NCRI

German Politicians Urge Stronger Iran Policy

Shamsi Saadati

Online Conference in Germany

On Thursday, an online conference was held in Germany. The event featured remarks from a number of Iranian-German activists and both current and former members of the German Bundestag, most of whom offered recommendations for policy changes regarding Iran, both in Berlin and throughout the Western world.

That focus was reflected in the title of the event, “Reshaping Iran Policy.”

Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the NCRI, send a video message to the conference. In her speech, she said that 40 years of Western dealings with this regime have proven that “any concessions make [the regime] even more ruthless.” She also noted that recent examples of that ruthlessness include the killing of 1,500 activists in the midst of a nationwide uprising in November 2019. Despite this, Mrs. Rajavi said, “the flame of resistance is rising up again throughout Iran” in the form of various anti-government protests that are backed by a viable, democratic alternative to the clerical regime. She then concluded her remarks by emphasizing that in the midst of these protests and in the wake of the Vienna talks, Western policymakers will soon be forced to consider which side they are on: that of a dictatorship that recently attempted to commit terrorism in Europe or that of the people who are suffering under its rule.

In promoting the virtual meeting, the NCRI noted that it could be expected to outline ways of centering human rights in future policy discussions, as well as halting the proliferation of Iranian terrorism and promoting a better future for the Iranian people. The speakers in the conference emphasized that this latter goal could best be accomplished through support for an organized, pro-democracy opposition movement.

Former Bundestag member Otto Bernhardt pointed out to conference viewers that he was part of a contingent of German politicians who have been supporting that movement since 2005 as part of the German Solidarity Committee for a Free Iran. Similar groups exist throughout Europe and North America, and as Bernhardt noted, their collective efforts helped to secure the relocation of thousands of members of the NCRI’s main constituent group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI-MEK), from their long-term residence in Iraq to Albania and other countries.

Thursday’s conference coincided with the anniversary of the attack in 2011 that incited the coordinated effort to remove the MEK members from their community at Camp Ashraf. It was on April 8 of that year that Iraqi forces attacked the camp with tanks and killed 38 residents.

Martin Patzelt, a member of the Bundestag since 2013, pointed out that he was among the hundreds of political dignitaries who attended the 2018 Free Iran rally just outside of Paris. This was considered particularly noteworthy because it made Patzelt a potential victim of a terror plot that could have resulted in one of the worst attacks on European soil. On June 30 of that year, Belgian authorities arrested two Iranian operatives who were attempting to travel to the NCRI rally while carrying 500 grams of the high-explosive TATP. The following day, the mastermind of that plot was arrested in Germany – a high-ranking diplomat named Assadollah Assadi. These three individuals and a fourth accomplice were all convicted in a Belgian court in February, and critics of the Iranian regime have been eagerly highlighting that fact to underscore what they view as a need for changes in the focus of Western policy toward Iran.

Most speakers at Thursday’s conference pointed to events earlier in the week as evidence for the currently narrow focus of that policy. On Tuesday, representatives of the seven signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal gathered in Vienna to discuss prospects for saving that agreement, which Iran began systematically violating.

Patzelt and his colleagues acknowledged the value of Western motives underlying the effort to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and restore its restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program. But they also insisted that single-minded focus on those motives threatens to sideline other issues that are equally if not more important. Patzelt lamented that the meeting in Vienna entailed the representatives of secular democracies sitting “side-by-side with representatives of a murderous regime.” This, he suggested, would send the wrong message as long as European policymakers failed to “place human rights at the center” of their policy discussions.

This sentiment was echoed by Mr. Bernhardt, who explicitly stated that Iran should be granted no concessions whatsoever as part of any deal that, like the JCPOA, fails to mention human rights. The narrow scope of that agreement was a major source of backlash against it, with many politicians in the US and Europe.

Such arguments have arguably been strengthened during the period of Iran’s non-compliance, as the pace of violations has raised doubts about how seriously Iran was committed to compromise in the first place. Accordingly, Bundestag member Thomas Erndl used Thursday’s conference to argue that whatever the outcome of the Vienna talks may be, there must be consequences for Iran’s violations, as well as measures that bring an end to terrorist attacks and espionage activities in Europe.

However, the broader conference evoked very little confidence in the ability of Western negotiators to secure such an agreement through talks with the existing regime, especially under present circumstances. Aziz Fooladvand, an expert in extremism and an instructor at the Freiherr-vom-Stein school in Bonn, characterized that regime’s ideology as being one that is only capable of accepting peaceful coexistence in the form of “unconditional surrender.”

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