Interview with Mike Raffi Interviewers: Isaac Gray, Ben Sachrison and Connor Smith Date of interview: January

19, 2013 1st file (3:35 min) Connor: How about you start by stating your name for the camera and your life in Iran as you remember it? Mike: My name is Mike Raffi, and I was born February 1969 so when the revolution took place in 1979 I was just 10 years old. So what I remember well, I was in elementary school and in the capital, Tehran and we were, our family was upper middle class and thats pretty much how I recall the socio-economic scene there. You definitely had the poor, then you had the upper middle class, and then very wealthy. Theres not really a presence of the middle class in Iran under the Shah. So my elementary school, our first five years, it was very, very much back then that the country was very Westernized, under the Shah and prior to the Shah, his dad. And we had close ties with Britain, with US, with Israel, and when you guys interview most Persians theyll tell you that, you know, there wasnt this contempt and hatred for Israel, and there wasnt this passion for Arabs and Palestinians, it wasnt anything. We didnt care for them -- we just never thought that that was part of our culture. If you study Persian history, thats really a big thing. There are just the Persians, and then there are the Arabs. Persians, for some, theres the pride and their culture that was something that they felt that separated them from their neighboring countries and societies and cultures. So the second language in elementary school was English. Over here, I think, youll agree that here Spanish is a big part of what we learn; its English and Spanish. And as you go into middle school and higher, you get French and other languages, but back in Iran, there was no place for Arabic. So even though Quran was written in Arabic and the majority of the population in Iran is Muslim and they, uh , {dog comes in; makes comments about not playing and maybe removing dog} , we had English as a second language, everything was Westernized and we had all the TV shows that were being {more dog; paused; end clip #1} 2nd file Connor: Go Mike: So, I was 4th or 5th grade; lets see I would have been 10 years old and 78 and 79 when the uprising was going on and there was so much uncertainty, what I remember most about that time, um, most people regardless of their economic class embraced the change, because the message that was out there was that under the Shah, under a dictatorship, there was a lot of, as much as a person felt that they had all the freedoms, music, cultural, TV, everything being Westernized, um clothing, styles, I mean all of that was very much Westernized, as much as the average person felt they had all the freedoms when it came to political views, when it came to cultural statuses, there was always Big Brother watching. (1:00) There was plenty of stories about political opposition groups being tortured, being incarcerated and basically oppressed so that the Shah would still come across as being the peoples choice of leadership and government, ok? So when this movement started, it started by the youth, it wasnt you know, it started by the youth, by the educated (dog

barking), by the intellects, and it mushroomed into this massive uprising but the leaders of it were the university kids. They were the ones very similar to what happened with Egypt a couple of years ago, it was the students that did it. 2:00 Because they all felt like, you know, we want more, we want more freedoms; we want more for our country. And they felt like the injustice, there was really no room for the middle class and thats typically what happens in that region of the world and frankly anywhere in the world. If you look at big governments even in the UK, youre going to see most of uprisings were either against taxation or people saying I want a better life and youre in my way to get a better life. So, what I remember the most was being in school and just out of nowhere hearing about demonstration, a pocket of people that would show up and demonstrate against the Shah. Police would show up, school would go to lockdown to protect the kids and you would see armed guards. And then the biggest, exciting thing for us as kids, cause we were 9, fourth or fifth grade, was to hear a gunshot here and there, you know that echoing sound of a bullet. We were kids, I mean, we were sheltered. The parents would get worried, oh my God, we have to go get our kids from the school and bring them home from the school. So then at home what was on the news was very, very censored. They would show like little pockets, oh, we had an uprising here and these people, they are not the average person and this is against, this is going to end up being a bad thing for everybody and if you know of it, we gotta stop it. But as it got bigger and bigger, and the thing that I most remember as a kid living there and my mom was an MD, she was a pediatrician, my dad was educated in the States, thats when I was born, I was born in the States when they were going to school and then went back to Iran cause I was a natural born US citizen living in Iran. What I remember is for my parents who were in that upper middle class, a lot of that social group and the rich felt threatened by this movement, like oh my God, is this going to take away from our lives? And eventually that tide turned because none of them wanted to see their youth be killed. And, oh, there is so much pride in the youth of a country, of a nation, just like we have that when the media outlets started really showing, we didnt have social media, we didnt have any of that so when you came home and were watching the news, its whatevers being fed to you, its edited, (5:00) so if you had a TV network, before it got aired out of the fear of we dont want to air something because if this revolution doesnt go through, we dont want the government to come in and shut us down or torture us or kill us or whatever the case be may. So at first, it was very, uh, very cropped up and very, very censored. AS this thing became unstoppable and there was more unrest and more killings, a couple of the stations started airing raw footage. Not necessarily live but raw footage. Kids, they showed kids, government, they showed the army, the military. They came in because the police couldnt do it (6:00) and they also feared that the police were going to turn on the government because the police couldnt stand it. There were police that were crying saying I dont want to kill our youth and they were putting their guns down and there were snippets of news that would say such and such police station laid their arms down and joined with the public, with the crowd. And that basically meant that they go in and take the guns and use it during their movement. The thing I remember the most is one night we were watching this thing and the military, I dont recall the big center, its in Tehran, its got that big monument, every time you see

pictures, historical photos of Tehran, youll see this thing, its a square, a famous square, Im sorry I dont remember the name of it (7:00) but thats when the military opened fire (Connor: oh, something square, Mike: I dont remember, Im sorry, you guys can figure it out or look it up), they opened fire on the college kids. And anybody who was in this, and it was a SEA of people, right, and up to this point, you had politicians that were part of the existing government that were siding against the government so there were familiar faces and they started something against the oppression, against the dictatorship. And the people were going, ok were going to get some leadership now because initially it was were sick of this, we want change but there was no one leading them on. But then this became more of a public face so you had public figures (8:00) that were sponsoring the movement. My parents, I remember watching that night, kids being mowed down, just falling to the ground, you know bullets, and being killed and injured, and both of them just started crying and cursing the Shah. And to me, that was really weird to me as a kid, because growing up there was such loyalty to the Shad, nobody ever spoke against him especially not in our tight-knit community, our socio-economic class. And when I saw my parents cursing him and crying, my dad was like crying and Id never seen my dad cry, crying because he said he needs to be getting rid of, hes killing our youth, hes killing our future and thats when it was basically a domino effect, there was no stopping it and thats when the Shah, pretty much after that, got on the plane, tried to get out and the whole thing collapsed, the regime did because the military stopped. Were not going to use the tanks to run over people, were not gonna, so I dont know if you guys follow whats happening in Syria, everything that happened in Syria but go back a year from now. (9:30) I cant believe, for those of us who went through what happened in Iran, were sitting here going how could this guy Assad still be in power and the world sit there and watch him kill his own people and not be overthrown? Well, back then, a lot of the Shah loyalists said, well, its because ultimately the Shah cared for the country and people and he said Im done killing, this is a no-win situation, and Im out, Im out and Im just going to get out. So thats essentially what I remember leading up to it. 10:30 Now, I wasnt there for the when the regime actually fell. When this chaos was going on, because we had the ability and the resources to leave the country, my dad felt like it would be safer for myself, my mom and my sister who was 6 years younger than me to leave the country. And it was during the uprisings so the regime hadnt changed yet but there was a lot of uncertainty - leave the country and then see what happens, wait for a new government to come in, assess things and then come back. There was this fear that you could be anywhere, they didnt have, thank God, you still dont see that in Iran, they didnt have like you see today in Iraq or Syria suicide bombers because they didnt want to kill their own people. The people were uprising against the government. There wasnt this separation of religion, sex, Sunnis, Shiites and the whole thing we see today in the world so there was no fear of car bombings or riding a school bus and (paused for dog interruption). File 3 So with all the chaos (and Im kind of chopping, going back and forth here so hopefully you guys can figure it all out in the end), but I told you what I remember leading up to it, thats about the time when my dad, my dad crying, my mom screaming at the TV screen,

thats when the talk started getting louder and louder even amongst the upper income class, that this has to stop, this has got to go. There was still that fear that you could be on a bus coming back from school or coming back from the mall and there could be a demonstration or an uprising, the military would come in shooting at people. People had guns now because the police stations some of the people had surrendered their guns so my parents were like you know what? We dont want the kids to be around this so lets put you on a flight and ship you out of the country and when the whole thing kind of settles, well assess it and decide if you want to come back. Thats when we left. Now if it sounds like you could just up and go to another country, no problem, the reason for that is because my family had always, uncles, I had one uncle who was a German citizen that had left the country for school and stayed in Germany, and was a surgeon there and had married a German girl. Another uncle here in the States, same thing, had come out to the States for an education and married an American. So for us, flying back and forth to the UK or Europe or US was just the norm. It wasnt like, oh, thats a whole other country. Its not like for you guys if one day you woke up and your parents said, ok guys were going to move to France, itd be kinda weird. So for us it wasnt and for me as a kid it was awesome (2:00). It was exciting, it was like oh wow! Not to mention, yeah it was sad, kids, people were getting killed, as a kid it was like I wondered what happened today. Which school got shut down, are we going to school today? The school is on lockdown. So we got on a plane and we left and this was probably in 78, I dont know the exact time but it was before the fall, before the revolution, went to Cambridge, England, no, actually went to London sorry, lived in London probably for 3, 4 months but then we had to start school so my mom said Cambridge had better schools so were going to take you to Cambridge. So we went and lived with this family that was a British family that opened their home to political, not refugees but people who were leaving the country for political reasons (3:11) but they left legally so it wasnt a refugee situation. So we lived with this family, I got enrolled in school; my sister was too young so she was just hanging out with my mom. Started going to school there and what I remember then was how weird the accent was for me. The British accent compared to what I had learned and I didnt have proper dialect as far as how we speak our dialect in the States cause I was still learning English as my second language but British accent was really tough for me to understand so I struggled in school, Id take the bus, Id walk and it would be like there was no Skype, there was no email, it was letters and phone calls, right, with my dad. So my dad was the one who actually stayed in Iran until the revolution happened. And around 1980, my mom and dad decided; time to go back because the elections had taken place for the first time in a long time and the government was elected by the majority, by the people. Who happened to be a guy, whose family and himself had a history of prodemocracy, quietly anti-Shah, anti-dictatorship but kinda like anti-establishment but never threatening enough (5:00) for him to have been incarcerated or taken out of the picture. So, he gets elected and all of a sudden, life is normal, you dont see any of the weird stuff, you dont the people who are running, have been running Iran for the last 30 years, a lot of them are the clerics, they have the outfits, they have the pillow, they call them pillowhead, I mean I do. Before the revolution where you saw those people were at the mosques, at the mosques. Prayer was never part of our elementary school routine. Not that they were against that but organized prayer was never something that we did. Just like todays schools for the most part, except like my kids go to Christian school so

they have chapel. But I go back and life appears to be normal (6:00) until this whole thing came about where the clerics started influencing, creating their own little movement, that were a godless country, we are a godless society, we have no fear of God, we commit sins, we drink alcohol and women walk around with outfits that are suggestive. We need to be, our roots are Islamic and we need to embrace Islam, enough of this. The reason we got where we are, you know I skipped over the whole hostage crisis I do remember that but I wasnt there for that, I was in England for that. The hostage crisis had nothing to do with the religion, it had to do with hey, the Shah was supported by Americans (7:18) and the CIA, therefore these guys in the US embassy are spies and we need to go in there and find out what was going on and how this all went down, that youth that went in and did that, but nothing at that point was about lets take the country back to the stone ages and making it into, seriously like 100 years back from the attire, from the practices, from the conservative religious point of view where men had to button up, they had to grow a beard to wear a tie was materialistic and ridiculous, its western influence, women had to cover up. This wasnt going on in 80 when my dad said to come home. So we went home and it just started happening that way. They found a way to disgrace the guy that the public elected as the president and I forget his name, I think it was Abbas but I dont remember. Look him up, though, because he was a catalyst in getting the upper class and the upper middle class behind the revolution because they were like democracys fine, lets be a democracy but once he get squeezed out, basically chased after, I dont even know if they arrested him or killed him, I dont remember, I think maybe he exiled out (9:00) of the country for fear of his life. Then all of the sudden the clerics, the religion, the religious influence came in and thats when Ayatollah Khomeini came out of nowhere, it was the weirdest thing we never heard of this guy. Turned out the Shah knew about the guy and had exiled him out of the country and banned him from coming back into the country. So he gets in on a flight and all of the sudden, hes the messiah, hes god and it was so weird, people were like wait a minute, what happened, I thought we wanted to do away with one person being the ruler, one party being the ruler and all of a sudden we gave up one for this and it was such a surreal, weird time for me as a teenager, a young teenager, starting middle school. So what I remember then was small uprisings within the universities of those same students starting to throw rocks and stuff against the new regimes police and military saying no no no no no, we didnt want our sisters, our girlfriends, we didnt want to be told we cant have a girlfriend, we didnt want to be told that we cant dance, we didnt want to be told that we cant wear a tie, we didnt want to be told we have to grow a beard, we didnt want our moms to have to cover up their faces out of the fear that if they dont, somebody is going to throw acid in their face or they are going to get arrested, this isnt what we signed up for. Except this time I was on a middle school campus called Alborz and this was a really famous school in Tehran. The new government peoples came on campus and started shooting at the kids. And I remember being in a classroom and hearing gunfire. Our school was all the way to high school so you had older and as you guys do your research, there was a significant difference in where kids are as teenagers in those countries and where we are here. We all kind of live in a bubble here, we have our lives and are protected, over there, when you became a young man, youre expected to be a young man. So you had to mature much, much faster and you were exposed to political views at a much younger age so you tended to be much more involved and have a political opinion

at a much younger age than this country does (12:06). So you might be thinking, these are high school kids, why they heck would they care what the high school kids are saying or even the freshmen in college. Over here, kids are busy playing sports, having fun and going to games and partying. As long as they get good grades, who cares? NO, over there if they didnt like a way of life, they spoke out, right? When these guys came on campus, and we had to get on our hands and knees and crawl under the window sill so the bullets were flying and we wouldnt get hit, and to evacuate the classroom and get into a safe spot, thats when I started hearing the buzz with my family, my immediate family, relatives and especially my mom and dad, all right this isnt what we signed up for, this revolution got stolen. Whether its going to change (13:05), it doesnt matter; were going to need to get out of here. My mom was of a religion called Bahai and I dont know if you guys have read on that or not but my mom was Bahai, which is definitely, for whatever reason, a threat to the clerics in Iran and people who practice Islam, the leadership of the mosque. Not the Muslim, not the people, even the Persian Jews, there are so many Persian Jews. When the Shah was there, you had your synagogue, you had the Bahaists practicing their religion, the Muslims did theirs, the Christian did theirs and it didnt matter. Religion when the Shah was there was like hey you can believe, we all believe in the same God but youre a different religion. Thats fine, youre still an Iranian, youre still a Persian.14:15 When these guys took over, it just became so, it was like a cleansing. Like, nope we want only people who believe in Islam. Anybody else is an enemy of God, an enemy of Islam. And thats what they would say. Around the same time and you gotta look at the timeline, did you guys read up on when the Iran-Iraq war started? (Yes) When was that? (81) 80, 81? 81 ok, so thats about the time when the talk was going on, lets get out of here, lets see what happens and then the war started. We had air raids coming over the Tehran airspace, which is a lo-o-ng way from the Iraqi border. By this time, we had witnessed the new guys line up all the F-16 pilots that Iran had, execute them, kill them in loyalty to the Shah. Even though they were part of the Revolution, they didnt want any possible way that anything would be infiltrated from within. So they wanted to make sure they had 100% loyalty and support from within. Well, the F-16 pilots were Israelitrained pilots, we used to do joint training exercises with Israel, we were allies, Iran was. So as soon as the military got weak to the point where it could be attacked, thats essentially when Iraq attacked. When the Shah was there, nobody even thought about messing with Iran because Iran was supported by the Brits and the US as like the policemen of that region. Right or wrong, Irans regime was kind of propped up because it was to keep the peace to stop these guys from getting in and killing each other over religion (16:17). As soon as that collapsed and soon after when the military started deteriorating was when Saddam attacked. So I remember another highlight as a kid, we had to put black paper over all the windows so that light could not be seen from the outside because if there were air raids thats how they can target what part of town they are, so the government ordered that. Then wed have emergency signals when there was a breach of airspace and they expected air attack. And if youd hear the surface to air, the

anti-aircraft weapons going off and youd hear, you learn all this stuff as a boy, the MIGs (??), which is what the Iraqis had and we had the F-16s, so all the toys were all military toys now, everything was military toys. I remember getting into building models of airplanes and those things. 17:17 But it was scary. Wed go in the basement, wed have to wait, wed hear the bombings and the anti-aircraft stuff going on and thats when we said, whatever the expense, were going to get the heck out of Dodge. Theyd now frozen the airports, you couldnt travel out, forget about it. Thats when they started recruiting teenagers. 13 years old you were good enough to be drafted to be put out on the front line. 13 years old. And I remember seeing footage on TV, oh, weve got all these kids and theyre all wanting to go and fight for the cause of God. They would have the Koran and a key theyd put around their neck and call the key to heaven. Against every ounce of common sense and intellect, you were just going what is going on? And if Im telling you this, trust me, its not because Im against that regime, its because youre kinda scratching your head going, 13? What are you going to do with a 13 year old they cant even lift a weapon (18:40). It was just really, really weird. So people started talking amongst themselves and the regime realized they were going to have to keep a tighter leash so they started having plainclothes members of the government that would mingle with the people but they were basically spying to see who was talking bad about the government and they would take them. They would take them and put them in prison. Or take them and execute them. And since my mom was a Bahai and a lot of the Bahais were being executed, my dad worked for the national oil company under the Shah. They issued a warrant for the arrest of anybody who had anything to do with the Shahs brother who was the oil minister. The Bahais could not, they couldnt do anything. She had her own medical practice, she worked at the hospital even if she had put up with all the cover-ups and stuff, she had no job. But they couldnt get out. They couldnt get out. I could because I was a US citizen and they couldnt do a thing about it. But I couldnt fly to the US so I got put on a plane in 82 by myself, so I was born in 69 so that makes me 13. So I flew to Germany and my uncle who lived there got me from the airport and I lived there for 6 months or so, maybe less. Didnt go to school there, I tried actually. They enrolled me in school and the German kids (20:30) there, you know it takes you wanting to like (?) something and it was just too much change as a kid so I fought it. I was terrified of the fact that I didnt know the language. I didnt know how to speak German but they spoke English so I thought well, Ill go to school but the plan had always been that I was going to come to the States to San Diego, which is where my uncle lived. So 83 is when I came to the States. 83 is also when, let me think a bit, 82 or 83, I think the end of 82 was when my parents had liquidated as much as they could and you had to put it in cash and they buried the cash, they put it in these black trash bags, like our Glad trash bags, they werent called Glad then, whatever they were, they put it in trash bags and they dug in the yard and put them under dirt. So they pulled all their money out, sold their Persian rugs, did everything they could. Then they got out through the Turkish border with smugglers, human smugglers. You could only bring a suitcase basically, whatever jewelry you could wear on you, and that was it. Nothing fancy. So they went to Turkey. While I was in Germany, then here, that whole transition, my parents were doing their own thing. So they went to Turkey and there was a non-profit called United States Catholic Conference (USCC) that sponsored political refugees coming out of Iran and so they were in Turkey

and they lived in Turkey for about a year. We would talk over the phone, once again no Skype, no email, no nothing (22:50). And they were with my sister so from there they went to Italy and from Italy, after 6 months in Italy, Rome they came to San Diego. When they got to San Diego, they were put up in an apartment paid for by that non-profit and my mom had to take her board examinations again even though she had done her residency here but that was so many years beforehand that she had to re-certify so they were starting from scratch (23:32), no money, no nothing. That was 83, 84 and thats pretty much my life up to that point. The rest was that it allowed me to be a teenager here with a much deeper respect and perspective on how life can change on you literally. It felt like it happened overnight although it was over months. Any time youre in a situation where theres a separation of classes, the danger is there (24:22) for that to happen. Now what the regime did, the new guys that took over, they used religion and whenever you have a separation of classes and you have the masses as being the less fortunate in society, the poor, in that region, religion is the only way youre going to keep a lid on it and use that to maintain your popularity. It really hasnt been a democracy and it is what it is. Things have loosened up a little bit there mainly because the regime realized that if they dont, they might have an uprising. The kids still party, the adults still do their music and dancing but its all behind closed doors. Its like a big lie. I would say that were soft, thats just my opinion, and if you guys follow, what was it called what happened in 2009, the green movement in Iran, where the students got back on the streets again. I dont know if you guys studied this for your project or not, the students got back on the streets again in Iran. It got crushed like that (snaps fingers). They killed people. It did exactly what the Shah wouldnt do. The Shah stopped, ok, I cant do it, it is what it is. Even if I kill these, its a joke that Assad can go and talk to the people a couple of weeks ago, ok, ok, well change the government but Im not going anywhere, Ill stay, its like really? You just killed all these people and you think youre going to be ok sticking around? But these guys have no fear, they kill people, they say if youre against me, youre against God. And thats pretty powerful you can get a lot done with that message. And thats kind what I remember and thats what I see.