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Executed champion Navid Afkari earns prominent role in campaign for new Iran policies

Reporting by PMOI/MEK

Iran, September 20, 2020—On Friday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran hosted a “Trans-Atlantic Summit on Iran Policy” featuring speeches from a wide variety of American and European policymakers. The virtual conference began with remarks from the NCRI president-elect Maryam Rajavi. But before delivering those remarks, Mrs. Rajavi took time to commemorate Navid Afkari, the Iranian champion wrestler who was executed the previous Saturday as a result of his participation in an anti-government protest in August 2018.

Afkari’s death sparked widespread international outrage, coming in the wake of weeks of global appeals for the Iranian regime to revoke the death sentence. Afkari’s execution was carried out on the basis of forced confessions been obtained via torture. Prominent human rights groups concluded that the popular athlete had been slated for execution as a warning to others who might follow his lead in protesting the corruption and abuses of the clerical regime.

A number of speakers at Friday’s summit agreed with this assessment but also emphasized that Tehran’s efforts to stamp out dissent had failed. “Today,” Mrs. Rajavi said, “Navid Afkari lives on in the hearts and struggle of thousands of Resistance Units in Iran who will continue to resist and rise up for freedom and justice.”

In the weeks leading up to the summit, the NCRI highlighted a number of examples of public demonstration and acts of civil disobedience that had been undertaken by the Resistance Units, the network of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), to demonstrate continued opposition to the regime’s authority in the midst of escalating crackdowns. That activism follows in the wake of two nationwide uprisings that featured explicit calls for regime change, as well as a variety of local demonstrations like the one for which Navid Afkari was killed.

“The Iranian people’s uprisings – from December 2017 to November 2019 and January 2020 – have [dispelled] all illusions about the stability of the clerical regime,” said Mrs. Rajavi. Each of those nationwide movements was considered remarkable not just because of their size or their geographic and demographic diversity, but also because they elicited rare statements from Iranian officials regarding the existence of an organized Resistance movement inside the country.

When the uprising that began in December 2017 continued well into January 2018, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered a speech in which he explained that the unrest was so widespread, provocative, and consistent because the MEK had “planned for months” to facilitate protests and to popularize slogans like “death to the dictator."

Tehran had long insisted that the MEK has no meaningful presence inside Iran. That narrative was enabled by a massacre of political prisoners that took place in the summer of 1988 and primarily targeted the MEK. Members of the group comprised the overwhelming majority of the estimated 30,000 individuals who were subjected to minutes-long trials before “death commissions” and then sent to the gallows after refusing to submit to the theocratic system. But despite the brutal act and an extensive demonization campaign carried out by the regime, support for the MEK’s pro-democracy platform has never really waned.

Mrs. Rajavi and other speakers at Friday’s summit were keen to point to the three recent uprisings as the ultimate proof of this. And several participants seized upon the apparent persistence of domestic unrest as a principal reason to adopt more assertive policies toward the Iranian regime.

“The UK and the US and other Western democracies should align themselves with the people of Iran and Madam Rajavi for a viable Iranian-made solution,” to various current problems, said British Member of Parliament David Jones. He also condemned existing European policies to hold the Iranian regime accountable on a number of fronts and thus “embolden[ing] the regime to continue its domestic crackdown and export terrorism across the region.”

Other speakers criticized their own governments and the entire international community for failing to carry out or insist upon a thorough investigation of the 1988 massacre, much less a plan to prosecute known perpetrators of that massacre at the International Criminal Court.

“It’s shameful and infuriating that to this day, no Iranian official has been held accountable for their crimes,” said Lori Trahan, another member of the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, many other supporters of the Iranian Resistance made it clear that as long as this situation persists, there can be no hope of reform in the Islamic Republic, and no expectation that politically-motivated arrests or executions will diminish unless the Iranian people finally triumph in their efforts to replace the theocratic system with true democracy.

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