04.10.2012

Iran Tribunal: Credibility drains away

A prominent member of the German left party, Die Linke, has joined others in withdrawing support for the Iran Tribunal. Tina Becker reports

The Iran Tribunal continues to divide the Iranian left. Ever since Yassamine Mather first exposed the links of the organisers to the imperialist-backed National Endowment for Democracy (NED),¹ Hands Off the People of Iran has been pointing out the nature of the tribunal and urging comrades not to cooperate with it.

Comrade Mather’s articles in the Weekly Worker have been hotly debated in Iran, across Europe and the United States. A number of organisations and individuals have withdrawn their support. Other groups and parties have split over the issue.

During the 1980s, tens of thousands of political activists in Iran were arrested, tortured and sentenced to death. Many leftwingers fled abroad and around 20,000 dissidents were murdered. The worst massacre was in the summer of 1988, when between 5,000 and 7,000 political prisoners - mainly leftwing revolutionaries - were systematically executed in a matter of weeks, their bodies dumped in anonymous mass graves.

Ostensibly the idea of the Iran Tribunal is to investigate this crime. However, its main organiser, Payam Akhavan, is not only centrally involved in a number of organisations that have accepted money from the NED, which is funded by the US congress. For years, he has been pushing his sponsors’ agenda for ever harsher sanctions on Iran (and, in effect, regime change from above). He is one of the authors of the International report published by the ‘Responsibility to Prevent Coalition’, which calls for “a comprehensive set of generic remedies - smart sanctions - to combat the critical mass of threat, including threat-specific remedies for each of the nuclear, incitement, terrorist and rights-violating threats”. This 2010 report was, incidentally, also signed by Tory MP Michael Gove.²

The first stage of the tribunal sat from June 18-22 in Amnesty International’s London HQ, where 60 witnesses (all of them survivors of the massacre or relatives of those murdered) gave accounts to a “truth commission”, detailing their horrific experiences and those of their family members at the hands of the theocratic regime (they had also supplied written statements beforehand). The report of the commission will be handed to a ‘court’ in a second stage of the tribunal. This court, made up of bourgeois ‘human rights’ lawyers from around the world, will meet in The Hague from October 25-27 in order to evaluate the material and announce a ‘judgement’.

But the furore over its funding might well overshadow the proceedings, as this issue starts to impact on the non-Iranian left. When German MP Norman Paech, a leading member of the left party, Die Linke, was confronted with the evidence gathered by comrade Mather, he immediately ended his cooperation with the tribunal. This is his statement in full:

“I have indeed supported the intention and the work of the committee to prepare this tribunal. I still think it is absolutely necessary that all facts about the horrific murders, the torture and the crimes of the 1980s are brought to light. But the background of the funding and the obvious links to the NED, of which I had no knowledge and which have only just been brought to my attention, make it impossible for me to continue this support. I find myself in particularly strong disagreement with the committee when it comes to my resolute opposition to sanctions and the threat of war on Iran. I do not want to be part of a project which is supported by the pro-war Mujahedin.”

He has since come under pressure from a number of Iranians in Germany to withdraw this statement. But his political biography suggests he is astute enough to stand firm.

Paech quit the then governing Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in 2001, when it sent German troops to Afghanistan. He became a member of parliament for Die Linke in 2005, where he acted as the fraction’s spokesperson for foreign affairs and led the (failed) attempt by the party to declare the despatch of fighter jets to Afghanistan to be illegal.

In 2010 he was on board the ship, Mavi Marmara, which attempted to deliver goods and food to Gaza. Notoriously, it was raided by the Israeli army and nine people were killed. Afterwards, Paech and two other Die Linke members on board were heavily criticised by the German media for their involvement in a mission which ‘harboured extremists and Hamas supporters’. Because of the still strong German ‘collective guilt’ complex over World War II and the holocaust, any kind of criticism of Israel is widely misconstrued as anti-Semitism and Paech was slammed even by rightwing sections of his own party.

It is also important to point out that, to his credit, he has been very critical of attempts to charge so-called ‘war criminals’ in international courts. These act very much as the courts of the victors who are rewriting history for their own purpose. They are not interested in and cannot deliver ‘justice’. Neither should we have any illusions in the ability of the US, Israel or any western government to bring democracy to Iran. Iraq and Afghanistan surely serve as horrific examples of imperialist-led ‘regime change from above’.

According to Israeli socialist and leading Hopi supporter Moshé Machover, “The plan is to rebuild the politically unstable Middle East in a US-friendly way and preserve the regional hegemony of Israel. The biggest obstacle here is the regime in Iran.” The Iran Tribunal is a secondary, but nonetheless important, part of that reactionary project.

As a result of Hopi’s work, many Iranians have withdrawn their support. For example, a number of tribunal witnesses have condemned the links of the committee to the NED and publicly stated that they are against war and sanctions on Iran. Several organisations withdrew their witnesses, support for and cooperation with the tribunal - amongst them the communist organisation, Charikhaye Fadai Khalgh (one of the offshoots of the original Fedayeen), and Rahe Kargar (Komitee Ejraai). “It is inconceivable that a genuine tribunal of victims of the 1988 massacre would be associated with individuals or organisations who have such connections to the United States government,” says Mohammad Reza Shalgouni, a founder-member of Rahe Kargar, who spent eight years in prison under the shah.

Others, like the Communist Party of Iran, also dropped their support. The Marxist-Leninist Party of Iran (Maoist) has split over the issue, as has the Iranian Left Socialist Alliance in the US and Canada. Ashraf Dehghani, a prominent member of the Iranian People’s Fadaee Guerrillas, has also come out strongly in opposition to the tribunal.

But perhaps the most ferocious criticism has come from the tribunal’s Norwegian support committee. In two highly critical statements it describes how all tribunal witnesses who arrived in London on June 17 were taken to a briefing session, where they were explicitly asked not to raise any politics during their session. They would not be asked the name of their organisation or their political views, as this was “not a political tribunal”.

Worse, they then spotted that Maurice Copithorne was about to chair one of the sessions - between 1995 and 2002 he acted as UN human rights rapporteur for Iran. This was at a time when the US was making efforts to stage a rapprochement with Tehran and to enlist it as an ally in the fight against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. It was in this geo-political context that Copithorne’s annual ‘human rights’ reports were seen as a political whitewash of the theocracy’s oppression.

Copithorne’s sudden interest in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners (in the new geo-political context of a US-led drive to war against Iran, of course) impressed few, and most of the witnesses from Norway (as well as a number from Great Britain and Germany) decided at this point to withdraw from the proceedings. In protest at the farce unfolding in London, the Norwegian committee decided to dissolve itself, explaining that its members felt they had been “duped” by the organisers.

Despite all of this, there are still a number of Iranian ‘left’ groups who continue to support the tribunal as an important element of their opposition to Tehran: for example, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). For this organisation, the overthrow of the regime has always been the key objective and it explicitly supports sanctions and war to achieve it (in the first Gulf War, it famously sided with Saddam Hussein and supported his attacks on Iran, including militarily). The Mujahedin’s backing for the Iran Tribunal is actually disputed by the organisation, yet the involvement of people with close links to the MEK seems to tell a different story. Hardly surprising: after all, the US government has recently announced that it has removed the Mujahedin from its list of terrorist organisations.

The website of the pro-Mujahedin organisation, Human Rights and Democracy for Iran, has just published a very sympathetic interview with Payam Akhavan, who is not only chair and spokesperson of the tribunal’s steering committee, but founder of the US-funded Iran Human Rights Documentation group. In the interview Akhavan is sympathetically prompted to tell readers how he feels about being “slandered” by the Weekly Worker.³

“For some, the end justifies the means,” concludes Yassamine Mather. “They think that sanctions, the tribunal, even the threat of war will help to topple the regime in Iran and their day will have come. But they seem to wilfully ignore the fact that the US and Israel have no interest in democracy of any sort for Iran. So they are playing a dangerous game. I am sure that many of those who were killed in 1988 would be turning in their grave if they could see how their comrades are behaving now”.

Notes

1. See ‘Regime change must come from below’ Weekly Worker June 14; ‘Accepting funds from the CIA’ Weekly Worker July 5.

2. http://irwincotler.liberal.ca/files/2010/05/2010_11_17_-_R2P_IRAN_REPORT.pdf.

3. www.hrd4iran.se.