By: Rt. Hon. Lord David Waddington
Source: Yemen Observer
The world’s major powers have offered a fresh package of incentives to Iran including long-term nuclear and economic cooperation in a bid to get it to abide by U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on it to suspend its uranium enrichment activities.
But in doing so Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia along with the George W. Bush administration seem to be closing their minds to the fact that the regime’s top leaders including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei have already in plain terms ruled out any deal which would require Tehran to halt enrichment. And there is every reason to think they have done so, because the regime needs enrichment to get a nuclear bomb.
Furthermore Khamenei openly stated on April 30 that the Islamic Republic would resist U.N. “threats or sanctions” and “turn any threat by the enemies into an opportunity to continue its advancements.”
The uncomfortable truth is that with China and Russia likely to block any Security Council sanctions resolution targeting Iran’s oil sector, the West seems powerless to prevent Iran continuing with activities which are a grave threat to world peace and security.
And what is so odd about the present situation is that while many countries, and the United States and the European Union have on the surface threatened punitive action against the regime over its rogue behavior, both the U.S. and the European Union have been helping the mullahs to suppress their greatest foe, the Iranian people.
The former U.S. Bill Clinton administration included the main democratic Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), on its list of terrorist organizations as a “goodwill gesture” to, it said, moderates in the regime when no such moderates existed. And the EU, under British auspices, followed suit in 2001 as part of a futile policy of “constructive engagement.”
And what has come of all this? The net result has been that the only force capable of bringing about long-term democratic change in Iran has found obstacles put in its way by the West, and while it has been having to bring legal proceedings in order to win back the right to work for the Iranian people and bring democracy to Iran, the advanced centrifuges capable of producing highly-enriched uranium have been spinning in Iran’s underground nuclear site at Natanz in defiance of four U.N. resolutions.
The Iranian people are longing and striving for change. They deride Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s infamous phrase “nuclear energy is our inalienable right,” and instead the young cry ‘our inalienable right is freedom.’
Hundreds of students in the northwestern city of Tabriz took part in an anti-government protest which went on through much of April and May. Seventeen were admitted to hospital after going on a hunger strike.
The PMOI has been instrumental in organizing student protests, particularly in Tehran. But 90 percent of its energy and resources have been dedicated to the task of freeing themselves from being unjustly listed as a terrorist organization.
In Britain it scored a major victory on May 7, when the court of appeal, headed by the lord chief justice himself, ordered the government to lift what the high court had earlier called the “perverse” ban on the PMOI, acknowledging that the group was not in any way involved in terrorism. Britain’s foreign office grudgingly accepted defeat but said it would not develop relations with the group – seemingly nervous of Tehran’s reaction were it to do so.
Since the EU’s blacklisting of the group was based on the British decision, there is good reason to hope that the European court of justice, which is currently evaluating the PMOI’s status will order the 27-nation bloc to lift their ban as well.
Rather than offer Tehran concessions in an attempt to persuade it to halt enrichment when it has already refused outright to do so, the United States and EU must now lift their wrongful ban on the PMOI and allow it to use its resources to mobilize the Iranian people against the most destructive regime of our time before it obtains the most dangerous weapon of our time.
Rt. Hon. Lord David Waddington GCVO DL QC is a former UK Home Secretary under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
