by Dr. Antonio Stango
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, in a recent interview argued that the Iranian regime must be placed under stronger international pressure and sanctions if it is expected to actually give up its pursuit of a nuclear bomb.
She spoke to Ambassador Ken Blackwell and said that the international community will have to do better to this end.
In particular, the US should not be pleasing with the Iranian government. On the contrary, the US administration has often been silent on the issues of human rights violations in Iran and has been lax in its promise to protect Iranian refugees and dissidents in Camp Liberty in Iraq, even though it was legally binding to protect them.
Iranian regime’s “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei cannot be stopped by mere letters from the US.
The agenda of the clerics in Tehran includes a three-pronged strategy: acquisition of nuclear weapons, repression of its own population, and regional aggression. If any one of these strategies fail, the regime could fall. The only way to make them fail is to put their survival at risk, nothing less would deter the theocracy from nuclear empowerment.
Mrs. Rajavi said, “When fruitless negotiations continue and the regime is actually rewarded and granted concessions for flouting UN Security Council resolutions or disregarding IAEA demands, these concessions are counterproductive.”
She was of the view that the extension of the negotiations by the US would just give the Iranian regime more time to obtain a bomb, and exposes the weakness of US policy. She does not believe that the “medieval” theocracy could act rationally through negotiations. It needed sticks, not carrots. It was sanctions that forced the regime to come to the negotiating table in the first place.
However the regime is facing more and more social discontent.
The people of Iran paid a very high price as tens of thousands have been suppressed, tortured, and executed by the brutal theocratic regime. Mrs. Rajavi said, “The slogan chanted by millions of Iranians during the 2009 uprisings is still relevant today: ‘Obama, you are either with the mullahs or with us.’”
The failure of the intense negotiations from November 2013 to November 2014 has undermined the solution of the crisis. The Iranian regime violated UN Security Council resolutions on its nuclear program, while becoming more repressive and more militant day by day. It was a serious mistake to tolerate the regime’s ballistic missiles program and its export of arms to other countries. It is time to force it into signing a deal to stop its nuclear program rather than playing the politics of appeasement.
Dr. Antonio Stango is the President of the Helsinki Watch in Italy