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In the wake of Iran elections, EU must abandon appeasement |
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Friday, 01 July 2005 |
 In the wake of Iran elections, EU must abandon appeasement; remove Mujahedeen-e Khalq from terror list
Press
Release
Brussels, June 30, 2005
On the initiative of Friends of a Free Iran, an inter parliamentary
group in the European Parliament, a meeting, entitled "Iranian
elections, Implications for Iran and the European Union," was held at
the European Parliament. Several Euro-MPs and their aides attended the
meeting. Mr. Paulo Casaca, Co-Chair of the Group and head of the EP
delegation to NATO, chaired the meeting.
 Ms. Sarvnaz Chitsaz, Chairwoman of Women's Committee of the National
Council of Resistance of Iran, and Mr. Ali Safavi, President of the Near East Policy Research
in Washington DC, were the speakers.
In his opening remarks, Mr. Casaca said, "The Iranian election caught
the Europeans off guards. Having insisted that their policy of engaging
Tehran would work and strengthen the so-called moderate forces in Iran,
they must now explain how and why one of the most extremist officials
in the Islamic Republic came out of the ballot box."
 Mr.Casaca added that with the failure of this policy, the European
Union must now change course and try to reach out to the Iranian people
instead investing in the mullahs as reliable partners. There is no
longer any justification for dealing with a regime whose president is a
notorious criminal who has personally been involved in killing
dissidents.
In her remarks, Ms. Chitsaz said, "By any Western standard of
democracy, the Iranian presidential election was a joke and the results
were a tragedy. Faced with choosing between the lesser of the two
evils, Iranians in the millions did what was expected of them: Stay
away from the polls."
Referring to widespread rigging and fraud in the election, Ms. Chitsaz
said, "This time it was not only the opposition, which cried foul.
Other candidates were irate over a well-oiled machinery of vote fixing,
which involved no less than 300,000 members of the paramilitary Bassij
militia and the Revolutionary Guards Corps. Khatami's faction pointed
to the abuse of treasury and country's financial resources to turn the
process into a "managed election".
Quoting Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of
Resistance, Ms. Chitsaz added, "Appeasement of the clerical regime has
led to the complete consolidation of power in the hands of the most
extremist factions of the clerical regime. A Revolutionary Guards
commander and terrorist is at the helm of the executive; a
mullah-terrorist heads the judiciary, and other Revolutionary Guards
and henchmen control the legislature and the state radio and
television, and occupy many seats in the Majlis (Parliament)."
Ms. Chitsaz said the terrorist designation of Iran's main opposition
group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq was both immoral and illegal. "Time
therefore has come for the world community, particularly European
governments, to end the policy of appeasing Tehran and remove the
terrorist label against the Mujahedeen so as to allow the Iranian
people to bring about democratic change in Iran before the
international community is forced to intervene."
In his remarks, Mr. Safavi said, "As they say, every cloud has a silver
lining. And the dark clouds that have settled in Iran post Ahmadinejad
victory confirmed the Iranian Resistance’s long-held view that a viper
never gives birth to dove, meaning that the bloody theocracy that has
ruled Iran for a quarter century cannot and will not change, unless it
is ousted from power in its entirety by the Iranian people."
Pointing to the role of EU's policy on the election of Ahmadinejad,
Safavi said, "There’s no question that the European Union’s self
serving and profit-driven approach contributed greatly to the emergence
of a killjoy set to taking Iran back to the dark ages."
Safavi concluded his remarks by saying, "On the domestic scene, the
regime will emerge much weaker and more vulnerable. Ahmadinejad is not
going to resolve any of Iran’s acute problems of poverty, unemployment,
drug addiction. Any attempt at addressing social calamities in Iran
requires one essential decision: Respect the Iranian people’s free
choice, something that is not going to happen as long as the theocracy
remains in power." |
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