Madam, – As one of the protesters present at the meeting at which the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki spoke in Dublin last week, I read Iranian Ambassador Ebrahim Rahimpour’s letter (June 16th) with interest.
I have lived in Ireland for the past six years as an Iranian exile and peaceful political activist, vocally opposing the Islamic regime of Iran. At the meeting, I protested against Mr Mottaki’s claim to represent the Iranian people and the many ethnic groups within Iran.
People in Ireland may be unaware that five political prisoners, four of them Kurdish, were executed in Evin prison in Iran, on May 9th. Thirty more political prisoners have been sentenced to death and are awaiting execution. Their crime? Speaking out in defence of human rights in Iran.
The threatening and heavy-handed attempt to silence and eject Reza Shiraz and I from the meeting in Dublin last week reminds me of how any voice of protest is dealt with in Iran by the regime’s thugs.
Reading Mr Rahimpour’s disjointed letter, it’s clear he is rattled by last Wednesday’s events.
He uses the Gaza aid convoy as a red herring to distract attention from discussion of the Islamic regime’s appalling human rights abuses. The attack on the flotilla, although disturbing, has no bearing on the implications of Mottaki’s visit to Ireland.
Mr Rahimpour attempts to silence the regime’s critics even in Ireland by implying that our protest was a stunt. Referring to the citizenship status of the protesters is irrelevant – anyone deserves to voice an opinion when defending the human rights of others irrespective of their status.
The ambassador’s implication that Reza Shiraz and I are members of the political group MKO is false – yet we defend MKO and any other political grouping’s right to oppose the Islamic regime. He describes MKO as terrorists, but it is the regime which has executed thousands of political opponents – in Iran and overseas – since its inception.
Mr Rahimpur refers to Reza Shiraz and I as “offenders”. He might be interested to hear that voicing one’s opinion in Ireland is not an offence. The offence committed that evening under Irish law was the threatening and vicious assault on us at the hands of the minister’s security staff.
Is it not telling that Mr Mottaki did not feel well enough armed with his own rhetoric to answer the questions I posed to him? Far simpler to suppress troubling questions with violence. – Yours, etc,