Speech of Maryam Rajavi -City Hall Paris 2nd district

First of all, let me praise Mayor Jacques Boutault, Mayor Jean-Pierre Muller, and Mayor Jean-François Legaret, joint chairmen of the Committee of Mayors in Defence of Ashraf, for organizing this conference.

The extensive support by French mayors and elected officials for the Iranian people and the Iranian Resistance, and particularly for the freedom-fighters in Camps Ashraf and Liberty, is an expression of the commitment of French citizens and elected officials to defend the cause of liberty and human rights. In their fight against the ogre of tyranny and fundamentalism, the Iranian people are honoured indeed to have France’s elected representatives standing at their side.

This conference takes place after yesterday’s decision by the P5+1 to extend the deadline for the nuclear talks with the clerical regime, giving the regime yet more time to push global and regional peace and security to the edge of catastrophe. The failure to strike an agreement after a year of negotiations delivers two essential messages.

First, the clerical regime is so weak and vulnerable that despite receiving unjustifiable concessions by the U.S. and other western governments, it has proven incapable of abandoning its bomb-making project. This weakness and vulnerability has been compounded by the blow it received with the removal from power of its chief crony, Nouri al-Maliki, in Iraq. The mullahs’ Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wants to obtain a nuclear weapon in order to maintain his power.

Second, the policy of doling out concessions to the mullahs while sacrificing the Iranian people and the Iranian Resistance has not yielded any results and has been a failure. The continuation of such appeasement is tantamount to handing out a nuclear weapon to the mullahs, which will be an unforgivable betrayal of global peace and security.

At the beginning of the negotiations last year, western governments retreated from UN Security Council resolutions regarding the mullahs’ nuclear program, and thus laid the groundwork for yesterday’s failure.

The invisible part of this incredibly feeble behaviour has been the shameful silence with respect to the dreadful human rights violations in Iran as well as the regime’s criminal meddling in the region, from Syria, Iraq and Lebanon to Yemen. The western governments’ silence has sacrificed the fate of the Iranian people and the peoples of the region. America’s complicity in the forcible displacement of Ashrafis and their relocation to Camp Liberty, which is an oversized prison, was also part of the incentive packages handed out to the mullahs during negotiations that began in secret in 2011.

But, in practice, all of these concessions have produced the opposite result.

The lesson gleaned from 12 years of destructive and damaging negotiations with the regime has been that the only policy that can prevent the regime from obtaining the bomb is based on firmness and resolve. Such a policy would include a demand for the full implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions, a complete halt in uranium enrichment, and snap inspections of all suspect centers and sites.

At the same time, a policy of firmness and resolve must include the recognition of the Iranian people’s resistance for regime change.

Respected Guests,

Currently, the world is rightly concerned about crimes committed by the un-Islamic group ISIS in the region. In reality, it was the mullahs’ support for Bashar Assad in Syria and for the sectarian government of Maliki in Iraq that led to the rise of ISIS. ISIS is the product of sectarian policies, suppression and marginalization of vast portions of populations in Iraq and Syria by Maliki and Assad at the behest of the ruling clerics in Iran.

Yet, we are once again coming across a dangerous effort to overlook crimes committed by the Iranian regime and its militias in Iraq and Syria. Worse still, some introduce the clerical regime as an ally in the fight against ISIS, either by making an unwitting mistake or acting in line with their own interests.

In August, the U.S. President sent a letter to khamenei, promising that in exchange for signing the nuclear deal, the Iranian regime would be pulled into the international coalition against ISIS. This is the persistence and repetition of the same grave mistake that produced to the current crisis in the region in the first place.

Involving the mullahs in the Iraqi crisis would neither stop the regime’s nuclear program nor would it put an end to ISIS. On the contrary, it would fuel the ISIS terror machine because the Iranian regime’s presence in the region intensifies sectarian conflict.

Today, French families are concerned about the large number of French youth joining Jihadists.

The important question is: How can this crisis be solved? Should the source of fundamentalism and terrorism, which is the Iranian regime, be given legitimacy, or should it be resisted? After a 35-year experience in the struggle against dictatorship and religious fundamentalism, the Iranian people and the Iranian Resistance would answer that we must stand up to this regime and refuse to cooperate with it under any circumstance.

Distinguished Guests,

The clerical regime’s deep crises can be seen in several fundamental realities:

First, in the growing trend of anti-regime protests.

The regime’s barbaric suppression in recent months has strengthened the mood of protest among the Iranian population.

In October, the people’s angry reaction to acid attacks against by women by the mullahs’ agents, including a large rally in the historical city of Isfahan in which women played an instrumental role, sounded alarm bells for the regime.

Since today marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, I would like to salute all Iranian women who are waging resistance against the mullahs’ barbarity.

According to the regime’s officials, over the past year, at least 3,000 various acts of protest have taken place in Iran. The Iranian people spare no opportunity to protest. Recently, when a young singer passed away, a large number of people poured into the streets, effectively lining up against the regime. In some cities, security forces attacked people and arrested some of them.

In response to the people’s disenchantment, the mullahs carry out public executions, hanging one person every eight hours. But, such suppression no longer has the required impact. Recently, Ali Jannati, a member of Hassan Rouhani’s cabinet, confessed: “The number of executions and those in line to be executed is staggering.” He also confessed that the policy of executing people has been a failure.

This is particularly true as Rouhani, the regime’s president, has failed in even pretending to be a moderate.

Dear Friends,

Now that the religious fascism ruling Iran has been encircled by political, economic and social crises, both domestically and internationally, it feels its existence threatened more than ever before by the organized opposition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK). The mere presence of this opposition movement infuses the threat of overthrow into all the existing challenges confronting the regime.

That is why confronting this resistance and its members residing at Camp Liberty in Iraq tops the list of the regime’s security priorities.
During the past eight years, the regime’s puppet government in Iraq attacked Ashraf and later Liberty on 27 different occasions, leaving 116 dead, close to 1,400 injured and seven hostages.

22 people have lost their lives as a result of the medical siege. Currently, dozens are in critical condition.

Today, I call on respected mayors to broaden the scope of their support for the Iranian people and the Iranian Resistance.

I anticipate that they convince the French government to lead an international initiative with the following objectives:

1. Adopting a policy of complete firmness towards the mullahs’ project for building a nuclear weapon;
2. Making western governments’ political and trade relations with the Iranian regime contingent on an end to executions;
3. Evicting the religious dictatorship from Syria and Iraq;
4. Putting an end to the unjust siege on Liberty, especially the medical blockade, and declaring Liberty as a refugee camp under the auspices of the United Nations.
5-supporting the Iranian Resistance that is the alternative of religious fundamentalism that its center is at Tehran.

I thank you all very much.