By Stanley Tromp, Vancouver
Courier, 30 Nov. 2012
_________________
It's 9 o'clock on a Saturday night
on Vancouver Persian Radio, at 93.1 FM and Internet radio redfm.ca. I am
listening to callers speaking both Farsi and English on a lively
current affairs talk show hosted by actor Ebby Mohseni,
a fierce critic of the Iranian government for three decades.
Farsi pop music with jangling sitars
starts off the show, then fades out to Mohseni's
peppy voice: "Welcome to Persian Radio! What is on your minds? The lines
are open." A wide range of issues come up, amongst them a woman's
complaint that her foreign employment credentials are not recognized here. Yet
most are still riled over an event that occurred on Sept. 7 and reverberates in
the local Iranian community today.
On that day, the Canadian government
cut diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, closing our embassy in
Tehran and expelling Iranian diplomats from Canada. Foreign Affairs Minister
John Baird declared that "Canada views the Government of Iran as the most
significant threat to global peace and security in the world today."
Ottawa said it cut diplomatic ties
because Iran gives military aid to the Syrian regime, may be trying to create a
nuclear bomb, threatens Israel's existence, incites genocide, violates human
rights, supports terrorist groups and fails to protect diplomats. Those in Iran
seeking passport services now have to contact Canada's embassy in Turkey.
Amongst the hardest hit by the diplomatic rift were Iranian international
students who had come to Ottawa to renew their travel visas, or needed to
process their exemption from military service. (There were 3,247 international
students from Iran studying at Canadian universities in 2010, and Persian clubs
remain active at UBC and SFU.)
Trying to travel has become a major ordeal, with many rules too confusing
and byzantine to explain here, including the need for "secondary
visas" because direct air travel between the two nations is forbidden.
Iran does not recognize dual citizenship; those who have Iranian passports
can still go to Iran, but others travelers need visas and had best contact the
Foreign Affairs Ministry in Tehran for more information.
A year ago
on human rights grounds, Ottawa forbade Iran to open a consulate in Vancouver, a refusal that
displeased some local Iranians for travel reasons, but
relieved others such as Mahjouri because they believed
it would have been used as a base for Iranian government spying.
During the third electoral debate
with Republican candidate Mitt Romney, U.S. president Barack Obama declared,
"As long as I'm president of the United States, Iran will not get a
nuclear weapon.
"We then organized the
strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it
is crippling their economy." Obama said this to Romney to dampen his call
on the possible need to invade Iran to quash its nuclear capabilities. Many local Iranians followed the U.S. election closely and were
much relieved when Obama won, he seeming to be the lesser of two evils.
The sanctions are hurting indeed,
but the people more than the government. Sanctions can occur in many forms. For
example, in 2012, the Harper government passed a law to restrict financial
transactions between Canada and Iran that could benefit the Iranian government. In response,
the Toronto Dominion Bank closed a number of accounts of Iranian-Canadian customers in
Canada, including Vancouver
(although most other banks have not followed suit). Some complain that students
and pensioners cannot obtain money from Iran.
THERE ARE about 70,000 Iranian residents in B.C.,
although Kambiz Sheikh-Hassani,
former Charge d'Affairs of Iran's embassy in Ottawa, overstated the
number at 120,000. They mostly live in North and West Vancouver, but also in Vancouver neighbourhoods
such as Coal Harbour (according to the Vancouver Sun's ethnic mapping
website).
Most are very well educated, and
some are gays and lesbians who came to Vancouver to escape the death penalty for their sexual
orientation in Iran. Local Iranians are generally divided
between those who are afraid to speak on the record (especially women) because
they want to return to Iran some day or have family still there, and the
longtime exiles who are keen to publicly lambaste their former government.
Some were engaged in the Green
Revolution, which was a name given to the protests after the 2009 Iranian presidential election against
the disputed victory of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in major cities in Iran
and around the world. It was also nicknamed the "Twitter Revolution"
because of the protesters' use of Twitter and other social-networking Internet
sites. (The government still tries but fails to block websites and blogs.) It
was violently suppressed, with several dozen people killed, but protests
erupted again in February 2011 at the time of the Arab Spring.
A whole panorama of Iranian culture is visible
locally, from fine restaurants (such as Zeitoon and Cazba) to newspapers, radio stations (negintv1.net and the Iranian Women's Show on Co-Op
Radio 100.5 FM). Five Iranian
films were screened at this year's Vancouver
International Film Festival, such as Kissing the Moon-Like Face, Like Someone
in Love, and A Respectable Family. The movie A Separation won the Academy Award
for Best Foreign Language Film in 2012, the first Iranian film to do so. Farsi language television shows
are popular on Ten-TV, ITC-TV and Shaw TV (such as Bey-ad-E-Iran, Goftego, Iranian's
Pop, Parvaz and Vancouver Nights), and Iranian live concerts, dances, art lectures and poetry
readings often appear in the city.
Last July, Hamid Mohammadi,
Iran's cultural affairs counselor at the Iranian embassy
in Ottawa, gave an interview in Farsi to an Iran-based website directed at Iranian expatriates in Canada.
He described them as having
"characteristics" that "set them apart" from other
immigrants, and urged all Iranian-Canadians
to aspire to "occupy high-level key positions" and "resist being
melted into the dominant Canadian culture."
But as with so much advice from the Iranian government, these
entreaties seem to have been mainly ignored. For example, compared to Chinese
and Indo-Canadians, few Iranians
have run for election here. Speaking to the Courier, Kei Esmaeilpour,
the Vancouver-based
president of the Civic Association of Iranian Canadians, posited two reasons: "Iranians have a much shorter
history in Canada, and some might not realize that it's safe to get involved in
politics here, unlike in Iran."
That might change. He said his group
started two years ago to encourage more local Iranians
to become involved in the Canadian political process, and run for office.
I asked several locals: What are the myths that
many Canadians harbour about Iran? They replied that
one is in not seeing the diversity, and confusing "Persia" with
"Iran." Persia is only one element of the nation, which also consists
of many other groups such as Turkish and Kurdish Iranians. A second error is not realizing that
although all females must wear the head scarf in public (but need not wear the
veil), they can remove it in private. Third, most Iranian people are not anti-Semitic.
Will the Iranian people ever be free of ayatollahs? Opinions
vary starkly.
"I have absolutely no hope in
Green or any other kind of peaceful revolution," said Mahjouri.
"They will not go out in a
peaceful way. The only solution is for the people inside Iran to rise up.
Outside intervention won't work because the Iranian government would rally all the people together
against an external invader."
But Ebrahimi disagrees: "I
think there is much hope for the future."
Back at Ebby Mohseni's
Saturday night radio talk show, one man calls in to complain the show is
rambling too much: "Some people talked for a half hour. You should be more
in control!"
"I cannot control you, so how
can I control others?" Mohseni replies.
"You have to be more open to critics, otherwise you will be just like
mullahs in Iran!" (Mullah is a derogatory term for a petty Islamic cleric,
used in Iran against an ayatollah to ridicule his religious authority.)
Caller: "I am mullah, you are
mullah, we are all mullah! We are doing this to ourselves!"
Mohseni: "It is not us, my friend, it is you! What is your
topic?"
The man objects to the embassy closures. "What the Canadian government did was
totally irresponsible, to close all the negotiation channels with the enemy.
It's bringing hardship to innocent Iranians
living here. They want to go to Iran to visit their parents, and sometimes our
parents and grandparents in Iran want to come here. Now they have to wait for
six months and send their documents to Turkey. But I am still against the Iranian regime. I escaped
political persecutions."
In the end, though, a common theme
persisted amongst the callers: that the peoples of both countries could get
along fine if their governments would just step out of the way.
"We care about politics because
it is our destiny," said one older woman. "Young and old folks'
thinking is almost the same, but their behaviour is
different. I love both countries, and I hope someday we don't have to talk
about these things."
The show eventually fades back to
Farsi pop music.
"If he ever goes to Iran, he
will be in trouble," Mohseni later muses to me
about the last male caller. "But we are a people raised to take
risks."
-------------------------------