DEAL OR NO DEAL?
The Failure of the West’s Policy of Appeasing Iranian Tyranny
It is thirty-two years since a crime against humanity took place in Iran. Thirty-two years during which evidence has slowly emerged of one of the greatest acts of genocide since the end of the Second World War. We now have solid proof that in the summer of 1988 in Iran, a tempest of savagery led to the systematic execution of tens of thousands of political prisoners. Within months the theocratic, fascist regime hanged over 30,000 men and women, mostly members and supporters of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the main democratic opposition to the mullahs. They were murdered on the orders of the psychopathic Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The bodies of the 30,000 murdered martyrs were buried in secret graves. Their families were forbidden from speaking about their deaths.
Monstrous acts of butchery like this have become grisly milestones in the history of oppression and tyranny in contemporary Iran and even the death of Khomeini brought no respite. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has presided over a regime that now executes more people per capita than any other country in the world. Iran has become, in the words of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. They brutally shot down and killed over 1,500 young protesters who took to the streets of Iran’s towns and cities in a nationwide uprising last November. Deploying their Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) – the regime’s Gestapo, the mullahs have unleashed a homicidal blitz on their own population, crushing dissent, wantonly murdering and maiming thousands.
Four decades of rampant corruption, medieval brutality, unchecked abuse of human rights and women’s rights, together with the country’s emergence as an international pariah, have left 80 million Iranians angry, frustrated and demanding regime change. Yet, the mullahs live a life of luxury and spend billions of euros supporting Bashar al-Assad’s brutal civil war in Syria and on funding Hezbollah and other terrorist groups like the vicious Shi’ite militias in Iraq and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Many of the key executioners during the 1988 massacre now hold senior positions in the fascist dictatorship.
Why, after 32 years, has no-one been held to account for this horror? Why do we in Europe still seek to appease this oppressive terrorist regime? Why did Britain, France and Germany abstain in the UN vote on August 20th when the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sought an extension to the arms embargo on the theocratic regime?
Their abstention and the vote against by Russia and China, means that arms sales to Iran could recommence and it will be Russia and China who sell them the weapons.
Do we really want to see the mullahs re-armed? Do we really want to see the terrorist IRCG sending more weapons and personnel to Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon? Why have these European nations taken the side of the mullahs rather than the Iranian people?
We should strongly support the US decision to implement the ‘snapback’ procedure enshrined in the nuclear deal (JCPOA). There is no doubt that the Iranians have breached the conditions of the JCPOA, openly boasting how they have restarted IR-2 and IR-2m type centrifuges to accelerate the enrichment of uranium, as well as accelerating their ballistic missile programme. The JCPOA nuclear deal is dead in the water. It was a lousy deal from the outset and it is ludicrous that Britain, France and Germany now seem to be bending over backwards to breathe life back into its rotting corpse.
The 80 million beleaguered Iranians do not want this. They see the ending of the arms embargo, the revival of the nuclear deal and the subsequent relaxing of sanctions, as being directed against their own welfare by strengthening the regime. The nationwide protests have focused on how the mullahs have corruptly stolen their money to finance proxy wars and military programmes, while the Iranian population has been forced to suffer repression, extreme poverty, hunger and the disastrous mis-management of the coronavirus pandemic, where reliable sources inside Iran now claim the death toll has exceeded 95,000.
The collapse of the Iranian economy following the imposition of the arms embargo, tough US sanctions, the dramatic fall in oil revenues and the Covid-19 pandemic, have left the theocratic dictatorship reeling on the brink of disintegration. By ending the arms embargo and trying to revive the nuclear deal, we will simply provide a lifeline to this pariah regime, allowing them to continue their vicious, fascist repression of the Iranian people and their territorial aggression throughout the Middle East.
80 million Iranians, the majority of whom now struggle to survive on daily incomes below the international poverty line, are demanding regime change and the restoration of freedom, justice and democracy to their impoverished nation. They have had enough of the mullahs and they look to the West for support. They will regard the restoration of arms sales, the removal of sanctions and failing to hold the regime accountable for its human rights violations under international law, as an act of sickening betrayal. We must support the Iranian people and not the mullahs.
