By Donna Jacobs
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
At 7 a.m. on Saturdays, 14-year-old Robin Corbett — now Lord Robin Corbett of Castle Vale — was up and making the rounds of neighbors with dogs.
Then he'd go to market, buy and divvy up 20 pounds of horsemeat — still rationed in 1947 postwar Britain — for his delivery route.
At 15, he left school to work as a copy boy and journalist-in-training on the Birmingham Evening Mail, then as a reporter for the Daily Mirror and as deputy editor of Farmer's Weekly.
In 1974, he won a seat as Hemel Hempstead's Labour MP, lost it in 1979, and returned to journalism until a winning streak in 1983 gave him the Birmingham Erdington seat until he "retired" in 2001.
Three weeks later, then-prime minister Tony Blair appointed him to the House of Lords.
Says Lord Corbett's wife, author-journalist Valerie, the appointment was "very much on the basis of him being a working peer. Which he is — leaving home at 9:30 a.m. and coming back on average between 8 and 10 p.m. — and sometimes later, all the days the Lords sit (longer than Commons and with shorter holidays).
He says: "We don't get a salary and don't even get to claim an allowance for expenses unless we're there," he says. "You literally get a tick (for attendance)."
Lord Corbett is chairman of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom. He has worked for 15 years for democracy in Iran — and worked to remove the terrorist tag Britain, Canada, the U.S. and Europe have put on the PMOI — People's Mujahedeen of Iran.
Inside Iran, it is known as the main opposition group, MEK, the Mujahedin-e Khalq.
The committee had a major victory on May 7, when the Court of Appeal ordered the British government to remove MEK from the country's terrorist list. MEK, said the court, seeks "replacement of the theocracy with a democratically-elected secular government in Iran" and "is not concerned with terrorism."
Iran's mullahs fear democracy will rear its ugly head in Iran — so much so, says Lord Corbett, that they insisted MEK be tagged as a terrorist group in 2002. MEK/ PMOI wants UN-supervised elections.
"The sole reason the PMOI is on the terrorist list was because the mullahs made it the price of opening talks with Britain and the EU over their nuclear deceit," he says. "We know they've lied because it was the Resistance (PMOI) that in 2002 first revealed nuclear development sites."
Then-prime minister Paul Martin listed the PMOI as a terror organization in 2005, where it remains today.
Meantime, says Lord Corbett, Iran is ripe for free elections with "literally thousands" of protests around the country by pro-democracy students, by consumers fed up with gas shortages, by women opposed to wearing the mullah-prescribed veils.
"Further," he says, "some 60 per cent of Iranians — probably the best-educated people in the region — are under 30 and absolutely, absolutely certain to never get a job. And, by the government's own statistics, nearly 80 per cent of people live below the poverty line."
Lord Corbett's four-point plan for Iran:
1: Crank the UN sanctions tighter to choke off foreign investment and "to really squeeze and hurt them over their nuclear weapons development program. I think they are very near to nuclear weapons, but I don't think they're there yet. Estimates vary — I'm a two-year man rather than a five-year man.
"I think it's desperately important because of this menacing mix — a theocratic fundamentalist regime with nuclear weapons that threatens not just the region, but the rest of us. This is not — I want to emphasize this — an argument for the use of military power, not by Israel or anybody else.
"The nuclear facilities are way underground and the Iranians are capable of retaliating — it's not a bluff. I think there are people who would press buttons for those missiles — whatever they're carrying. And it's not just Israel (as a target). They can reach British bases in Cyprus. They can do what they want in the Gulf — they have threatened to sink oil tankers and block the Strait of Hormuth to check off (stop) oil supplies."
He says the West's "policy of appeasement" has merely bought time for the mullahs' nuclear weapons program and that military action against Iran will worsen the situation. What's left is "a peaceful route. Don't' call it negotiations. Just call it talking.
"There will come a point where the mullahs will say, 'We can't go on because the economy is in ruins.' Although the elections are fraudulent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised he was going to share the oil wealth with the Iranian people. Did not happen. So whatever else the arguments, he's not the most popular guy."
2: If Russia and China, from their Security Council seats, veto or weaken a UN resolution to tighten sanctions, the EU can go it alone.
3: Western countries should remove the PMOI from their terrorist lists. Further, this will "signal the people of Iran who want freedom that they do not stand alone."
4: Do not abandon the 3,500 PMOI members who are protected in Camp Ashraf, near Baghdad and the Iranian border, by U.S. troops under the Geneva Convention. If Iraq forces the U.S. to leave the camp, observers fear a massacre. Iran has reportedly bombed the camp three times already this year.
Lord Corbett just returned from visiting U.S. members of Congress to discuss the Iran solution and says he plans a return trip to Canada.
"I think Canada has got a very praiseworthy record of peacekeeping and has got a role to play here in backing tighter sanctions on the regime and finding ways through its diplomatic mission in Iran to encourage and assist NGOs working for more democracy."
