On Thursday, lawmakers and foreign policy experts from across Europe and the Americas took part in an online conference that was scheduled to coincide with the conclusion of a Belgian court case stemming from a 2018 Iranian terror plot. As expected, the judge in that case issued guilty verdicts for each of the four known participants and handed down the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison for the principal defendant, Iran’s diplomat-terrorist Assadollah Assadi.
The online conference, which was organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), provided an outlet for widespread praise of that decision. The keynote speaker, NCRI President Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, was the prime target of the terror plot, but she emphasized that the court’s decision represented a promise of justice and triumph for countless parties.
Mrs. Rajavi described the verdict as “a brilliant victory for the people and resistance of Iran and a heavy political and diplomatic defeat for the regime.” Many of the speakers expressed the same sentiment while also focusing on prospects for extending that victory and handing further defeats to a regime whose leadership was seemingly implicated in the case.
“Conviction of the regime’s terrorist diplomat… represents the conviction of the entire clerical regime,” Mrs. Rajavi said, referencing Assadi’s former position as third counsellor at the regime’s embassy in Vienna. The casefile for the 2018 terror plot established that Assadi used his diplomatic status in order to evade ordinary security screenings and smuggle 500 grams of the high explosive TATP into Europe. There, he handed the bomb off to an Iranian-Belgian couple that was tasked with infiltrating the NCRI’s annual “Free Iran” rally that was taking place just outside Paris.
The two would-be bombers were arrested before they were able to leave Belgium on the day of the rally, and Assadi was arrested the following day in Germany, as he sought to return to his diplomatic post in Austria, thereby reclaiming the protection of diplomatic immunity. When he was arrested, Assadi was found to be in possession of numerous documents pointing to a massive network of assets that he had developed while working under diplomatic cover. Over a period of years, he had visited hundreds of those assets in at least 11 European countries, often delivering cash payments for services unknown.
Assadi’s conviction on Thursday, these details contribute to the urgency of a change in Western policy toward Iran. Participants in the NCRI’s conference underlined that existing policies are so weak and conciliatory as to be categorized as “appeasement.” Some even speakers underlined that those policies were primarily responsible for inspiring Tehran with the belief that it would be able to get away with a crime as serious as the planned attack on the Free Iran gathering.
There is little doubt that if that plan had been successful, it would have killed hundreds of participants in the rally, where total attendance was above 100,000. Furthermore, the objective of killing Mrs. Rajavi would have no doubt led to the bomb being placed near the event’s VIP section, meaning that the greatest risk was borne by political dignitaries such as former US Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and former Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi.
Reflecting on the potential death toll, the particular threat to Western personnel, and the apparently failure of prior European and American policies, former US Senator Robert Torricelli commented on the Assadi case by saying, “I do not know how European leaders who have Iranian embassies in their capital can continue as if nothing has happened.”
Torricelli proved to be one of many commentators who took the view that Assadi’s conviction ought to prompt European governments to downgrade their diplomatic relations with the Iranian regime and to demand accountability not just from the direct participants in the 2018 terror plot but also from the regime’s leadership that makes such activities an element of its statecraft. Many of them placed particular emphasis on the role of the regime’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who has often been embraced within Western policy circles as a kind of moderate, but whose role as the regime’s top diplomat suggests that he was privy to Assadi’s actions.
As long as Zarif avoids facing consequences for the confirmed terror plot, it seems that questions will continue to linger regarding how many other figures like Assadi may be operating within the regime’s embassies and other institutions. Those questions can only be resolved with help from a much higher degree of scrutiny than European leaders have lately applied to either Zarif or to those institutions.
Assadi’s guilty verdict underscores how important that scrutiny could be to Western security. But it is equally important to the future of Iran itself. Indeed, Mrs. Rajavi said in Thursday’s conference that the Iranian people themselves are expecting “that the EU revises its Iran policy and hold the ruling theocracy accountable” not just for terrorism but also for “flagrant violations of human rights, the massacre of political prisoners, and the mass killing of defenseless protesters” in recent uprising which made Tehran desperate to lash out at the Resistance abroad.
The EU should shut down the regime’s embassies, and sanction the regime’s leaders for their role in terrorism and human rights violations. The EU should designate the entire Ministry of Intelligence (MOIS) and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as terrorist entities. The regime’s intelligence agents and mercenaries under any cover must be prosecuted and expelled. Granting them refugee status or citizenship must be considered a red line.
And most importantly, any form of renormalization of diplomatic relations with the regime must be contingent on dismantling its terrorism infrastructure and on the observance of the human rights of the people of Iran.
