Serge de Patoul, a prominent Belgian politician and a former member of the Brussels parliament, was among a group of renowned American and European politicians addressing a grand rally in Brussels on March 20. The rally and its attendees supported Iran’s nationwide uprising and the people’s organized Resistance movement and urged the European Union to blacklist the regime’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).
Below is the translated text of Mr. Patoul’s speech, edited for clarity:
Dear friends, I want to bring here all the solidarity and support of my party here in Brussels for [the Iranian people’s] demands that are, in fact, basic. And I will limit myself to highlighting three of them, but they are rudimentary. The first concerns the Revolutionary Guards. The Revolutionary Guards is a terrorist organization. The international community must recognize them as such and put them on the list of terrorist organizations. It’s absolutely rudimentary and doesn’t even have to be proven.
This would also allow the international community to extricate itself from certain hypocrisy through its silence on what is happening in Iran today. The second element is what this momentum wanted to highlight. It is our support and admiration for all these women fighters who, at the risk of their lives, demonstrate today in Iran to claim the simple fact of having freedom, the simple fact of being considered, of being considered as human beings with full freedom.
This courage is exemplary and inspires our admiration because we know that constantly when they demonstrate, they risk their lives, they risk being arrested. They are at real risk of suffering and being abused. It is, therefore, an admiration that one can have for this incredible courage. But we must also globally say that all the Iranian demonstrators in Iran today are admirable in their courage and their will to go all the way. For six months, they have been demonstrating this to us. We can get only here. In addition to admiring and supporting them, expressing our desire that the international authorities contribute to what they are asking for becomes a reality.
And finally, a third element I would like to highlight is that it is obvious to us that a state, particularly in Iran, must be a democratic state and bring secularism into the public service. State neutrality is needed. State and religion must be separated. We, therefore, need secular democratic states. And it is an essentially political approach to achieve that Iran can be tomorrow in a secular democracy, a source of peace for the region of this entire region of the world.
For these three reasons, I would like to say how adamantly my party here in Brussels supports your demands. And finally, I would like to wish you a happy Iranian New Year. I hope that your Iranian New Year will be a year of openness to freedom.