Sardar Pashaei has had a difficult few months. Both his parents passed away. His brother Saman was arrested and imprisoned — arrested and imprisoned by the Iranian regime in order to punish Sardar for his dissidence. Sardar Pashaei is indeed a dissident. And he is my latest guest on Q&A, here.
He was born in Saqqez, Iran, in September 1979 — in other words, several months after the victory of the Islamist revolution. His father, Tofigh Pashaei, owned a restaurant, and he was also a dissident. “I remember when I was five years old,” Sardar tells me. “Members of the Revolutionary Guard came to our house at 2 in the morning and arrested my dad. I have never forgotten that scene.”
Tofigh Pashaei was frequently imprisoned or detained. He was lucky, says Sardar: “Most of his friends got executed.” He also says, “My father was not really educated, but he taught us a great lesson in our lives: to fight for freedom, and for our dignity, and never to give in to dictators.”
Sardar has three brothers and three sisters. Saman is in prison, as you know. Another brother, a former political prisoner, is in Germany. Another is in London. Their sisters are in Iran.
All four boys were trained in wrestling. Why? “My father’s dream was to be an athlete,” says Sardar, “but he had a tough time in his life.” Tofigh had a friend who was a fellow political activist and a wrestler. That friend was killed. Tofigh always thought that, if he ever had sons, they would learn to wrestle.
Saman finished third at the World Junior Wrestling Championship in 1996. He earned a Ph.D. in sports physiology. At the time of his arrest, he was teaching at a university in Saqqez.
As for Sardar, he was World Junior Champion in 1998. (Also Asian Junior Champion.) In the natural course of things, he would have gone on to compete in the Olympic Games. They were held in Sydney in 2000. But the Iranian authorities forbade their champion to compete — because he was from a dissident family.
For seven years, he could not compete anywhere. It was hard to find a job. The authorities simply stymied him. But in 2007, things changed, for a while — for three years. Sardar Pashaei was coach of the national junior team. They won the Asian championship three years in a row. They came in second in the world championship. They would have come in first — but they lost ten points because the regime refused to allow a wrestler to compete against an Israeli.
Sardar hates the regime’s hatred of Israel.
In Iran, Sardar explains in our podcast, the sports world is controlled by the Revolutionary Guard — designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. The current head of the Iranian Olympic committee is a high-ranking member of the Guard, and a former bodyguard to Ayatollah Khamenei.
The regime made it impossible for Sardar to continue coaching. In 2009, with his wife, he walked into the U.S. embassy in Turkey. He is today a grateful citizen of the United States.
He arrived without speaking a word of English. Today, he is an articulate spokesman for human rights in Iran.
One of his specific causes is this: He thinks Iran ought to be banned from international athletic competition. The Islamist regime is very good at banning people — athletes and others. The Revolutionary Guard’s teams ought to be banned as well. There ought to be a consequence for the regime’s depravity.
Young people in Iran are fed up, says Sardar. You can see it in the streets. They don’t want to obey Islamist ideology. They want the kind of life that other people enjoy around the world. They are ready — more than ready — for change.
Yet “we still don’t have a solution for empty hands versus bullets,” says Sardar. “This is where we struggle. Otherwise, the people are brave.”
In the last few months, 20,000 people have been arrested and six executed. Still, people take to the streets to protest.
“They don’t want to reform this regime,” says Sardar. “They know it’s not reformable. They want to change it.” They want, in short, democracy.
And what does that mean? Sardar says,
We want freedom. We want to take our dignity back. We picture a country that is a land of tourism, not terrorism. A country that does not burn the American or Israeli flag. A government that is not a threat to its neighbors or to the world. A place of opportunity. A country where women can choose what to wear. Where there are free elections, as in the United States. Where power belongs to the people, not dictators.
One thing that irks Sardar Pashaei and other Iranians is that “President” Ebrahim Raisi is called just that: “president.” That ought to be a democratic designation, says Sardar. Raisi is a flat terrorist and murderer. Long has been.
I am reminded of Cubans who hated to hear about “President” Fidel Castro. And Russians who hate to hear “President Putin.”
Toward the end of our podcast, I ask Sardar what he would like, ideally, from the U.S. government. He says he would like our government to talk to ordinary Iranians, and not just rulers. He also cites a common expression of the protesters. They say to America and the rest of the democratic West, “We don’t want you to save us, but we want you to stop saving the Islamic regime.”
Sardar Pashaei is a remarkable, talented, resilient man, who has lived a turbulent life. Again, for our Q&A, go here.