Ingrid Betancourt, Former Colombian Senator and Presidential Candidate for 2022, addressed the third day of the Free Iran World Summit on July 3, 2023. The summit was under the title: Prosecute Iran’s Regime Leaders for Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide.
Ingrid Betancourt: West Should Stop Kneeling Before the Regime in Iran
The script of the full speech of Former Columbian Senator Ingrid Betancourt follows:
Hello, my dear friends, my dear Ashrafians, and all distinguished guests of this incredible summit, four days that we have seen incredible people, like never before I would say.
It’s very encouraging to see that while there have been so many efforts in the dark to try to prevent us from coming here and meeting and talking and defending the cause of a free Iran, so many people in the world have been coming from all over the continents.
I’m so glad to see fellow South Americans, very nice to see those testimonies of Argentina, which speak loudly of what the continent has bared, but from all over the place, from Africa, from Asia, from Europe. On Saturday we had an amazing group of parliamentarians from all over Europe, Italians came by the hundreds.
And of course, well, you saw it in the media, Mike Pence was here, John Bolton was here, and I’m saying this because I think it’s very important for us to reflect on what this means.
This is not about ideology; this is not about right or left. And for us who have been here following this cause for some years, there is something that is deeply sinking in our souls, and it is that when we come here, we meet people that are good, good human beings.
And because when you do politics, you are sometimes obliged to sit near people that you don’t want to sit with because you know what they represent. When you come here, it’s like, I mean, you’re relieved. You’re relieved because people that come to sustain the Iranian Resistance are people that are here because they believe in what they say and they say what they believe and they do what they think. And that’s a big difference in this world.
We are thinking about what happened 35 years ago. 30,000 people were massacred. But I would say that what we’re commemorating today is the ongoing massacre of the people of Iran. It’s not 35 years ago. It’s 44 years of massacre, of violation of human rights.
And it’s not a coincidence that when we were hearing the testimony of Majid Saheb Jam showing us the death corridor and showing where Raisi was sitting, the same Raisi that is now sitting at the presidency of Iran, this shows that we are dealing with the same people, it’s the same cause, and we will be dealing with exactly the same people and the same problems and the same crimes if we don’t act differently.
I say this because I’m puzzled by what the world does. I don’t feel that I’m a revolutionary like the ones who held me captive in Colombia claim to be, but I’m a revolutionary in my heart in the sense that I don’t like what I see, and I don’t like and I don’t understand how the leaders of our countries, knowing what we know, do what they do.
We know, we know that Iran is on the path of gaining a nuclear bomb. We know it. We know that they have enriched uranium to an 84% purity. We know that they have amassed enough uranium to destroy our countries, our freedom, and our democracy, and yet we want to sign a nuclear agreement with Iran.
We know that Iran is providing weapons to the most absurd and blood-thirsty leader in today’s world, Putin, which is coming to Ukraine like a barbarian with no other justification than to try to put his name on the history of the world by killing thousands of people.
We know that they are providing, that the Iranians are providing drones to kill people in Ukraine, in this war that affects us, all of us, and yet we want to have an agreement with Iran in order to lift the economic sanctions, which will allow them to kill more people and more of us.
We know that they have kidnapped people like you and me, young people, tourists, coming from Europe, from the States, from free countries, and they have accused them to be spies, which is, of course, easy, because if you’re a spy, you don’t have to demonstrate anything, because it’s secret.
So, these young people, women, and men, tourists, like your children, your sisters, your brothers, are detained in the prisons of Iran, and yet we are here in Europe freeing from our jails the people, the criminals, the terrorists that they use to blackmail us.
In 2018, the people that were in a meeting similar to this one could have been killed, because there was a diplomat, an Iranian diplomat, that was on a mission to bring a bomb to this precise event and to kill us all. And yet we signed treaties in order to swap prisoners and to send them, the criminals, in exchange for innocent people, which, of course, they have to come back, our innocent people, our citizens. But what are we doing? Sometimes I think that it’s true that we have this craziness to give our enemies a rope to hang our democracies, and that’s what we’re doing with Iran.
What are the consequences of this policy? Some of us have been talking about appeasement, that this is a policy of appeasement, and of course history tells us what happens with appeasement. But I would say that this is not an appeasement policy. This is a submitting and kneeling policy.
This is, in French, we would say, géniflexion. We knelt before the crime. And I think that this is something that we’re going to pay a big price. And we’re paying for it. We began to pay for it already.
Three weeks ago, there was a raid in this peaceful space that the Iranian Resistance has been granted with the blessing of the United States, with the blessing of the UN, in Albania, which has been the country that we have been so grateful to, for having hosted people that were going to be massacred in Iraq. Because the Iranians had a puppet regime that was killing those same people and we had to move them and bring them to Albania. In Europe, a country with a Muslim majority, respected, freed from communism, and with a new tradition of democracy, suddenly we are facing that what happened in Iraq is now happening in Albania.
And what was told today, the news that we heard, is appalling. Not only they enter this private space, if you wish, that should be preserved because of course, we know that it represents the hope of freedom for millions of Iranians. And they entered, they took the information from the computers and they gave it to the Iranians.
What is happening? What is happening in the dark? This is not something that citizens in the world are okay with. They have to do it in the dark because it’s shameful. Because this will cost more lives of people that are defending their birthright, the right to live in dignity, the same rights that in Argentina you had to fight, that in Colombia we have to fight, that today in South America many have to fight and in the world many have to fight. And the democracies, the leaders, respected leaders of the Western countries are now giving information to the Iranians, a regime of terrorists, of corrupt, men of gangsters, of politics.
So, we are allying ourselves with these people? Who are we becoming? What can we expect from the world we’re going to hand to our children if today we are accepting that this could be the new normal?
And I say this also because I’m appalled as a French national. I’m also Colombian, but I’m French. French saved me. I’m here and I live in France because France fought for my freedom. And I’m simply scandalized to think that a French government, which by the way is center-left because we can’t say that it’s from the right or the extreme right. No, it’s center-left. Macron was in the government of Hollande, so we think that it’s a center, very democratic, upon principles, upon human rights. We have the Panthéon. We honor the people that died for the freedom of our country. And then, we decide to kneel and bow under the pressure of Iran. And we decide that it’s not possible to have a meeting to support the free Resistance because it’s so dangerous.
It is so dangerous now to live in a world where a democratic country like France cannot guarantee the safety of its citizens. And we cannot express our support for freedom in the world because Iranians are so dangerous that they could kill us.
And I’m appalled because in 2018 the Belgian justice did its work. They chased them, they put them in jail, and they were sentenced to 30 years. Our justice in Europe did the work.
Our media is doing the work. For many years it was silent. No one would speak about the Iranian Resistance. Until now you can see it on the New York Times front page, in Le Figaro yesterday. Now people are beginning to see that there is an option, a political option to the craziness of the Mullahs.
And we have seen, as I said as I was beginning, in this summit so many extraordinary voices with us showing that we’re strong, that we have momentum, that people in the world, people in the world, normal people, jaywalkers, people are good in their hearts. They want us to be fighting for the good of the world.
So, I’m so glad that we’re together here today because we are not bowing, we are not kneeling, and we are standing all together. And we’re standing because in Iran, girls, women, young men, and not-so-young people are standing and when they stand they are shot with real bullets. And we are standing with them.
We are standing with Maryam Rajavi. And we are standing with our brothers and sisters because I’m taking the word, our brothers and sisters of Ashraf. Because it will not happen again.
Thank you. Thank you for being brave and being here.
