During an international conference held in Brussels on September 15, Former European Parliament VP Alejo Vidal Quadras delivered a speech. The event held in Brussels to commemorate the first anniversary of Iran’s 2022 uprising. This conference was organized by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI).

The text of Alejo Vidal-Quadras’s speech follows:

Dear Mrs. President, dear friends, it is a great pleasure for me to participate together with such a distinguished group of friends and colleagues, all of them supporters of the Iranian Democratic Opposition, in this event in memory of Masha Amini, and also to pay tribute, a very special tribute, to the youth and women of Iran in their struggle against the clerical dictatorship that oppresses, ruins and loots their country.

I have been working together with my good friends Paolo Casaca and Struan Stevenson for 21 years now with the PMOI and the NCRI, and I visited them in Ashraf 1 in Iraq, in Ashraf 3 in Albania, in the headquarters in Overs-sur-Oise, countless times. I have suffered with them when we had to mourn the victims of the criminal regime of the mullahs. I rejoiced with them when we reached political success. I have lived with their joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, frustration and achievements. And after all this wonderful experience, I can say proudly that I belong to the great family of the Iranian Resistance.

That means that I know them, the PMOI, I know them much better than all foreign ministries of the European Union, much better than all intelligence services, and much better than the so-called experts in Iran of Western media and academia. And it is because of that long objective and complete knowledge I can tell you that all propaganda, fabrications, and slander of the Iranian mullahs on the PMOI are just lies, malignant falsehoods and pure rubbish.

Every time, every time the PMOI has appealed to the courts in Europe or in the United States to fight against these lies, the courts have ruled in their favor. Unfortunately, many European governments, scared by the threat of the mullahs, scared by their nuclear program, scared by their hostage-taking, scared by their capacity to organize terrorist attacks, cared a lot, they have developed a policy of appeasement. To please the theocratic dictatorship in Iran, they have harassed the PMOI and made their life difficult.

Let me say to you, and very loud, Guy Verhofstadt said it very eloquently, this is a wrong policy, wrong and cowardly, wrong and shameful, wrong and useless, wrong and counterproductive. If you accept blackmail, you will be blackmailed forever. The only policy to stop the Iranian regime is that of firmness, courage, diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions, and full support to the PMOI, to the NCRI, and to Maryam Rajavi. This is the only way to achieve what we must achieve for Iran and this is regime change.

There is only one political organization in Iran with the capacity to lead the peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy, from tyranny to freedom, from poverty to prosperity. And this organization is the NCRI and its backbone the PMOI led by Mariam Rajavi.

When the European Union governments prevent the PMOI from doing their political work, they prevent them from fighting to liberate Iran from the most criminal regime existing in the world. When they do that and when my compatriot Josep Borrell does that, they condemn the Iranian people to hardship and to slavery. Let us all work hand in hand with the PMOI and with Mariam Rajavi until the final victory.

Thank you very much.