Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 23, 1991 TAG: 9103230134
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOSH FRIEDMAN NEWSDAY
DATELINE: TEHRAN, IRAN LENGTH: Medium
She has been jailed and she has seen all of her American friends leave. But she says that she isn't homesick for the Virginia horse country where she grew up, the daughter of a wealthy international lawyer whose clients included Iran.
Home for Louise Firouz is the horse farm on the lonely plain of the Turkoman Steppe near the Soviet border, where she spends half the year. She spends her time writing, reading, listening to her shortwave radio and raising Caspian miniature horses, a breed she saved from extinction nearly 40 years ago.
"I considered leaving," Firouz said in an interview at her other horse farm near Tehran, where she spends the rest of the year. "But I realized I had too many dogs, too many horses and too many agricultural responsibilities."
Firouz' son is a photographer here, a daughter is thinking of returning from Paris and her other daughter is married to the British charge d'affaires, the highest-ranking British diplomat in Iran. Firouz says she sees herself as a kind of Karen Blixin, the heroine of "Out of Africa." She speaks fluent Farsi and runs around with a light scarf barely covering her blond hair.
After Louise Firouz, the presence of U.S. citizens who aren't ethnic Iranians drops off sharply. Western diplomats in Tehran say they have run into about a dozen other Americans, most of them married to Iranian men and some reportedly zealous converts to the Islamic revolution.
There is an American from Texas who runs a travel agency and stays on because his Iranian-born wife can't leave, says a diplomat who has heard his tale.
There is an American in Evin prison - Jon Pattis, an American engineer who was imprisoned in June 1986 on charges of spying and using false documents to enter Iran and who suffers from "severe anemia, weight loss and his skin has a green hue," according to a recent U.N. report on Iran's human rights situation.
Another American was released from prison last year and there are somewhat vague accounts of Americans working in skilled technical jobs under cover of Italian passports.
Recent estimates by the Swiss Embassy indicate there are more than 2,000 bearers of U.S. passports in Iran, some appearing to be recent arrivals. The Iranian government is carrying on a campaign to lure back home the skilled managers and professionals who were among the 1 million Iranians who fled after the revolution, most of them to the United States, where many have become citizens.
But there is little trace of the 50,000 Americans who lived in Iran in 1978 just before the revolution, mostly in Tehran in enclaves that resembled neighborhoods back in the United States.
Amir Soltani, 40, is typical of the new type of American showing up in Iran. Soltani had left here 21 years ago for Los Angeles where, he says, he was a contractor and sold Mercedes, Jaguars and Rolls-Royces. But the economy soured and Soltani, son of one of Tehran's biggest contractors under the shah, returned six months ago with his wife and three children.
He still has not brought his money back with him because he is not sure he's going to stay.
"There's lots of people coming back," he said in an interview in the north Tehran grocery store owned by his brother.
Soltani says Iranians are returning because they "feel they were working so hard, we might as well be back here making our country better," plus it is easier to make money and there is less crime here.
"The reason more people don't come back is they're afraid the government will kill them and take their house and money. But it's not true," he says.
by CNB