Monday, 10th November 2008
Meeting with members of the Czech Parliament
Firstly let me thank my distinguished colleague, Jan Zahradil for inviting me to speak to you in the Czech Parliament today. He has done so on the basis that I am co-Chair of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup in the European Parliament and also recently launched a new trans-national committee called "IN SEARCH OF JUSTICE: European Committee to de-list the PMOI," an organisation bringing together 2000 members of parliament from around the world, in support of the PMOI. This new Committee is headed by the Vice President of the European Parliament, Mr Alejo Vidal-Quadras. Let me explain what this is all about.
Some years ago, I was visited in my office in Brussels by the Iranian Ambassador to the EU. I was extremely angry with his country because of their continuing oppression and their horrific record of torture, abuse and the application of the death penalty, even to children and pregnant women. I spoke my mind to the ambassador.
Some days later, I learned that the mullahs had hanged a 16-year-old girl. She was publicly hanged from a crane in the main square of a town called Neka. Her name was Atefeh Rajabi and the offence, which earned her the death penalty, was for “acts incompatible with chastity.” The man who had sexually abused her was sentenced to 100 lashes, however, Atefeh was sentenced to death because, according to the Judge, “she had a sharp tongue and had undressed in his court.” In fact she had torn off her veil in protest at the ludicrous cruelty of the sentence. So outraged was the judge that he undertook to place the rope around Atefeh’s neck himself at her public execution.
I was stunned and appalled at this horror. I immediately called my friend and colleague Paulo Casaca, who is a member of the Socialist Group and an MEP from Portugal and we agreed to set up the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup. Our objective was to work for the downfall of the Islamo fascist regime in Tehran and to see it replaced with a secular democracy. We determined to back the largest, most dynamic and most impressive opposition group who gave us most confidence that they could accomplish regime-change in Iran - the PMOI and their parent umbrella group the NCRI.
We get almost daily evidence that the mullahs share our view of the PMOI as the greatest threat to their survival. They have mounted disinformation campaigns against Paulo Casaca and myself. They have briefed the media against us. They have lied and dissembled and frequently used violence against our supporters.
The regime has also sent many of its agents who pose as “former members of PMOI” to confuse and neutralise those politicians who have been actively backing the Iranian opposition.
But this is modern Iran. This is the regime that executes women and children and amputates arms and legs. A regime that uses torture in its prisons, while pursuing a culture of impunity for the perpetrators of such outrages. A regime that has brought the civilised and highly cultured population face to face with the black depths of barbarism and has taken Iran back to the stone-age.
A regime that has executed 120,000 PMOI supporters since it came to power. 29 people were executed in the notorious Evin prison in a single day, earlier this summer. Growing unrest within Iran and widening support for the PMOI has inflamed the paranoia of the mullahs. These turbaned tyrants preside over a regime committed to oppression on a scale that would even embarrass North Korea. But the fascist regime in Tehran is not only a threat to its own people. It is a destabilising influence in the Middle East and a threat to global peace.
Freedom and democracy in Iran are a forgotten dream. The mullahs see Tehran as the centre of a Jihadist Empire, ruled under a strict Sharia code. To spread their vicious Islamo-fascist philosophy, the fingerprints of the mullahs can be found on almost every terrorist atrocity worldwide over the past 20 years. Their malign influence is evident in Palestine, where they fomented the civil war and the division of that country.
They backed Hezbollah in the war against Israel in Lebanon, supplying arms and cash. And, as Obama and McCain know only too well, they are steadily consolidating their hold on neighbouring Iraq, funding and supplying trained military personnel and sophisticated weapons to inflame the insurgency and murder innocent civilians and allied soldiers alike.
As President George W. Bush nears the end of his turbulent presidency, it is certain that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain will thank him for the legacy of conflict one or the other will inherit in the Middle East. Both of them have named Iran as a key policy issue, but both from dramatically different perspectives. Obama wants to sit down and negotiate with President Ahmadinejad, the crazed leader of Iran, who has repeatedly told the world that he wants to wipe Israel off the map and is busily building the nuclear weapons that will enable him to do so. McCain ominously says that he will use all the power at his disposal, if he becomes President, to stop Iran developing a nuclear weapon.
The choice between appeasement and military intervention looms large. But this is a false choice and here in the Czech Republic, your memories of the failed policies of 1938 when Europe tried to appease another brutal dictator, must convince you that appeasement will never work, while military intervention will simply pour petrol on the flames of conflict in that already troubled zone.
Sadly, the view from Brussels is not so clear. The EU is strongly opposed to war, so it sees no alternative but to pursue relentlessly its policy of appeasement. Javier Solana pretends to talk tough in Tehran, but bends to every demand from the mullahs. But there is an alternative to either military intervention or appeasement. There is a third way and this is the key reason I was keen to speak to you today in the Czech Parliament. We should give our support to and empower the PMOI as the main opposition movement to the mullahs and help them to achieve regime change. Instead of that, at the direct request of the mullahs, we have done the very opposite. We have treated our enemies as friends and our friends as enemies.
The recent debacle over the blacklisting in Europe of the main Iranian opposition – the PMOI exposed the worst excesses of this appeasement strategy. The mullahs fear and loathe the PMOI and their political arm, the NCRI, led by the inspirational Mrs Maryam Rajavi. Their commitment to a secular democracy with recognition of human rights, women’s rights, freedom, an end to torture and the death penalty and the abolition of nuclear weapons, is the direct antithesis to everything the mullahs stand for. The regime’s determination to wipe out this key threat to their stranglehold on power, defines their foreign policy. Every negotiator from the West is met with a list of demands, top of which is an insistence that the PMOI be designated as a terrorist organisation, so that their assets can be frozen and their activities severely curtailed. The West, with pathetic naiveté and a fawning lust for petro-dollar contracts, is always keen to oblige.
In 2001 the then home secretary Jack Straw added the PMOI to the UK's terror list, drawn up under the Terrorism Act, and asked the EU to add it to its own list.He admitted in a BBC interview that he had done this at the specific request of the Iranian regime. This wretched charade fell apart when on 12 December 2006 the European Court of First Instance in Luxembourg ordered the Council of Ministers to remove the PMOI from the EU blacklist and more recently when on May 2008 the UK court of appeal ordered the British Home Secretary to remove the PMOI from the UK terror list. The British judges even called the blacklisting of the group 'perverse' stating that there was no justification whatsoever for their being on the terror list.
Undeterred, the mullahs quickly found another EU Member State willing to do their bidding in exchange for lucrative contracts and the elusive pledge to end their escalating uranium enrichment programme. France was persuaded to place the PMOI on their terror list and then to seek the approval of the Council of Ministers to maintain the PMOI on the European blacklist (July 2008). Both decisions are a blatant breach of European law and both will be subject to challenge in the French and European courts respectively. But meanwhile, at Tehran's request, the PMOI have been neutralised. For example Camp Ashraf in Iraq which is the home of over 3500 members of PMOI , was heavily bombed by the Coalition forces in 2003. Ahmadinejad has been laughing all the way to his nuclear bunker!
Of course promises by the mullahs that they will cease their nuclear enrichment programme are never fulfilled and recent intelligence revealed to the West by the PMOI proves that work is continuing apace on the construction, not only of nuclear warheads, but also of the delivery systems to launch them. Indeed the Czech Republic is on the front-line of the West's defensive missile shield which the US wishes to install here in your country as a protection against the Iranian threat.
But we also know that in blatant breach of UN sanctions, several EU Member States are ignoring the activities of major national corporations who are supplying the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC) with tunnelling equipment for their nuclear installations and other advanced dual-use technology. For such countries, money shouts louder than the screams of the oppressed.
The Jihadists are on the march and their champions hold the reins of power in Tehran. It is now crucial for the EU to contain this terrorist regime. The EU's policy of appeasement towards the clerical dictatorship has only emboldened the mullahs and encouraged them to become even more aggressive, bringing the world closer to yet another catastrophic war. We must take the PMOI off the EU terror list and place the Revolutioanry Guards on the EU terror list. This would cripple the regime's war and suppression machine and hinder its ability to build a nuclear bomb. It would not only reduce the possibility of a war but also pave the way for democratic change in Iran.
The definition of appeasement is "the granting from fear or cowardice of unwarranted concessions in order to buy temporary peace at someone else's expense." It is shameful that Europe continues to act out of fear and cowardice and it is high time they realised that the peace they have bought is only temporary and the price they have paid has been freedom and democracy for the people of Iran. Only the PMOI and the NCRI offer a vision of hope for a free democratic Iran where human rights and women's rights will be respected, weapons of mass destruction banned and the death penalty abolished. Vaclav Havel led your country to democracy and pluralism. Mrs Rajavi can do the same for Iran. We must end the policy of appeasement and back the Iranian opposition.
