Maryam Rajavi: By relying on its social base and unremitting struggle, the Iranian Resistance is the force for change

Message on the occasion of the Iranian New Year, Nowrouz

The year 1386 (2007) was truly a year of advancement and pride for the Iranian people’s Resistance and one of defection and a downward spiral for the mullahs’ regime, which showed that we are in the phase of the regime’s implosion and overthrow.

The year that passed witnessed an unrelenting cycle of protests and demonstrations across the occupied nation. It was sparked over the issue of fuel rationing and its flames engulfed the neighborhoods, cities, universities and factories, from Haft Tappeh to Zahedan, Orumieh, Shahroud, Babol, Ghaemshahr, Bandar Turkmen, Sanandaj, Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz, where everyone was chanting the slogans of those in Ashraf:

We are men and women of struggle. Fight and we will fight to the end.
We will remain steadfast, and we will sing until the end,
Even if bullets and hardships come our way, the movement will continue. And freedom is our inalienable right.

For the mullahs, 2007 ended bitterly as it began, with UN Security Council resolutions 1747 and 1803. In between, the mullahs tried their utmost, through an assortment of ploys, to avert the passage of the resolutions: from taking the British sailors hostage to deceiving US intelligence agencies about their clandestine nuclear program. But those efforts failed. In other words, the Iranian Resistance did not allow them to achieve their ends. It exposed the mullahs’ witchcraft with a major revelation, which represented an extremely crushing blow to the nuclear program of the ruling religious fascism, namely the plan to build warheads and evil plans to make the bomb. So severe was the blow that much like Hassan Rowhani, the former nuclear negotiator, the mullahs’ President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said explicitly that everything began from the summer of 2002 and the revelation about Natanz and Arak nuclear facilities by the Mojahedin.

So vulnerable has the position of the regime become that Ali Larijani, the Secretary for the Supreme National Security Council; Maj. Gen. Rahim Safavi, Commander in Chief of the Revolutionary Guards Corps; Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, his Deputy and Deputy Interior Minister and many other senior and junior officials tendered their resignations.

And the mullahs’ President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was humiliated wherever he went, from Columbia University in New York to Tehran’s Polytechnic University to the streets of Baquba, Baghdad and Ramadi in Iraq. In a major defeat for Ahmadinejad when he went to Iraq, the Iraqi people expressed their abhorrence toward the hidden occupation of Iraq by the Iranian regime. Many Iraqi political currents described this development as the most important development as regards Iraqi relations with the Iranian regime in the past five years, so much so that today, in and out of Iran, Ahmadinejad is the most hated person in the eyes of everyone.

As the year came to a close, the mullahs’ Majlis (Parliamentary) elections completed the unipolarization and further contraction of the regime. Before all else, the election was a resounding NO by the Iranian nation to dictatorship. This was the ultimate defeat of the reactionaries and despots. More than 95 percent of Iranians boycotted the farce. So pathetic was the election that according to figures announced by the regime, only 26 percent of those in Tehran voted. The candidate who came in first received only 11.5 percent of the vote and the one coming in last received six percent of the vote. The situation remains the same in major cities, such as Mashad, Tabriz, etc. The highest number of vote cast was around 10 percent of the eligible voters.

It was later announced that the so-called “Principlist faction” which supports Ahmadinejad had obtained more than 70 percent of the vote.

The defeated factions, such as Mohammad Khatami’s are truly pathetic. The maximum number of seats they were allowed to compete for were about 30 seats, or less than 15 percent of the 290-seat Majlis.

In Tehran, which is a microcosm of the entire nation with 30 seats in the Majlis, 18 of the 19 candidates who made it in the first round were from Ahmadinejad’s faction and the other person belongs to Khamenei’s camp, but a mild critic of the government. The situation will not get any better in the second round.

The new Majlis in its totality is one of henchmen and torturers. One of the deputies, Ruhollah Hosseinian, lauded the former deputy Intelligence Minister, who was implicated in the murder of more than 100 dissident writers and intellectuals in the 1990s, as a great martyr of the regime.

Another is Fatemah Alia, a woman who was personally involved in torturing many Mojahedin women in Evin Prison. Still another is Mullah Morteza Agha Tehrani, one of the ringleaders of the plain-clothes agents who are mentor to the henchmen in Ahmadinejad’s cabinet. The same is true for other cities.

One can arrive at a better understanding of the status of the elections when taking into consideration the fact that the regime was under pressure from six sides:

1. Internal defections, among the highest echelons of the regime and further contraction of the ruling clique;

2. Economic sanctions and the adoption of resolutions, in particular the Security Council resolutions;

3. The inclusion of the Ministry of Defense and its affiliated organs, the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the terrorist Qods Force, and most important banks in the terrorism on nuclear proliferators blacklists;

4. Deadlock in Iraq, especially following the formation of the Awakening Councils, which entered the fray as the most important security and military factors;

5. The departure of a key regime ally in Europe, Jacque Chirac and the latest position by the European Union about the elections in Iran, describing it as “neither free nor fair;”

6. The status and advances made by the Iranian Resistance in and out of Iran through solidifying the third option, which believes the solution for the Iranian crisis is neither the continuation of appeasement nor a foreign war, but democratic change in Iran through the Iranian people and Resistance.

Four years ago, during the Majlis elections at the end of 2003, the regime embarked on unipolarizing the regime. They had been emboldened from the windfall gains of the war in Iraq, especially the disarming of the National Liberation Army and the June 17, 2003 raid.

The regime’s unipolarity emerged with Ahmadinejad’s Presidency in July 2005 and was solidified in the Majlis elections.

Now, the question is: What does Khamenei need a Majlis comprised of henchmen and torturers for? And for what purpose has he, as his clique say, “engineered” the formation of such an assembly?

Is it because he wants to preserve the status quo? Or he is in this way trying to set up the work plan for further adventurism and war?

What Khamenei said in his message immediately after the election was that despite the “adoption of the Security Council Resolution,” “the election boycott,” “blackening the country’s management,” “frightening the public from the danger of an attack by the enemy,” “the allegation of an unhealthy election,” “the pretenses of popular disillusionment and apathy,” a Majlis has been set up that is “committed, elite, opposed to Western arrogance and powerful.”

In effect, what Khamenei is saying is that he is preparing to challenge all those models which are not compatible with religious fascism.

A day later, in his congratulatory message to the Supreme Leader, Ahmadinejad described the election as one which would “safeguard the right to enjoy the capacity to acquire nuclear energy with exemplary prowess.” So, he had sought a Parliament, which would follow, without bickering the Supreme Leader and his minions on the path toward exiting the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, obtaining the nuclear bomb.

The situation was such that the European Union and the United States affirmed the illegitimacy of the elections and said that the elections “were neither free nor fair.”

Of course, we welcome this change of position by the European Union and consider it as a turning point which has been imposed by the regime, especially since France, Germany and the US declared the elections as not being free, fair or legitimate.

May I say in passing that our only crime from the beginning of our political campaign post 1979 revolution until today has been a demand for popular sovereignty as well as a democratic and fair election.

Indeed, have the NCRI and its President, not said from June 20, 1981 until today that we want an election based on popular sovereignty and not based on the absolute rule of the clergy? In September 2003, on behalf of the Iranian Resistance, I called for a referendum on regime change based on the Iranian people’s free vote.
In a message to our compatriots in London in December 2004, I said, “The real yardstick and demarcation between terrorism and legitimate Resistance is whether one rejects or accepts elections and the plebiscite under the United Nations auspices or any other competent and impartial international agency. With this yardstick and definition, one can easily set aside ambiguous and wide-ranging interpretations and biased political labels and demarcate clearly between those who respect the people’s vote and free elections and fight for freedom and popular sovereignty and those, who like the mullahs ruling Iran, refuse to hold free elections and plebiscite. With that realistic yardstick, Iran’s combatants of freedom can never be tainted with the brush of terrorism.”

But in so far as the Iranian people and Resistance are concerned, 2007 was a year of advances and reaching new heights. It can not be said that the greatest conspiracies to preserve the regime and destroy the Iranian people’s Resistance were quashed.
This was achieved through,

1. The unsparing material and moral support of the Iranian people and our compatriots outside Iran, manifested for example in the major gathering of Iranians last summer in Paris;

2. The round-the-clock efforts of our brothers and sisters in Ashraf and in the unrelenting work of the NCRI, its members and supporters the world over;

3. The victories in courts, especially the annulment of the terrorist label in the UK;

4. The resolutions in the European Parliament, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and its Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in support of the judgment by the court in Luxembourg and in the United Kingdom;

5. The support of more than 1,500 European Parliamentarians and Parliamentary Committees for the Iranian Resistance and the third option for democratic change in Iran;

6. The realization by the international community of the nuclear and terrorist threats by the religious dictatorship as the main threat to global peace and security, as the Iranian Resistance had declared three decades ago;

7. The resolutions in the European Parliament and reports by the United Nations missions and the UN Secretary General’s Special Rapporteurs concerning the legal status of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) in Iraq, including the recent report by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq about the status of PMOI members as protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention and a reiteration of the principle of non-refoulement, which forms the pillar of refugee laws;

8. The great solidarity congress in Ashraf and the declaration by 450,000 Iraqis in the Diyala Province in Iraq;

9. The support of 3,000 tribal sheikhs;

10. The support of 300,000 Shiites in southern Iraq and a major political movement of Shiite Ulemas in defense of Ashraf;

11. The support of all democratic parties and nationalist currents, groups and personalities, whether Shiite, Sunni or Kurd and Turkmen in Iraq, to the point where except for the regime’s operatives and allies, most Iraqis and nationalist forces consider the Mojahedin and the Iranian Resistance as their strategic ally and support for peace, security and freedom.

The Iranian Resistance is the force for change. By relying on its social base and its unremitting struggle, it is advancing and on the offensive. It will bring freedom to Iran.

The mullahs’ regime has reached the end of the line. Appeasement and concessions are doubly counterproductive and futile. In its non-stop activities in the New Year, the regime will pass through such fragile milestones which will transform such policies to the detriment of the regime in its entirety.