Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon from Brussels, and thank you for the opportunity to address this most distinguished forum.
I am also very pleased and honoured to speak before you, in particular Mr. Irwin Cotler, a man I strongly admire for his work and his advocacy on human rights issues.
I would like to draw your attention to a number of issues the preceding speaker mentioned, and I would like to expand on them.
On June 12, 2009, Iran will go to the polls to elect a new President. There is a sense of anticipation among many policy-makers, especially here in Brussels and indeed across western Europe, that the election of a new President in Iran, and the hope that the present President may be ousted and replaced with a more moderate figure at the helm of Iran's executive power is something to count on as a promise for turning the page in the relations between the international community and Iran on a number of critical files, including, but not only, the concern we all share about Iran's nuclear program.
It's extremely important to emphasize the significance of these elections and the meaning of a possible change of the Iranian President. The leading candidates running for the presidency today alongside the incumbent, Mr. Ahmadinejad, are all in one way or another linked to the early revolutionary days of the Islamic republic, and they all have an attachment or a link to the Revolutionary Guards. Their power is very much like my own power in my organization. The President is not the supreme holder of power in Iran, as was mentioned. He's more like the executive director, somebody who has some influence and role in formulating policy, but by no means the last word.
While we pin so much hope on change in that province, we should open our eyes to the fact that Iran, despite the thin veneer of democracy provided by an electoral process for the choice and selection of some officials, remains at heart a political structure and a regime that is profoundly illiberal and very remote from the practice and observance of fundamental democratic values, which must include the respect of basic human rights, civil liberties, and political freedoms.
Iran is ranked sixth and seventh, respectively, by Freedom House when it comes to civil liberties and political freedom, very much in the same category as countries such as Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. So we should not hold any illusions about the possibility that a politician who may be slightly more polished in his speeches and more educated in the way he confronts and deals with western diplomats will hold the promise of change. Polite conversation and successful diplomacy are two very different things. And we should realize what at heart Iran remains--namely, a revolutionary power intent on asserting its role in the region on the basis of an ideology, and a power driven by the desire to expand its hegemony regionally and beyond in the name of that ideology.
The founder of the Islamic republic, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, in many of his speeches during his exile in Iraq and later on in Paris, always emphasized the unjust nature of the monarchical political structure that ruled his country before the revolution. His challenge was rooted in a revolutionary interpretation of Shia theology that not only assumed that in the thousand-year-long split between Shia and Sunni, the Shia had been deprived of political authority in the world of Islam, and that was something to regret, but he actually hoped for an instrument of power that would change that balance between Sunni and Shia. His attack on the monarchical order of the shah was couched in theological terms and meant to target also the monarchical rule across the Sunni countries of the region.
It would be a mistake, though, to consider the Iranian revolution as simply a reverse image of the Sunni-Salafi hatred for Shiism. The Iranian revolution and its religious language always sought to overcome and transcend that division and speak ecumenically, trying to reach across the Sunni-Shia divide in the name of a unified Islam that would reassert its power and challenge the unjust order that, according to the revolutionary ideologies and founders of the Islamic republic, dominated the region. It also sought to transcend the division between Islam and the rest of the world in the name of a revolutionary ideology that, while speaking the language of Islam, was also deeply rooted in Marxist revolutionary theories. We have to understand the revolutionary republic of Iran as a combination of the subversive and the divine.
Therefore, when we look at Iran today and we see Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, we must understand this pursuit in this context--namely, a country that has survived a challenge to its rule and its internal order through a very long and traumatic war, that has slowly reasserted itself and its power in the region, that has slowly rebuilt its economy, and that now wants to flex its muscles and export its ideology and its influence across the Middle East.
Some people say that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons because it aims to actually make true its threats of annihilation of the state of Israel. I do not think we should discount the rhetoric that comes out of Tehran when it comes to Israel. But we should also not delude ourselves that if Iran doesn't mean that rhetoric, the danger is gone. Let me explain. Even if the Iranian leadership uses the rhetoric only as a tool for propaganda and in truth wants nuclear weapons just to somehow strengthen its power and protect itself and its survival, the meaning of that acquisition is that Iran, in the combination of nuclear weapons and its ideology, will destabilize the region for decades to come and will make it impossible for the forces in the region that seek reconciliation among peoples, resolution of armed conflicts, the defeat of radical ideologies, and the assertion of human rights across the Middle East to actually triumph.
Many people draw comparison between the current standoff with Iran on the nuclear file and the time of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union had a nuclear arsenal. They point out the fact that the Soviet Union, despite its communist revolutionary ideology, could be deterred, and we could strike a balance--perhaps one that was fragile, but one that held water for almost 50 years, ensuring peace despite the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Now, if you live in Canada or in the United States or indeed in western Europe, your memory may tell you that indeed that was a time of peace. But if you were an eastern European, you know that the price for that fragile balance was totalitarian communist oppression for nearly half a century. You should also know, if you come from different regions of the world, that the price of peace, or stability rather, and the avoidance of a nuclear confrontation during the Cold War meant the freezing of conflicts and the creation of areas of influence across the world where the two ideological opponents fought each other by proxy.
If Iran achieved nuclear weapons, even in the eventuality that it did not wish to use them, in order to make true its threats of annihilation against Israel, the most likely consequence for the region is that we would have to acquiesce to some sort of Middle East Yalta, where Iran would wish its areas of influence to be recognized. Our ability therefore to address the challenges in those areas, including the current ongoing conflicts such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, and crises in Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq, would be unsolvable, or at least would become solvable only at the price of compromises that would fundamentally contradict the interests of the free world.
Most important of all, through the freezing of crises, the emboldening of radicals, and the possibility of using nuclear weapons as an instrument for power projection, Iran would destabilize countries in the region. It would assert its hegemony and push out of the region the presence, influence, and role played by western powers--first and foremost by the United States. As a result, the hope of spreading human rights and asserting basic freedoms in Iran and elsewhere would be lost for decades to come. We could only count on the internal forces of opposition to the regime--and that is a meagre hope--to bring about change.
As we look at the upcoming elections and the two main contestants for the presidency--the incumbent, and Mir Hossein Mousavi--one is a more polite version and the other is a less polite version of a very radical ideology that has consistently and systematically oppressed religious minorities across different presidencies and times of Iranian political history over the last 30 years.
Iran is a country that asserts itself as the representative of Islam in the world, yet if you go to Tehran you cannot find or build a Sunni mosque. So the repression of religious minorities, in the case of the Bahá'ís, has turned into systematic persecution. There is the oppression of journalists. You are all painfully aware of the plight of Roxana Saberi in the Evin prison in Tehran, which has come to the attention of the media in recent weeks. There is the systematic abuse and arbitrary use of punishment, including the death penalty, through trials that make a mockery of the very concept of justice. All these things will continue to be the trademark of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The achievement of nuclear weapons for that country will mean profound instability in the region and terrible damage to our interests and hopes of bringing more stability, freedom, and peace in the Middle East. It will result in a terrible and perhaps insufferable price for millions of individuals across the Middle East who hope, as humans, to be treated with more dignity and respect by their governments.
So I think it is imperative for us and for the free nations of the world to realize that human rights are one of the most important antidotes to counter countries like Iran that combine the subversive ideology that drives the regime with the ruthless aspiration to impose their own world view onto others through the achievement of such deadly instruments.
We must, as western nations, improve, increase, strengthen, and intensify our support for internal dissident groups. We must strengthen our ties with Iranian civil society. We must mandate our diplomats who serve in Iran to continue to speak to and increase their contacts with dissidents and shun the regime, while talking to those in Iran who stand for freedom. We must improve the understanding of the true nature of the regime and the potential threat it poses to the region and to its own people among our public opinions through a number of measures.
Last but not least, once we know both the nature of the regime and the goals it seeks to achieve through the pursuit of a nuclear program, we must strengthen and double our resolve to prevent Iran from achieving its goals. We must do this, first and foremost, by denying Iran and its emissaries the ability, through subterfuge, to access or come into our own societies and use the tools offered by our free and open societies to procure the kind of technology they need to advance their goal.
I would be very happy in the Q and A to offer you a number of examples where societies and companies created by Iran, ostensibly through legal means, exist across the western world, whether in Europe or North America, Canada included, through which Iran actually goes around sanctions and measures and procures the kind of technology that will enable Iran to achieve its goal.
It is imperative for us, I think, to realize the kind of price we will pay if the finish line is crossed by the regime in the intervening months, the cost that will be paid by millions of individuals for the denial of their most basic rights, the instability that will stem from that achievement by the regime, and the inability to solve crises for decades to come in the region. We have the tools and the means to advance such goals and to prevent Iran from advancing its own goals. We have an instrument, which is the assertion, through policies—not just words—of the values for which the free nations of the world stand, and I think it's imperative for us to seek all the means at our disposal to prevent Iran from achieving the goals of domination, which such weapons would give the regime, and the terrible damage to the region and the values of freedom we hold so dear.
I thank you very much for listening to me today.