Iran: Appeasement is not diplomacy

Today (5 August), the Iranian regime is going to inaugurate as President Ebrahim Raisi (pictured), universally condemned for ordering the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, following a decree by then Supreme leader, Rouhollah Khomeini to execute all political prisoners who remains loyal to the Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/ MEK). 30,000 were massacred in a span of a few months, writes Shahin Gobadi.

Asked about his role in those mass killings in his first press conference, Raisi boasted brazenly that he was proud of his record as a jurist who’s fought for the people’s security and claimed that his sacrifice should be rewarded. Whether he went on offense to avoid being driven into the corner or if he truly believes what he said, it just reveals his beastly nature.

The decision by the EU External Services to send a senior official to inauguration of a mass murderer is troubling and blatantly contradicts what the Service’s top official, Josep Borrell, said on 8 December 2020: “We must never forget the atrocities of the past. We owe it to the victims of these crimes against humanity. We also owe it to ourselves: we can only build a better future if we acknowledge the dark days of the past. It is a moral obligation towards humanity. Genocide does not just happen overnight. It is a process. There are always warning signs. We must act upon these signs immediately.”    

Do the crimes Raisi has perpetrated not amount to crimes against humanity?

Lessons in history have served as bitter reminders that appeasement always has the opposite effect.

Back in the 18^th century, the young United States of America was dealing with one of its first international crises. Pirates were hijacking more than a dozen American naval vessels and they were demanding huge ransoms. At the end of the day, the US Congress decided to pay the ransom, hoping to see an end to the crisis. As one million US dollars were sent to the pirates, another group of sea bandits from Tripoli intervened and asked for their share from the US. But the crisis didn’t stop there either. The pirates learned how effective their extortion tactics have been and eventually, the number of Americans kidnapped in the subsequent 20 years reached 700. As G. Thomas Woodward from the Congressional Budget Office wrote: “One characteristic common to all diplomatic dealings with the Barbary powers was that no payment was ever final.”

As soon as the Islamic Republic took grip on Iran in 1979, the first major international interaction was storming the US embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. In the last four decades, the ruling cleric continued to use kidnapping and terrorism to extort countries like France, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, UK, US, Australia and the like to force them into concessions such as releasing detained terrorists or law breakers. For its part, the West has responded to these transgression by turning the other cheek, always claiming that ‘diplomacy’ is the right approach, when dealing with the highest international security concerns.

Ever since 2002, when the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) exposed Iran’s hitherto clandestine nuclear weapons program, the latter has become another crisis the international community has had to deal with. Even though the UN’s veto-wielding powers and the UNSC have forced Iran to walk back some of its nuclear advancements throughout the years, the dossier has certainly become another toll of extortion for Tehran to ‘leverage’ itself on any serious discussion with the global community. After the Trump Administration withdrew from the nuclear deal, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the ruling clerics retaliated with the same tactic they knows best; advancing the nuclear program up to enrichment levels far beyond the JCPOA ever allowed.

Responding to Iran’s breach of its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal, the European signatories of the JCPOA (E3) pushed Washington to get back into the deal. Meanwhile, the Iranians kept increasing the uranium enrichment up to 60% purity and threatening to enrich to 90% purity. Europe’s response? Stressing on diplomacy even more.

As if all the concessions have not been enough, the EU is sending Enrique Mora, the Deputy High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy to attend Raisi’s inauguration on August 5.

As shameful as this latest gesture is, obviously, the West has a serious problem with extortion and bullying; it is bowing instead of standing tall. If ‘the Free World’ truly wants to push back and stop the endless cycle of blackmail and political coercion, it only has to stick to its own values and history. The Magnitsky Act, passed in the U.S. Congress and signed into law by in December 2012 has also become law in the European Union since March 2019. The approach to Raisi is a litmus test as to whether or not the West will uphold its principles and whether its interpretation of diplomacy is any better than the appeasement, Neville Chamberlain tried, and of course failed in the 1938.

Instead of being in the same room with a mass murderer, Enrique Mora, or his boss, Borrell, should reject the sham election as being illegitimate and not the expression of the will of the Iranian people. Their policy, as millions have risen up in Iran for water, electricity, food, and most important of all, freedom, to the medieval theocracy should be to refer the Iranian regime’s appalling dossier on human rights to the UN Security Council so that an international commission of inquiry is established to hold Raisi and other leaders of this murderous regime to account for crimes against humanity in the past four decades.

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