NCRI – One of the distinguished speakers at the “SYMPOSIUM OF PARLIAMENTARIANS & JURISTS” in the House of Lords on November 29 was Lord Alton of Liverpool, former chief whip of the Liberal party. As a target of the clerical regime’s Intelligence Ministry he said: “Having been involved with the activities of the Iranian Resistance over this 25 years, I have learned a great deal about that misinformation campaign and the attempts by the Iranian regime to discredit the PMOI.” He then explained further about his own experience. Excerpts of his speech covering different areas are as follow:
It is actually 25 years since a group of Iranian intellectuals approached me and asked me how to organise a party conference, a meeting for the Iranian resistance. Over the distance I have tried to be faithful to this cause because it is close to my own heart and I have personally never been able to understand how any government could proscribe an organisation that stands for democratic values and has been fighting for liberty and equality within Iran over this last 25 years, and meanwhile, do business with a government that has licensed terror all over the world. For me a parallel I’ve often drawn is doing business with the right and I am here describing the French resistance during World War II.
I cannot understand why we have pursued this policy. I think that over the last few months our own government has started to question this policy itself. I have been particularly heartened and pleased that so many colleagues from both Houses as well as eminent lawyers whom we have heard from.
We gathered earlier this year in Church House and gathered so poignantly as some of you will remember on the 7th of July while bombs were going off in this very city. It was against that back drop that we were considering the nature of terror. Only yesterday Tony and I were in this room speaking about the situation in Burma. There is just one parallel that I would draw. We were raising the plight of ethnic minorities in that country but also the continued house arrest of Dor Aung San Su Kyi for ten years has been under house arrest and the Burmese military jungsa decide to re-new that house arrest for a continuing period.
Well the parallel you can draw between Dor Aung San Su Kyi and Maryam Rajavi who I have had the privilege to meet now on several occasions is a very obvious one. These are two extraordinary women and we have heard from several of my colleagues from the House today, including Baroness Harris about the plight of women in Iran. What better iconic figure than Maryam Rajavi who stands alongside Dor Aung San Kyi in my view as two of the great women in our world today. She should be properly acknowledged as Dor Aung San Kyi has been properly acknowledged by the world authorities. I would like to see the nobel peace prize given to Maryam Rajavi for all that she has done for Iranian women over this period.
There are two questions that I want to briefly address as there are so many distinguished people that are going to speak today, concerns the proliferation which is gathering as a result of the nuclear programme and the continued character assassination of the PMOI.
The manner in which the West has dealt with the threat posed by the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons programme is an illustration of the danger of the kind of appeasement which many of us thought would be set aside when Lord Renton first entered the House of Commons in 1945.
After having led the EU3 on a merry dance for a few years, the mullahs’ nuclear negotiator openly admitted the nuclear advancements that the mullahs had made during the negotiations with the EU3. During this process, they also broke every agreement which was reached with the EU3, most recently by feeding 37 tones of uranium ore into the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan. Now the mullahs state that they will feed a further 50 tones into the facility, providing them with sufficient highly enriched uranium for up to 10 atomic bombs.
The thought, as others have expressed of the most active state sponsor of terrorism possessing the world’s most dangerous weapons is truly terrifying. Since the National Council of Resistance of Iran revealed the existence, and it is they who revealed the existence, not the CIA or some other intelligence agency, because they revealed the mullahs’ nuclear programme in August 2002, the international community has gone about dealing with this very serious threat in entirely the wrong manner. Rather than adopting a firm policy towards the Iranian regime, the EU3 have given the mullahs concession after concession in the blind hope that the mullahs will suddenly wake up one day, repent for all their misdeeds and decide that they will give up a nuclear weapons programme on which they have spent billions of dollars and which they see as their only means of survival. The EU3 even went as far as to promise the continued proscription of the PMOI if the mullahs agreed to comply with their nuclear obligations. What a forgery deal. Any further delay in the referral of the Iranian regime’s nuclear file to the UN Security Council is wholly totally inexcusable, as the threat posed by the Iranian regime continues to mount, thereby increasing the potential for extraordinary military conflict in the region.
Mullahs’ misinformation campaign
The promise made by the EU3 highlights the way in which the West has used the PMOI as a pawn in negotiations with the mullahs and leads me on to the mullahs’ sophisticated misinformation campaign against the PMOI. I have, as have my colleagues even in the last few days have received yet more brochures by the propaganda arm of the regime, trying to discredit the PMOI.
Having been involved with the activities of the Iranian Resistance over this 25 years, I have learned a great deal about that misinformation campaign and the attempts by the Iranian regime to discredit the PMOI. One of the allegations that I personally followed concerned the gruesome murder of three Anglican leaders in Iran in 1994. We were told that three women publicly confessed to have received orders from the PMOI to murder the Anglican priests. Several years later, however, former intelligence officials of the Iranian regime revealed in their newspapers in Iran that those priests had been murdered by agents of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security and that all the allegations about PMOI involvement in the killings were fabricated in order to deliberately discredit the movement. This is an example of the sordid thing that we are dealing with here today.
The reason I draw attention to that issue is that the Iranian regime and its agents have recently intensified this misinformation campaign against the PMOI right in the heart of Europe. A recent example of this was when in May of this year Human Rights Watch, an organization that I immensely admire was duped into writing a report accusing the PMOI in Iraq of human rights abuses. The report was based on a few telephone interviews with individuals claiming to be former PMOI members. Now HRW failed to give the PMOI a right of reply to the allegations and failed to visit Iraq and camp Ashraf, the scene of the alleged abuses. The report drew ire from many circles and a delegation from the European Parliament visited the PMOI’s camp and conducted independent investigations into the allegations. Many of you will also have seen the excellent report that was drafted by our colleague Lord Slynn about the camp. It published its findings in a book, which concluded that agents of the Iranian regime’s Ministry of Intelligence had duped HRW into preparing the report containing fabricated allegations against the PMOI.
Even more recently ladies and gentlemen, agents of the Iranian regime, using front organisations and websites, such as Iran-Interlink, attempted to hold a press conference in London to falsely accuse the PMOI of being Saddam Hussein’s private army. In a statement entitled, ‘Mullahs’ regime given comfort in London’, Win Griffiths, the former Labour Member of Parliament for Bridgend and a great supporter of the Iranian resistance expressed his “concern about the activities of Massoud Khodabandeh and his wife, Anne, in trying to divert attention away from the dangerous dictats of the mullahs’ regime and the activities of the Iranian regime in democratic countries like the United Kingdom”. At the farcical press conference, which was attended by a handful of individuals, the speakers are reported to have praised Hezbollah and Iran’s new President, about whom we have just heard as well as positive statements about Osama Bin Laden. In light of this, it is incumbent on our government and European governments to investigate such individuals and prevent their activities in Europe on behalf of this regime.
Finally, I am delighted to hear the news that 1,300 British lawyers who have signed a statement calling for the de-proscription of the PMOI. I could not agree with them more.
As some of you may have heard I pressed the government on the floor of the House to say why the PMOI remains proscribed, when Iran’s president has asked for another state to be wiped off the face of the earth. The representative of the government replied that they had good reasons for proscription and that he would let me have it. I am still waiting. How long do we have to wait before our government changes its stance and stops with the appeasement of the 1930s. We have waited far too long already.