ISJ – Former Foreign Minister and current Lithuanian MP Audronius Ažubalis spoke on June 30 at a high-level conference near Paris as part of the “World Summit for a Free Iran”. The conference, entitled “Free Iran 2023 – Onward to a democratic republic”, consisted of four panels.
Mr Ažubalis took the floor on the panel concerning European politics and Iran. Here are excerpts from his speech:
Keeping the Iranian cause alive
I’ve spent 32 years of my life living in an occupied country. Thank goodness, to our allies all around the world that Lithuania’s occupation has never been recognized. And thanks to our immigration, who mostly lived and are living in the United States and in some European countries, who didn’t let the Western world forget about the Baltic states. That is why your role as an emigrant is a crucial one, keeping the Iranian cause alive, because we know how sometimes, tragic events become boring to the world politicians. Why is that? Because new tragedies are coming, and the old one is successfully forgetting.
During these 60 years, we had a lot of different organizations abroad. Sometimes they fight between themselves, conservatives, social democrats, liberals. But when the question came to the fight for freedom, they stood united.
The second thing is about Europe. During almost 60 years of our occupation, the major supporter wasn’t Europe, sorry to say. Europe at that time had a very good trade and very good benefits with the Soviet Union.
I think that you should double or triple your efforts working with the United States Congress, as by the way, Taiwanese are doing now and quite successfully. Do you know which group of friendship in the Congress is the biggest one? The group with Taiwan, not with Israel. That is why Iranian people, Iranian opposition, should work very actively.
Trade prevails over values
Now about Europe, Lithuania became a member of the EU in 2004, and a member of NATO in 2004. It looks fine. But I do remember, and I see it now in the case with Ukraine, that the greediness among the European countries is not going less. It’s at the same level, or is going up. As I am sometimes saying, the greedy Europe. Because the trade sometimes prevails over values. Someone said that have a strong moral code. I have some doubts. Because for example, now we passed 11 packages of sanctions against Russia. However, in each package, there are many derogations, which help the business communities to successfully supply the Russian military with high-tech, and so on. Is it fair? Of course not.
Moreover, about the sanctions to Iran, I just made a small investigation. On the violation for human rights, the EU sanctioned a total of 126 individuals and 11 entities regime. What does it mean? It is peanuts. Now Lithuania is pushing EU Council to sanction Iran on the UIV exports and the producing UIVs, which are playing crucial role now in the Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Do you think we are successful with some of our allies? For the time being, no. Even more, last year Iran supplied 1,700 UIVs, and this year, they opened a line for producing UIVs in Tatarstan, in the free economic zone in Russia. They put 1 billion US dollars on that. Why are we not sanctioning? I don’t know. It is a question about who is ruling Europe.
When we are talking about EU institutions, the freest EU institution, of course, is the European Parliament. But their power mostly lies on political pressure on the member states to do a commission. But when the talks are coming about the concrete regulations, I think here the corporate power of European business prevails. And I could give a lot of examples about it.
We must have a strategy
However, despite all our unity, the biggest part of Europeans are still very keen to make business and sometimes take a blind eye on what is happening now. We should have a strategy, but we do not have a strategy, because it’s quite difficult to get a common agreement. With Iran, for example, this initiative, which was very much praised some time ago about nuclear agreement, I think here President Trump was right. He said that it was just a window of opportunity for the Iranian regime to build muscles without any long-term agreement. Because agreement was just for 15 years. But during 15 years, the Iranian regime could rebuild its economy.
And the last thing is about what happened in 1990. When we announced that we had established our independence, what did we get at that time from the West? “Stop it! Do not play with fire, because you could make an obstacle to Gorbachev.” Our answer was very clear. Forget about Gorbachev, we are declaring our independence. And of course, it causes at that time a lot of headache in Washington and in some European capitals as well. But when we started to win politically against Gorbachev, together with Yeltsin, we saw that the biggest powers started to listen to us.
What is the lesson? First, you should reach some certain point in your fight against regime. Then the Western capitals would see something is going to happen in Iran. And after that, of course, all the countries will rush to say, look, we are supporting, what do you need? Guns? Please. What do you need? Money? Please. But the most difficult, most tragic job lies on your nation’s shoulders. It may not sound very great, but it is a reality. If you want to take freedom, win freedom.
