VILLEPINTE (France) An Iranian dissident leader urged major powers on Saturday to stop appeasing Teheran and start supporting opposition groups after the latest round of talks on Iran’s nuclear programme ended in deadlock.
Maryam Rajavi, who heads the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), also accused the United States of dragging its heels on a decision to remove her group from its terrorist list.
“Western countries lost this decade by providing all sorts of incentives to the Mullahs – a decade of appeasement and fruitless negotiations,” Rajavi said ahead of a meeting of thousands of Iranian exiles on the outskirts of Paris.
The NCRI, an umbrella bloc of five opposition groups in exile that seek an end to Muslim clerical rule in Iran, was first to expose a secret uranium enrichment plant at Natanz in 2002.
“Stopping the Mullahs’ nuclear threat is possible only through changing (its) dictatorial regime,” she said. “If one is not interested in handing the bomb to the Mullahs, one should side with the Iranian people’s resistance to topple the regime.”
Also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI), the group led a guerrilla campaign against the Shah of Iran during the 1970s that included attacks on US targets.
“Following the June 1 ruling … the State Department has no choice but to delist the PMOI, unless it wants to again trample upon justice and law to satisfy the Mullahs,” Rajavi said.
The United States added the group to its official list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997, but the group has since renounced violence.
A US appeals court ordered Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to decide on its fate by October 1.
