The neat suburban setting is a surreal backdrop for the story that unfolds as he describes his early life in Iran.
Akbari was born in Tehran’s Evin prison, one of the most infamous jails in the world, and spent the first nine months of his life there. His mother, pregnant when she was arrested, was serving seven years for opposing the government. His father, a well-known dissident, was also in jail, serving 12 years.
Akbari was about seven when hiH.Es parents were released from prison under a brief amnesty for political prisoners and came home, scarred from their incarceration.
The brutal punishments endured by Evin’s inmates are well documented; rape, torture and beating are routine according to Amnesty International and other human rights groups.
After their release, Akbari’s parents remained vehemently opposed to the tyrannical theocracy in Tehran.
’My family was always very heavily involved in politics,’ Akbari recounts. ’My parents were from a communist-socialist background, big thinkers, intellectuals.
’From when I was about nine years old I used to go to meetings with all these men, talking about politics and justice and freedom,’ he says. And because I was born in Evin, I was seen as this symbol of struggle.’
Facing arrest again in the early 1990s, the family fled Iran for neighbouring Turkey where they were granted refugee status by the UN, before resettling in Australia in 1995.
Until last year, Akbari was determined to leave Iranian politics behind. ’I’ve never been involved in politics, I hated politics, look what it did to my life. I never wanted to get involved. Then came June 12.’
June 12, 2009, was the day of the stolen elections, when voters turned out en masse determined to elect a new reform-minded president.
Instead, within hours of the polling boxes closing, the much reviled incumbent President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad declared an overwhelming victory, in a result widely believed to have been rigged.
The event threw Iran into turmoil, as millions took to the streets calling for change, and a new democracy movement flourished in Iranian exile communities across the world, including in Australia.
Akbari is now 28 years old, a social studies student at the University of NSW. Last June, he established the the Free Iran Project, one of many such groups to spring up in Australia’s Iranian community, to campaign for political reform in his homeland. It’s a movement that has caught the attention of the Iranian regime and its representatives in Canberra.
Iranian students and dissidents complain of being filmed and photographed at protests by embassy staff, and claim Tehran has sent scholarship students as spies to keep tabs on them in Australia and report their activities back to the government.
’We fled Iran because of a dictator-led theocracy where our objections to that suppressive government were met with batons, bullets, imprisonment and torture,’ Akbari says.
’We came here to live in peace with democracy. [But] even here they try to alter and condition our freedom through fear and intimidation tactics, by invading our privacy, by pressuring our families back in Iran . . This is not OK, they shouldn’t be allowed to do this.’
Iranian-Australians say harassment of those who criticise the Tehran government while in Australia has been occurring for years.
Akbari says after his mother wrote an essay for her university course recounting her treatment in Evin prison and her escape from Iran she began receiving threats and ominous warnings to ’stop spreading those lies’.
Iranians who oppose the regime can face dire punishment in their homeland, even if they now hold Australian citizenship.
Twice in the past three months, Iranian-Australians travelling home to visit their families have been detained and interrogated in Tehran about their activities in Australia.
They were shown photographs of themselves attending pro-democracy rallies in Australia and accused of being mohareb, which means fighters against God, a charge which can carry the death penalty.
Tehran recently announced plans to set up a new court to try Iranians living abroad.
In another case, an Australian-Iranian woman who returned home during last year’s uprising, was detained at Tehran airport for being inappropriately attired and forced to appear before an Islamic revolutionary court.
Twenty-eight-year-old Farideh, an Australian citizen who is studying psychology at Macquarie University, asks that her real name not be used for fear of reprisals.
She came to Australia with her family as a refugee in the 1990s, her father having been a political activist with the People’s Mujahidin, an Islamic socialist organisation dedicated to overthrowing the theocracy and replacing it with a secular, democratic government.
’My dad was the main problem, and my uncles, they can’t go back, they would go straight to prison,’ Farideh says.
When the democratic uprising began ahead of last year’s elections, Farideh was eager to return to her homeland to join it.
But on arrival at Tehran airport she was detained and told she was inappropriately dressed, because her skirt was just above her knees.
She was forced to appear before a revolutionary court for failing to wear proper Islamic attire. ’I was shaking; I was shocked. I was so scared, I was shaking the whole time,’ she remembers.
Thankfully, she was released unpunished and returned to Australia. It annoys her that many people here assume that because she is Iranian she supports the Tehran regime.
’People have to realise the Iranian people are not the government. We hate our government,’ she says. ’Most Iranians are out [of Iran] because we hate our government.
When people say where are you from, and I say Iran, they say oh, you’re a terrorist. I’m not. If I was a terrorist, I wouldn’t be here.’
Since last year’s uprising, the Iranian community in Australia has grown with the arrival of new exiles.
Among them is H.E, a 29-year-old electrical engineer who fled for his life after being branded by the Iranian regime as one of the instigators of the anti-government movement.
H.E was among the millions who took to the streets of Tehran ahead of last year’s elections, jubilant that the so-called green movement seemed on the verge of electoral success.
Polls were showing that the challenger, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, was leading strongly in the final days of the campaign, on a wave of support for his promise to reverse Ahmedinejad’s most hardline policies.
’We were very excited because we didn’t have the opportunity to go on the streets and protest before,’ says H.E.
’We didn’t have the freedom to choose our dress, to choose our hairstyle. We wanted change, people really wanted change.
’It was an opportunity after 31 years to come out into the streets and say we don’t want you. All the people on the streets were green [so] we were very happy, we knew we would win the election.’
H.E says he wasn’t particularly a Moussavi supporter. ’I just didn’t want Ahmedinejad elected again. I didn’t care who [was elected].’
But their jubilation turned to fury on election night when, after only a few hours of vote-counting, the regime declared that Ahmedinejad had won 62.6 per cent of the vote, compared with just under 34 per cent for Moussavi.
’It was a big lie,’ says H.E. ’They said Ahmedinejad had won with almost 10 million votes more than Moussavi. But how could they count 40 million votes by hand and declare the results within six to nine hours?’
Moussavi called the result an ’amazing incident of lies, hypocrisy and fraud’, citing widespread irregularities and missing votes.
The next day his supporters flooded the streets, chanting ’Death to the coup d’etat!’ and ’Death to the dictator!’.
H.E joined a crowd surging toward the Interior Ministry where the votes had been counted. He says ’we weren’t going to protest, we just went there because we were very angry’.
’Government troops and Revolutionary Guards set up road blocks, beat people with batons and fired teargas. The crowd set fire to buses and threw rocks back at the security forces.’
On June 13, the day after the election, H.E was among a crowd of protesters photographed by a New York Times photographer, running with rocks in their hands. The shot was published across the world the next day. At first H.E was unconcerned. ’I thought to myself there are many pictures, so many pictures, there’s no need to worry.’
But shortly afterwards the photograph was published on the official website of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
H.E was denounced as number 33 of 74 supposed leaders of the protest and ’agents of Western countries’ wanted by the government. Iranians were instructed to please identify the rioters whose pictures were shown.
H.E knew the ramifications of this were grave; there are still people in prison for taking part in the last anti-regime protests in Iran 11 years ago in 1999, and 112 people are known to have been executed in the eight weeks between last year’s presidential elections and the inauguration of Ahmedinejad for a second term. So H.E decided to get out of Iran, escaping across the border into Turkey, where he eventually secured a student visa for Australia to take a postgraduate degree in electrical engineering at the University of NSW.
He arrived in Sydney in January and recently applied for refugee status. His lawyer has told him he has a very strong case. He has also joined the Free Iran Project.
’There are many people suffering in my country,’ says H.E. ’Many people are tortured and raped in prison. The country is ready for explosion.’
Pro-democracy activists in Iran are preparing for a new wave of protests in June to mark the anniversary of the stolen elections. Support groups around the world including in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Brisbane will take to the streets to lend their backing and broadcast their vehement Opposition to a government they believe has betrayed its people.
’We want to raise awareness within the Australian community, we want to draw a clear line between the [Iranian] government and the people,’ says Akbari.
’The people of Iran are not represented by the government. We want to expose them. There is so much denial of human rights, we want to expose that and try to prevent it.’
So much for leaving Iranian politics behind. Akbari shrugs. ’I never wanted to get involved. And here I am.’