By Oakland Local Contributor Barbara Grady
SFGate.com in Oakland Blog, June 30, 2010

Hamid Azimi has lived in this country for 31 years – much longer than the 18 years he lived in his native Iran.

Yet every day his thoughts and many of his deeds are for his homeland. And all of his vacations, he said, have been used to help the cause of democracy in Iran or to seek protection for relatives who are stuck in a dissident camp.

This week, Azimi, of Albany, is in Paris along with several hundred other Bay Area Iranian-Americans to attend the political convention of the National Council of Resistance of Iran – an exiled political party with tens of thousands of adherents.

While many Bay Area Iranian Americans attend this convention every June, Azimi and others said that this year the political gathering drew more people – they estimate 100,000 although French police estimated 30,000 – because the pro-democracy activity in Iran during the past year has lifted hopes among exiles.

“This year is more important because we are celebrating last year’s uprising” said Berkeley resident Mojgan before she too traveled to Paris for the convention. She did not want her last name published for fear of reprisals inside Iran against her relatives.

“Change has to come from within the country,” Azimi said, adding that this year change seems possible. But he said the convention of exiles is important because Iranians need to know whether the rest of the world supports them.

Like thousands of other Iranian Americans, Azimi and Mojgan left Iran just before the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah and brought in the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Each came here to pursue college, but it turned out their timing was prescient.

“I had just finished school and my father, may he rest in peace, told me to leave the country for my college education because things were going to change here,” Azimi said.

So he applied to and was accepted at the University of Texas in Austin and was a college student while the revolution took place that changed the government, and life, in Iran.

“Yes, I’ve spent more years here than there,” he said, but he thinks about his homeland every day.

“I came in 1978. I came to study and go back home,’ Mojgan said. ’I came to the Central Valley. We had a feeling there would be big change, but on the other hand, I had planned to go back.”
It has been 32 years and she has not been back. “I cannot go back,” she said. So she stays in touch with family members and goes to conventions of the exiled community.

Both Azimi and Mojgan are participants in the Iranian-American Community of Northern Calfornia. Azimi is its communications director.
The National Council of Resistance was the organization that alerted the Western world to the possibility that Iran was enriching uranium and building up its nuclear capabilities. However, it has not won the sympathy of the U.S. government, even though European nations recognize it.

Most recently, exiled members of this party have been trying to urge the U.S. government to protect some 3,000 people who are in a dissident camp in Iraq.-
The U.S. military had protected the camp, but over the past year, security operations are slowly being handed over to the Iranian government. The dissidents, who are aligned with Sunnis in Iraq, fear for their safety in the largely Shiite Iraqi government.