IRANIANS PROTEST IN LAFAYETTE PARK AGAINST KHOMEINI, ARMS SALE DECISION

About 1,700 Iranians marched through downtown Washington yesterday, chanting protests against the Iranian government and the U.S. decision to supply it with arms.

The Iranians, mostly students and professionals who emigrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, gathered in Lafayette Park for what is an annual rally in honor of two slain leaders of an Iranian movement fighting the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Similar demonstrations by the opposition group, the People's Mojahedin, took place in numerous capitals through Asia and Europe, according to news agency reports.

In the park, loudspeakers blared taped messages in Persian from the group's leader, Massoud Rajavi, who is based in Iraq. The crowd, waving flags and neatly printed banners, shouted back "marg bar Khomeini" ("death to Khomeini").

The rally commemorated Rajavi's wife, Ashraf, and his deputy, Moussa Khiabani, killed five years ago in a raid by Iranian Revolutionary Guards on their home in Tehran.

At one point, a short, aging woman whose daughter was killed in the same raid eulogized Iranians who had been killed while fighting against the regimes of Khomeini and the late shah of Iran.

Aziz Razai stood motionless and slightly stooped at the microphone, her head covered, as is traditional, by a scarf. She told of the deaths of her three sons and two daughters, either under police torture or in firefights with security forces of either the shah or the Khomeini government.

The crowd then marched, chanting, up Connecticut Avenue to Dupont Circle, before winding back to the park.

At 21st and M streets, Karen Denslow was one of a group of office workers who watched in silence, while most other passers-by hurried past. "Most people aren't interested, but I am," she said.

"You know why they are out here?" she said of the demonstrators. "Because they have already suffered a lot, and now President Reagan screwed up and sold him {Khomeini} a lot of weapons."

Across the street, Mark DiPietro was less sympathetic. Watching with the other young men in his office furniture installation crew, he said, "I'd like to take one of their flags and stomp on it the way {Iranians} did with my flag when I was a kid. {The Iranians} should've had a little foresight when they were so much against us and for Khomeini. They should thank God they can march here in America."

Carl Stuono, a coworker interrupted him, "You don't understand; these people are against Khomeini."

DiPietro said with a grin, "Don't listen to him. He works for me and now he's fired."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.