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By ELAINE GANLEY and BRIAN MURPHY, Associated Press Elaine Ganley And Brian Murphy, Associated Press – 2 hrs 32 mins ago
PARIS – The apparent suicide of the former shah of Iran's youngest son has shocked and saddened Iranian emigres, many of whom were forced into exile by the Islamic Revolution and hoped their country's monarchy could one day be restored.
The death of 44-year-old Alireza Pahlavi of a gunshot wound at his home in Boston brought home the personal tragedies of many who fled Iran more than three decades ago, and symbolized another lost link to the era of the Western-backed dynasty's Peacock Throne.
In Iran, the official Islamic Republic News Agency carried a brief story that was the most-viewed early Wednesday. The website of the state-run Press TV released a factual account of the death under the headline: "Son of ex-dictator of Iran kills himself."
The official website of older brother Reza Pahlavi, now an exiled opposition figure, announced the death, saying Alireza Pahlavi took his own life Tuesday, succumbing to his sorrows. He was the second of the four children of the late Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi and former Empress Farah Pahlavi to die in exile. A sister was found dead of a drug overdose a decade ago.
"This represents the story of millions of Iranians who left their country and live with a sense of solitude everywhere in the world ... often treated like foreigners," Ramin Shams Molkara, a distant family member, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
He said this was particularly true of the first generation of exiles who left Iran as the clerical regime swept to power in 1979 and who still live with a "feeling of abandonment."
Shams Molkara, who lives in Paris, noted that Alireza Pahlavi was a low-profile member of the Pahlavi family and the only member living in Boston.
For years, Alireza Pahlavi had immersed himself in academia, and there was no apparent political link to the death.
Websites and social media outlets — which have become the lifeline for Iran's opposition movements — also became the main forums for the reaction to the death.
Postings on Reza Pahlavi's website constituted a study in the frustrations of Iranian emigres. Messages offered condolences, but many veered into rage that the Islamic theocracy ruling Iran remains strongly in control and how the emigres' dreams of returning to Iran are still distant.
"Where is God's justice? Hell is too nice of a place for those who took our country and caused this much suffering," said one posting.
Many others expressed particular concern for the dethroned empress, Alireza's mother.
The shah died of cancer in Egypt a year after fleeing Iran shortly before the defeat of his remaining forces in 1979. The new Islamic state quickly became an arch foe of the United States after militants — angered over American aid to the shah — stormed the U.S. Embassy and held 52 hostages for 444 days.
The shah's family sought haven in exile with many members settling in the United States.
Reza Pahlavi, the older brother, divides his time between raising a family outside Washington and trying to reburnish the Pahlavi dynasty image for a dreamed-of return to Iran.
"It's one more victim," said Ali Tavassoli, a renowned Iranian chef whose clients include the ex-empress, Farah. He said his thoughts go to the ex-empress, whose loss of two children is a personal tragedy that cuts across political divides within the fractious Iranian exile community.
Alireza, the monarch's youngest son, was born in Tehran, then attended schools in New York, Cairo and western Massachusetts before going on to study music at an undergraduate at Princeton University, ancient Iranian studies as a graduate student at Columbia University and postgraduate work at Harvard University.
But he struggled with depression following the death of his sister Leila in 2001, who was found in a London hotel room at age 31 after overdosing on barbiturates.
"Once again, we are joined with mothers, father and relatives of so many victims of these dark times for our country," Reza Pahlavi wrote on his website, announcing his brother's death.
Nazie Eftekhari, who works in Reza Pahlavi's office in Washington and is a close family friend, said Pahlavi's depression "grew over time — his departure from Iran, living in exile, the death of his father and then his sister to whom he was very close."
"The deaths were a huge blow to him," she said.
In Boston, police said they found a man dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday at a home in the city's South End neighborhood.
Police would not confirm the man's identity, but a law enforcement official who was not authorized to release the man's identity and asked for anonymity confirmed that the man was Alireza Pahlavi.
A police officer was seen late Tuesday afternoon going in and out of Pahlavi's Boston apartment and speaking with family representatives, who would not talk to reporters.
A neighbor, Dan Phillips, 42, said he did not know Pahlavi personally but recognized his picture and described him as someone who was very social and "who always dressed very dapper."
"I would always see him walking around here and he used to wear blue jeans and a blazer," Phillips said.
Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, said in a statement that "the Iranian-American community was deeply saddened by the news of this tragedy.
"There are many divisions in the community, but on a day like this, I think we are all united in our sympathy with the Pahlavi family for their tragic and painful loss," Parsi said.
Reza Pahlavi has spoken out in opposition to Iran's clerical regime. But he is not thought to carry real influence among Iran's current opposition leaders, such as Mir Hussein Mousavi, who have challenged the ruling system after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June 2009.
The protests and clashes after the vote marked the worst internal unrest in Iran since the Islamic Revolution.
Pahlavi will head to Boston on Wednesday, Eftekhari said, and she expected his mother, the former empress Farah Pahlavi, who's in Paris, to go as well.
Eftekhari said no funeral arrangements have yet been made.
___
Brian Murphy reported from Dubai. Denise Lavoie, Bob Salsberg and Russell Contreras in Boston; Scheherezade Faramarzi in Beirut, and Matthew Barakat in McLean, Va., contributed to this report.
===============
Why the Pahlavi Dynasty Still Haunts Iranians
By Azadeh Moaveni Thursday, Jan. 06, 2011
The family of the Shah of Iran in 1978, including Alireza Pahlavi, second from left
When the Pahlavi monarchy was approaching its final days in power in Iran, I was playing with Cabbage Patch Kids dolls in Cupertino, Calif., and thought that my friends' parents who worked for Apple ran an orchard. The diaspora community of Iranians around me talked politics incessantly, and I remember hearing vastly varied things about the Shah of Iran, who lost power in the 1979 revolution. Some of my relatives credited him with great feats, like transforming Tehran into a modern city; one elderly great-aunt kept a portrait of him and his wife, the Empress Farah, on her bedside table. Others called him a torturer, and avoided the Iranian man at the neighborhood pool with the Shah's face tattooed on his shoulder. He was a former agent of the SAVAK, the Shah's dreaded secret service, and he seemed to inspire a shadow of terror even in the California sunshine.
I grew up to study political science and work in Iran as a reporter, and managed to develop an adult understanding of the Pahlavi family's role in Iranian history. But that mature knowledge coexists with all the associations I absorbed as a child. Like so many Iranians, I find my feelings toward the Pahlavis a complex jumble of personal dreams and resentments, and the intensity of my emotions reminds me that they have as much to do with my past, my family and my relationship to history as the royal family itself.
(See pictures of the rise and fall of the Shah of Iran.)
The tragic suicide of Alireza Pahlavi, the Shah's youngest son, this week in Boston has stoked great feeling among Iranians everywhere. When I first heard the news, I felt an enormous sadness for Farah, who has endured more piercing losses in the course of a lifetime than most people could bear. The death of her by-then-exiled husband from cancer, the 2001 suicide of her daughter Leila and now the death of her youngest son. True, I had been feeling rather disappointed in Farah until that moment. She was all over the film Valentino: The Last Emperor, which I'd recently seen, and I couldn't help but wish that instead of just mingling with the fashion glitterati of Europe, she would engage in thoughtful charity and be terribly glamorous — like Queen Rania of Jordan.
(See how Iran reacted to the suicide of Alireza Pahlavi.)
I later wondered why I felt so strongly about how Farah, 72, occupied herself in her elderly Parisian exile. Did it matter much to anyone, let alone Iran? I realized that part of why I cared so much was that she remained the lone figure in the Iranian First Lady department of my mind. We know next to nothing about the wives of the mullahs. Mrs. Khatami, Mrs. Ahmadinejad — who knows what they even look like, let alone how they spend their time and what they contribute to Iran? The clerical government of Iran denies Iranians a First Family to grow up with — to admire, to envy, to criticize. We are left to feel our place acutely as outsiders to the clannish, insular fiefdom of the ruling mullahs, undeserving as citizens of even knowing their wives and children.
Perhaps that is why I continue to hold Farah and her family to such high standards. They continue to be the First Family of my imagination, a reflection of my fierce wish to be a part of what happens to Iran, to feel included in a country that no longer has a place for people like me. My expectations of them are oversize, and my anger toward them is studded with grievances against the Islamic Republic, as though the family members are to blame for the three decades of often brutal misrule that followed them.
Iranians these days cannot vent their political opinions in newspapers or on television, so they use the Internet as a forum to say all the things they so urgently need to express about their plight. Reading the posts of young Iranians on Facebook and on the BBC Persian service's website after the news of the suicide came out, I was struck by how so many young people who weren't even born during the Pahlavi era were roused by Alireza's death. Many expressed their sympathy in messages that were remarkable for their emotional and political maturity; they reminded me that living under dictatorship can make young people as wise as 40-year-olds in first-world democracies.
Many were incensed that anyone might feel sympathy for a Pahlavi. These are the angry Iranians who have given up on the mullahs entirely, for the prospect of meaningful, peaceful change seems a chimerical notion(Given to unrealistic fantasies; fanciful.
), inconceivable for their generation. Their despair — over lives disfigured by economic blight, in which simple dreams like finding a job or getting married seem permanently out of reach — is so easily channeled into fury with the Pahlavis. It is as though they want to scream at them with the bitterness of children accusing a parent, "You let us down, you fumbled(To touch or handle nervously or idly:), it is all your fault." It is almost a familial dysfunction: so many Iranians rushing like angry relatives at the chance to lay their anger at Iran's fate at the feet of the Pahlavis, whose failure turned Iran over to the mullahs. Decades after the fall of the Shah, the clan remains a politically acceptable target for so many painful feelings.
The family remains of great emotional relevance to Iranians. The Pahlavis themselves know that they stand no chance of being reinserted into Iran politically, though they must more than suspect that their moments of personal grief will be reflected in monumental ways on the larger stage of the Iranian political imagination. Indeed, the initial statement by older brother Reza on his website starkly attributed Alireza's suicide to the younger man's despair over Iran — an all-too-blatant political stance that only opened the family up to criticism. Certainly, the shattering fall of his father and the dislocation of exile contributed to Alireza's depression and pain. But just as surely, any suicide in a depressed person arises when such anguish combines with intimate factors from that individual's genealogy, biochemistry and medical history.
But the family changed tack(A course of action meant to minimize opposition to the attainment of a goal.
). On Wednesday afternoon, I heard Reza speaking bravely and honestly about his brother's battle with depression in television interviews. I felt an immense relief. His comments were nuanced(A subtle or slight degree of difference, as in meaning, feeling, or tone; a gradation.
) and candid(Free from prejudice; impartial.
). They broke the Iranian cultural taboo against acknowledging mental illness, and underscored a point most Iranians everywhere can relate to: families suffer when they are torn apart. Thirty years after the Shah's fall, the Pahlavis are no longer anyone's enemy, and in their grief lies an opportunity to reach out across all those lines that divide.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2041031,00.html#ixzz1ALUkCtnp
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Iran Reacts to Suicide of the Shah's SonBy Azadeh Moaveni Wednesday, Jan. 05, 2011
Alireza Pahlavi
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The youngest son of the late Shah of Iran, Alireza Pahlavi, committed suicide in Boston on Tuesday, the latest tragedy to afflict the exiled Persian royal family. The 44-year-old Pahlavi's death darkens his family's complex legacy at an awkward moment, as the clan is seeking to rekindle its ties with Iranians and identify itself with the country's democratic opposition movement.
Since 1979, when the Islamic revolution ousted his father from power, Pahlavi had lived a quiet life in exile, one very much out of the public eye. Cameras rarely pursued him, and most Iranians, both in the country and among the diaspora, rarely saw a photograph of him before his death. Pahlavi's older brother Reza, first in line to the throne, carried the family mantle from a base in suburban Washington, D.C., maintaining a tepid but enduring campaign to rescue Iran from its clerical government. (See TIME's 10 Questions for Reza Pahlavi.)
Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and the author of a new book on the Shah, noted a family record of depressive behavior. "Sadly," Milani wrote in an e-mail, "the Shah did have a propensity(An innate inclination; a tendency.) for depression. In nearly every major profile of him prepared by the CIA, or British and American embassies, there is some allusion to this brooding, melancholy tendency. One report calls him 'Hamlet-like.' The other side of this tendency was the Shah's love of speed, fast cars, and flying. The sad young man [who] killed himself apparently shared both qualities."
However, the family put the suicide in national terms in a message on Reza Pahlavi's website, noting that Alireza was "deeply disturbed by all the ills fallen upon his beloved homeland" and "struggled for years to overcome his sorrow." The response echoed the family's reaction to the 2001 London suicide of Leila Pahlavi, the youngest of the Shah's three daughters.
Muhammad Sahimi, an Iran watcher who writes for the website Tehran Bureau, says he considered the rationale a stretch. "Most Iranians are concerned about Iran. But, almost none commit suicide because of it," he wrote in an email. "This is a just a sheer political attempt to gain sympathy and perhaps support of Iranians inside Iran."
(See pictures of the rise and fall of the Shah of Iran.)
In Iran, where people's attitudes toward the former royals ranges from housewife nostalgia for an era of grandeur to enduring hatred for the Shah's despotism, the news spread quickly on social-networking sites and fueled acrimonious debate about Iran's political future. Some critics of the former monarchy accused the Pahlavi family of exploiting Alireza's death to burnish its image by painting him as a hero-martyr who died for Iran's cause. (In 2008 the Shah's widow, Farah, was featured in a relatively sympathetic HBO documentary, The Queen and I, along with an Iranian woman who had joined the uprising against the Shah but who later went into exile from theocratic Iran.)
Other Iranians online sought to put the Pahlavi legacy in a more modern perspective, arguing that although the family members lived in luxury, they at least sought to serve Iran, whereas the mullah-princes of Iran's clerical elite make no pretense of building the nation. For many young Iranians who are straining under double-digit inflation and social repression, the notion that a gilded and privileged son of royalty would take his own life came as its own shock.
(Comment on this story.)
The swift platform for Internet debate that Pahlavi's suicide has afforded young Iranians underscores the former royals' ability to polarize Iranians politically. It also highlights how few opportunities young Iranians have had to engage in meaningful, open discussions about their country's future since the authorities' brutal crackdown on dissent last year.
Press TV, the government's English-language news network, ran a brief story on Pahlavi's death under the headline "Son of ex-dictator of Iran kills himself." While Iran's Islamic government does not view the exiled royal family as a threat, it typically seeks to keep the family out of the news. The radical clerics who came to power in the 1979 revolution were deeply hostile to monarchy, sometimes going so far as to refute the historicity of Persia's pre-Islamic kings. Alireza Pahlavi's academic work, including his study at Columbia and Harvard universities, concentrated on ancient Iran and the kingly empires that were reviled and at times denied by its modern mullahs.
Azadeh Moaveni, the author of Honeymoon in Tehran, was TIME's Tehran correspondent.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2040830,00.html#ixzz1ALfZU1qY
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