Petre Roman, Prime Minister of Romania (1989-1991) addressed the first day of the Free Iran World Summit on July 1, 2023.

Petre Roman: All Dictators Denied Their Alternative

The full text of Former Romanian Prime Minister, Petre Roman’s remarks, is as follows:

Mrs. Rajavi, first of all, thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this great opportunity to express my deepest appreciation for the fighters for freedom in Iran, who are standing against the barbaric cruelty of the Iranian regime.

Why do all dictatorships, including the Iranian one, chant the same mantra that there is no alternative? Is it because they care about the future of Iran? Absolutely not. They simply think and are convinced that they can eliminate, and erase any alternative to their own personal power against the people. I am grateful to my colleague, the former Prime Minister of Ireland, for mentioning the Romanian revolution, which put an end to the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania. Because you, Madam President Rajavi, could say, and I would say, you should say to those dictators, to those terrible people in Iran, “Beware, criminals, beware.” History tells us formidable stories about how people conquer their freedom and how democratic alternatives are born.

I myself was on a barricade in the center of Bucharest on December 21, 1999. It was a fragile barricade made of our iron will against the Ceausescu dictatorship. When 20 minutes to midnight, they started to kill us and initiated a massacre against us, out of the 81 people present there, 39 were killed, with 17 of them being less than 18 years old. At that moment, nobody could have believed that just 12 hours later, under the pressure of hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Bucharest, the dictators would flee from the headquarters of the Communist Party and the regime would collapse instantly. Who could have imagined that the dictatorship would be erased, and eliminated just 12 hours later when they started to kill us on the barricade? Nobody. But it happened.

And I am glad, full of confidence, that similar events can and will happen because the fight for freedom always prevails. The current circumstances in Iran point to the fact that the change of regime, the collapse of this barbaric cruelty, is very, very near. Please accept my deepest, deepest, deepest respect.