LOS ANGELES, June 10 (Reuters) – Instead of pride, many Iranian-Americans feel shame about the Iran team’s participation in the World Cup and are demanding that FIFA boots the country out of the competition, protesters said on Wednesday.
The team’s presence is outraging many who see the Iranian government as using the competition as a way to sportswash its killing tens of thousands of dissidents since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, with many thousands killed as recently as during widespread protests in January. Those deaths have included hundreds of athletes, protesters said. “Bringing them here and having them play basically presents a calm face to the world, when in fact back home there is no calmness, there’s only execution and suffering that the regime has brought,” said 21-year-old American-born Ryan Salami, whose parents both fled Iran, in an interview at a protest in front of L.A. City Hall.
Many protesters backed the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s call to dump Iran out of the tournament. Photographs of dozens of Iranian athletes who died in government custody were spread in an impromptu open-air gallery in front of Los Angeles City Hall. Speakers including a number of former Iran national team players mourned athletes who they say died after crossing the government and being taken into custody. “This is the ayatollahs’ team,” said Asghar Adibi, who was a member of the Iran national team in 1970, to the crowd. He said the team was controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and it was wrong to allow an organisation “that kills people, tortures people, to have a team representing them”.
Protesters had a variety of views about whether the Iran players themselves should be seen as part of the regime. Salami said he sympathised with players who might just be athletes needing to stay silent and obedient in order to avoid the fate of previous players who have pushed back.
Another told Reuters that the IRGC would only allow loyal followers onto the team because she thinks they wouldn’t want any risk of defections, so they should be seen as little better than collaborators.
PLAYERS USED LIKE TOOLS
Another said the players were being used like tools to help the Iranian government look good on the world stage and that the players deserved little pity.
“They are all attached to the regime in some way,” said Peymaneh Shafi, who said she became an opponent of the Iranian government after gunmen shot her teacher in front of her. “These are the real athletes,” she said, pointing to the photographs of athletes persecuted by the Iranian government.
After the rally, which included a number of speeches and calls for regime change in Tehran, protesters marched in the park beside city hall.
FIFA and Iran’s national team did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The Iranian team has said that it will stop playing if banned flags or critical slogans appear in matches. Will Iranian-Americans try to sneak the pre-revolution lion-and-sun Iranian flag into the SoFi stadium and unfurl it when the Iran team plays?
“100%,” said Nasrin Saifi, who arrived in the U.S. one year before the Iranian revolution, when she was 17. In 1998 she snuck in a T-shirt with the banned flag image when the U.S. played Iran in Lyon, France, during the World Cup.
She has a ticket for Iran’s first match, on Monday, in Los Angeles, but is not sure if she will go. (Reporting by Ed White, editing by Ed Osmond)