Iran opposition leader urges Europe to support “Resistance”

Iran Focus: Strasbourg, Apr. 10 – Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi called on the West on Monday to end all efforts at negotiating with the hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and instead support the “Iranian Resistance”. Iran Focus

Strasbourg, Apr. 10 – Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi called on the West on Monday to end all efforts at negotiating with the hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and instead support the “Iranian Resistance”.

Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, was speaking at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, where she had been invited by the Liberal Party Group to make an address about how to tackle Tehran’s challenge to the West and outline her visions for a “future democratic Iran” .

“Once again, I call on the [international community”> to make this choice in support of the Iranian people and their Resistance”, Rajavi said, as she held up pictures of hangings carried out in Iran.

She called on the international community to offer the Iranian Resistance an official observer status at the United Nations. “The time has come for the international community to recognise the Iranian people’s Resistance and grant it an observer seat in the United Nations”.

“Today, Europe is facing a choice: A choice between firmness [against Tehran”> or compromise, which would allow the mullahs to arm themselves with nuclear weapons”, she said.

She added that the West had to support the “Iranian people’s demand for democratic change” to prevent the otherwise inevitable outcome of “tragedy and war” with Iran.

Rajavi urged the European Union to end its blacklisting of the main Iranian opposition group – Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK/PMOI) – as a terrorist organisation. “Five hundred pre-eminent lawyers and more than 1,000 parliamentarians in Europe have declared their opposition to the terror label against the Mojahedin, because it allows the mullahs to suppress a legitimate resistance”, she said.

The MeK, a member organisation of the NCRI, was listed as a terrorist organisation by the European Union in mid-2002, in what the EU’s then-Spanish leadership called “a goodwill gesture to Tehran”.

In her presentation, Rajavi announced a ten-point plan for a “future Iran” where citizens’ rights would be respected and “peaceful coexistence” with its neighbours would be sought.

Among other items in the plan was an Iran “free of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction”.

Several dozen representatives of the 46-member states of the Council of Europe attended the meeting which was chaired by British Peer, Lord Russell-Johnston of the Liberal Democratic Party.