The EU's action today is tantamount to rewarding the criminal mullahs although the situation of human rights in Iran has deteriorated and a greater number of dissidents have been murdered abroad after the EU's April declaration in Luxembourg.
The European Union declared last April that any progress in relations with the Iranian regime "can only be made if the Iranian authorities respect the norms of international law and refrain from acts of terrorism, including against Iranian citizens living abroad and cooperate in preventing such acts." Today, the question is what kind of progress has taken place in any of these fields?
Some 200 persons were executed in public in 1997. No less than 138 of them were executed during Khatami's tenure, including seven who were stoned to death. Since Khatami took office, 24 of the regime's opponents have been assassinated abroad.
On the ninth anniversary of the anti-Islamic fatwa against Rushdie, the regime's Prosecutor General, speaker of the Majlis, Foreign Ministry, the Guards Corps, and many other officials of the regime reiterated that the decree was irrevocable and that it must be carried out, a development which has been unprecedented since 1989.
The escalation of popular uprisings, student demonstrations, and workers' strikes in the past months shows that the people of Iran long for the overthrow of the clerical regime and all its factions. The mullahs lack any social base in Iran; any political and economic investment in this regime is doomed to fail.
The experience of the past nine months shows that Khatami is no different from his predecessors. He has neither the desire nor the power to bring about any change in the mullahs' medieval dictatorship.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
February 23, 1998
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