WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Empress Farah Dibah Pahlavi, widow of the deposed shah of Iran, says her eldest son may one day return to his country and take over his father's throne.
'I believe a restoration can be possible and I'm not just saying that because of who I am, but because we hear from Iran,' she said during a copyrighted interview published in The Transcript of North Adams, Mass.
'There is no doubt the Iranian people are miserable and just waiting for a miracle,' the usually reclusive empress, 48, told the newspaper during an interview published Friday.
The empress had been living with her children in a heavily guarded 12-room, mansion in the northern Berkshires town of Williamstown since 1981.
In the interview conducted last month, she said she planned to move to a house she bought in Greenwich, Conn.
Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was deposed in 1979 by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and died of cancer a year later.
The shah's eldest son, crown Prince Cyrus Reza Pahlavi, 23, dropped out of Williams College in Williamstown in 1980 and moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he declared himself a shah-in-exile.
'Our young shah has a lot of chances and a lot of people see in him a hope for the future,' she said in the interview the newspaper said was the first since her exile from Iran.
'Obviously, I am a monarchist. Iran is a country of different ethnic minorities and the shah has always been a cement holding together all these people,' she said.
The former empress said Khomeini's rule has devastated the country.
'The four-year war with Iraq has left the economy in shambles. They have dismantled education. The judiciary is back in the Dark Ages. And women have been stripped of most of their rights,' she said.
'Iran, once a cradle of civilization, has become the champion of international terrorism,' she said. 'And they have, by a system of appalling brainwashing, been sending thousands of young men to be killed (in the war with Iraq).'
