Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Iran, November 30, 2020—It is long past time for Western governments to reevaluate their collective approach to diplomatic relations with the Iranian regime. Despite the regime’s long history of terrorism and human rights abuses, many Western states have maintained normal interactions with it. In so doing, they have chosen to set the stage for patterns of terrorism and hostage-taking that persist even to the present day.
As a matter of fact, while some Western governments appear to be going out of their way to promote dialog and concession-giving to the Iranian regime, many of the regime’s malign activities are arguably getting worse. The maintenance of ordinary diplomacy has not stopped those governments from acknowledging that Iranian regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, but their actual conduct suggests that this is a trivial detail and that the risk from that terrorism is manageable, or on the decline.
A currently-unfolding court case in Belgium will hopefully raise more widespread doubts about that narrative. And if it does, we should also hope that it will lead to a shift away from the status quo and toward more of a collectively assertive Western approach to Iranian relations. The case involves an Iranian terror plot that was thwarted by multiple European authorities in the summer of 2018, at which point the “moderate” administration of regime president Hassan Rouhani had been wielding power in Tehran for more than five years.
The incident now stands as just one of many that that prove Tehran’s foreign belligerence and domestic repression have both grown worse, on average, since the international community began courting favor from the Rouhani administration. The plot targeted the Free Iran Rally, a yearly gathering of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). The main target of the attack was NCRI president-elect Maryam Rajavi, a keynote speaker at the rally. The regime wanted to thus to thereby disrupt the leadership of an activist movement that sparked a nationwide uprising in the final days of 2017.
The uprising lasted through much of January 2018 before being suppressed via a brutal crackdown, mass arrests, and torturous interrogations. But even though dozens of protesters were killed and hundreds of others were harshly prosecuted for their peaceful activism, the movement did not evaporate altogether. Instead, various participants took to repeating the uprising’s slogans within their own communities for months afterwards, thereby promoting Mrs. Rajavi’s call for 2018 to be a “year full of uprisings.”
The significance of this gesture was only amplified by the fact that the regime’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had responded to the initial uprising by acknowledging that the slogans had originated with the leading pro-democracy opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), a key member organization of the NCRI. Warnings about this feature of the unrest have persisted among the regime’s leadership ever since, and in so doing they have provided more and more evidence for the apparent motives behind the June 2018 terror plot.
Having failed to stamp out dissent at home, the regime was no doubt desperate to try another tactic. So much the better for its interests if Tehran could also make a semi-conspicuous show of force along the way. So it was soon resolved that the diplomat Assadollah Assadi, the third counsellor at Iran’s embassy in Vienna, would follow through with plans he had helped to develop after conducting reconnaissance at the 2017 Free Iran rally.
Both in 2017 and in 2018 the rally was held just outside of Paris and overall participation was estimated at around 100,000, with hundreds of political dignitaries representing a wide range of nations and political affiliations. The scores of European lawmakers in attendance at those events underscores the fact that Tehran is still perfectly willing to sacrifice Western lives and property in service of its political aims. And this surely strengthens the position that has been advanced in recent years by those Western attendees at the “Free Iran” rally: namely that a firm policy is needed toward the Iranian regime in order to prevent its violence from proliferating.
That position is supported with more than 40 years of evidence regarding the Iranian regime’s conduct. And while some proponents of the status quo might argue that much of this conduct was relegated to periods of hardline leadership, their critics need only point to the year 2018 as evidence that it doesn’t matter which Iranian officials are in charge; what matters most is how vulnerable they believe the regime to be at any moment in time.
The year 2018 was a period of unique vulnerability, and it prompted the regime to attempt attacks on opposition activists not just in France but also in the United States, Denmark, and Albania. Tehran’s vulnerability hasn’t diminished since then. Quite to the contrary, the following year was marked, in November, by an even larger uprising, encompassing nearly 200 localities and featuring many of the same anti-government slogans. The resulting crackdown on dissent was also more severe, with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) opening fire on crowds and killing an estimated 1,500 people.
But just as with January 2018, this repression has neither silenced dissent nor disrupted the leadership provided by the PMOI. There is every reason to believe that the regime’s effort to lash out on foreign soil will repeat itself on a grander scale as well. But Western powers have ample opportunity to prevent this, and it begins with the terrorism trial in Belgium.
When the verdict in that case is handed down next month, the perpetrators’ sentences must make it clear that there will be significant consequences for such activity in the future. But that message must be reinforced by comparable penalties for the entire regime behind the terror plot. These might include expanded human rights-related sanctions, the closure of Iranian embassies, and the formal recognition of Iran’s democratic Resistance movement.
Regardless of what specific changes are endorsed by Western leaders in the wake of the terrorism case, they should find that one conclusion is inescapable: Ordinary diplomatic relations with the Iranian regime have been ineffective at tempering its most destructive impulses. And considering that the terror plot in question was masterminded by a high-ranking diplomat in Europe, it should be clear that if those relations have had any effect at all, it has only been to provide Tehran with the infrastructure to facilitate terrorism at those times when a show of force is deemed necessary to help save the regime from overthrow by its own people.
