Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeARTICLESIran - Nuclear: A colossus with feet of clay visits Geneva

Iran – Nuclear: A colossus with feet of clay visits Geneva

By: Behzad Naziri
Iran under the mullahs was at the top of the world news agenda during the Geneva negotiations. But the tense smiles of its diplomats in the media spotlight and the euphoria of their government soon evaporated when reality set in.
The waves of discontent of a society in turmoil, persecuted by daily repressions, flooded by official propaganda, ruined by looting and the export of terrorism or nuclear projects and impoverished under the weight of international sanctions have increased the bankruptcy of a mismanaged economy. But the distraction of an agreement with the west should not hide suffering of the people of Iran.
In a press release dated November 25, the human rights organization Amnesty International called the mullahs’ President to account for his unfulfilled campaign promises
The statement said: “Despite the promises of Hassan Rohani during his election campaign to address the human rights situation in Iran, this issue has not been made a priority.”
Amnesty noted that the issue of human rights has long been overshadowed by the nuclear issue, and that it is now time to look more seriously at human rights in Iran. And it stressed that out of 592 hangings last year alone, 367 executions – including dozens in public – were carried out during the first 100 days of the Rouhani’s presidency, and this daily terror in Iran is now being obscured by the
Geneva negotiations on the ‘bomb’.
Another reality showing the cruelty of the Iranian regime – and at the heart of negotiations – had no place in the Palais des Nations: the white tent that has hosted for more than 80 days a dozen hunger strikers, the families and relatives of the 52 Iranian refugees who were victims of the extra-judicial killings at Camp Ashraf in Iraq, displaced in early September by the government of that country at the request of Tehran.
They are demanding the release of seven hostages (six women and one man) who are being held by the forces of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki somewhere in Baghdad, and they are staging their protest in the heart of the city that gave its name to the Geneva Conventions on human rights.
These gross and massive violations of human rights were they ignored by the negotiators of 5 +1 nations when they decided to loosen the sanctions and allow the Iranian economy to breathe a little – a loosening of sanctions which will benefit only the Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards) and the religious oligarchy. Do they not realise they were dealing with a a regime weakened from within by a political crisis (an implacable struggle between the factions in power), economic crisis (inflation over 40 per cent, growth of minus six per cent, unemployment at 30 per cent), a social crisis (industrial workers unpaid for more than nine months, unprecedented social movements). With greater firmness, the international community could have achieved much more than the permanent cessation of the production of nuclear weapons.
However, these permanent members of the Security Council (plus Germany) forgot the four binding resolutions they themselves have adopted in the past to force the Iranian regime to suspend ‘all activities related to uranium enrichment’ and after the first wave of French firmness, they gave priority to political and economic factors that have guided decades the policy of appeasement with Iran, making unnecessary concessions that complicate the next six months.
The international community has already lost eleven years in endless negotiations following the historical revelations of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in August 2002, in a press conference in Washington, that revealed the existence of two illegal nuclear sites illegal in Iran intended to build nuclear weapons – Natanz (for uranium enrichment) and Arak (for the production of plutonium), hitherto unknown to the IAEA.
The US president admitted years later: “If it were not for the revelations of the Iranian opposition, we would never have known that Iran’s nuclear program was at such an advanced stage.”
Despite the posturing of a so-called ‘regional superpower’, it was a weak and breathless regime that sat at the negotiating table at the Palais des Nations. Even the Iranians in Geneva acknowledged in speeches that the regime’s ‘coffers are empty’.
The 5 +1 should now be focusing on the danger of religious tyranny and the sponsorship of international terrorism as Iran prepares to arm an atomic bomb, rather than giving the regime another six months to plot new deceptions.


 

RELATED ARTICLES

Selected

Latest News and Articles

Most Viewed

[custom-twitter-feeds]