Iran Freedom

Remarks by Argentinian MP Maximiliano Ferraro at the Free Iran 2024 World Summit – Day 2

Iran Freedom

Argentinian MP Maximiliano Ferraro

On June 30, 2024,  at the Free Iran 2024 World Summit – Day 2 hosted at the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) headquarters in Paris, Maximiliano Ferraro, a Member of Parliament from Argentina, delivered a compelling speech.

A translated version of MP Maximiliano Ferraro’s speech follows:

Good afternoon everyone. First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation to participate in this Free Iran Summit. And a very special greeting to President Maryam Rajavi and to each of the brave women who never give up. But also a very special greeting to all the members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, to the former parliamentary presidents of the world, and to everyone present here.

We are 11,500 kilometers away from my country, Argentina. At the same time, despite this enormous distance, the terrorist actions of the Iranian regime, which separate us by 14,500 kilometers, live in the memory, in the present, and in the tireless demand for justice of each one of us, the Argentinians.

Almost 30 years ago, on July 18, 1994, at 9:53 in the morning, a car bomb crashed into the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, AMIA , leaving 85 dead and more than 300 injured, sowing terror, uncertainty, and impunity in our region. A deep wound remains open in Argentina. This was interpreted in our beloved country as the second terrorist attack in just two years, after the Israeli Embassy in Argentina exploded in 1992, leaving another 22 dead and hundreds more injured.

Just a few days ago, an intelligence report from 2003 was declassified, confirming the absolute involvement of the Iranian regime in the largest terrorist attack in Argentine history, the AMIA. Along the same lines, last April, the Federal Criminal Cassation Chamber of our country, which is the highest criminal court, held the Iranian state responsible for the massacre, declaring it a terrorist state and qualifying the act as a crime against humanity, that is, imprescriptible.

These recent events, I want to convey to you, are an incentive and attempt to put an end to decades of impunity in Argentina, aggravated by the signing in 2013 of a memorandum of understanding between Argentina and Iran, where the two countries sought to cover nothing less than the accused. This impunity was cemented in what was the assassination of federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman in 2015, hours before he was to testify in Congress about Iran’s role in the AMIA attack. I take this opportunity to highlight the fact that Mrs. Maryam Rajavi considered prosecutor Nisman a martyr of the Iranian opposition.

I would like to quote Primo Levi, an Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, who said it is not permissible to forget, it is not permissible to be silent. If we are silent, who will speak? And we are here today in Paris not to be silent, to give our testimony.

On October 7, with Hamas’s terrorist attack in Israel, the world changed. I agree with the former Italian Prime Minister that we are going through complex times with increasingly fractured and endangered democracies. The regime, and we have to be clear, the fascist theocratic Iranian regime kills and suffocates those who express different thoughts and those who find themselves in any position of true change. Its tentacles instill fear and threaten anyone who denounces and advocates for that true and real change. In this way, it exports terrorism and fundamentalism, not only throughout the Middle East but also to our region, Latin America, with allies such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and others who remain silent.

We cannot accept or be hostages or accomplices to these practices or this behavior. That is why we are here at this Free Iran Summit along with former Deputy Mariana Stillman, who was also a lawyer in the case of the AMIA attack, and representing each of the deputies who signed the declaration in favor of a free, democratic, secular, plural Iran, with an independent judiciary, separation of powers, and with an unwavering defense of human rights, and of course supporting the 10-point plan for a democratic and secular republic in Iran.

We condemn, and we are clear, we condemn this regime of evil and cruelty that acts by extending its claws through illegality and the nuclear threat, with the help of its proxies and terrorist organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah or through false business and financial structures. And we long for the freedom of the Iranian people, a people who have been repressed and humiliated, who have already massively rejected the regime by abstaining from participating in the last elections and who cannot be deprived, and we say this out loud, of their right to resist against all kinds of oppression and who have the right not to beg for rights.

The legitimate struggle of Maryam Rajavi, the Iranian people, its women, minorities, sexual diversity, and organized opposition must call us to action and motivate us to raise our voice once more, which means not being silent and becoming missionaries of peace, freedom, democracy, plurality, and otherness. And finally, as Robert Frenkel, another writer and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camps, would say, we come here to defend freedom, and it is not the freedom of conditions, but the freedom to take a stand against conditions. Today we are here not to be neutral and to take a stand for a free Iran, with democracy, plurality, and respect for human rights.

Thank you very much.

 

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