Protesters Urge Assembled Leaders to Cut All Ties With Iran’s Regime

DENVER — Screaming through loudspeakers and waving placards, about 2,000 opponents of Iran’s fundamentalist regime marched through downtown Denver on Friday, exhorting world leaders to sever diplomatic and trade ties with a country believed to be among the most active sponsors of terrorism.

The march, which followed a rally at the state Capitol and ended a stone’s throw away from the Summit of the Eight’s primary meeting site at the Denver Public Library, was organized by the National Council of Resistance, an alliance of groups dedicated to unseating the government in Tehran.

The marchers--many of whom came from Los Angeles to participate--carried huge photographs of Maryam Rajavi, the 43-year-old woman their movement hopes will become Iran’s president if Tehran’s government eventually is ousted. Rajavi’s husband, Massoud Rajavi, leads the movement’s military arm.

In a speech broadcast live by satellite from a camp along the Iran-Iraq border--and punctuated here with drum rolls and clashing cymbals--Maryam Rajavi urged the marchers to “get the people of Iran’s voice out to the world.”

“No trade! No ties! No arms to Iran! Down with the mullahs! Long live Rajavi!” marchers chanted in response, waving placards of the former metallurgical engineer as she addressed them from an enormous mobile television screen.

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In the crowd was Los Angeles businessman Mansoor Goodarz Lavaie, 54, who spent $3,000 to fly his seven-member family to Denver and lodge them in a hotel for the weekend.

“We came to tell the world we want freedom in Iran and we want it now,” Lavaie said. “The eight world leaders gathered in Denver must pay attention to this demonstration. The time for talking with this regime is over.”

“Look around; all these people made a sacrifice to come here,” added Hamid Azimi, 37, of Los Angeles, who heads the Southern California Society of Iranian Scholars and Professors. “All we ask is that the G-7 not do business with Iran. We’ll take care of the rest.”

Moderate cleric Mohammad Khatami was the landslide winner of Iran’s presidential election last month. But to hear these marchers tell it, the country’s mullahs are still in control and Khatami is only posing as a middle-of-the-roader.

They side with the U.S. officials who have sounded recent alarms over what they say is a military buildup in Iran. Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned earlier this week that Iran is testing a new cruise missile designed to strike ships and attempting to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. State Department has said that Iran continues to be the premier state sponsor of international terrorism. Leaders of Iranian dissident groups, U.S. officials say, are frequent victims of Iranian terrorism.

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A week ago, a Swiss official charged that Tehran’s leaders were responsible for the 1990 assassination of professor Kazem Rajavi, the resistance movement’s representative in Geneva. In April, a Berlin court convicted Iranian agents in the murder of Iranian dissidents living in Germany.

This week, U.S. officials were investigating the possibility that Iran recruited and trained Saudi dissidents to blow up a U.S. military complex in Saudi Arabia last year, killing 19 American servicemen. Iran has denied involvement in that attack.

The United States does not support the National Council of Resistance, saying it has an anti-American past, engages in acts of terrorism in Iran and relies on Iraq.