Open letter of Iranian Oppositionals

Berlin, November 1, 2019

This letter was sent to 610 German companies who trade with Iran according to different media and internet sources.

It has been proven that the economic empire of the Revolutionary Guards and the regime-controlled, tax-exempt religious foundations profited from the cessation of sanctions - not the private sector. At the beginning of 2017, the Reuters news agency presented a study showing that out of just under 110 financial statements completed after the nuclear deal in July 2015, only 17 went to private companies. On the other hand, 90 deals totaling at least $ 80 billion were contracted with companies owned or controlled by Iranian state authorities. Trade with Iran neither leads to change in the interior, nor to stability and security in the region, but mainly fills the purses of the Revolutionary Guards.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

we write to you as representatives of various groups of Iranian dissidents that have been living in Germany for several years. It has been brought to our attention that your company is involved in business with the Islamic Republic of Iran and we write to you in order to express our deep uneasiness with this decision and to invite you to enter a dialogue with us concerning this question.

At the moment, Iran is a very risky market that faces not only sanctions but a series of economical, cultural and political challenges and that is shaped by a regime of corruption, despotism and mismanagement.

These days, the Islamic leadership openly violates the JCPOA, the nuclear deal, which was agreed upon with the P5+1 in 2015. It is to be expected that both the UN Security council as well as European states will reinstate stricter sanctions.

It is unlikely that the situation will be improving as long as the islamist regime in Teheran is in power: since more than 40 years the rulers have oppressed all opposition and persecute dissenters and freedom loving people brutally. They support terrorism in the region and abroad and deny the Holocaust, they persecute religious and ethnic minorities like the Bahai. They hang homosexuals and rape women, they help the Assad regime and take part in the slaughtering in Syria. They torture prisoners, kill oppositionals even abroad like in Berlin’s Mykonos-attack in 1992, like in Vienna with the Kurdish murders of 1989 or like in Paris, where an attempted bomb attack in June 2018 has thankfully been thwarted by the authorities.The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution also mentions further attempted attacks in Germany.

With the ruling Islamists, there will be no return to any normal state or „Business as usual“. That doesn’t mean that Iran is lost forever, though. Within the last few years, the Iranian people have been taking to the streats and showed that – notwithstanding the brutal repression – another Iran is possible and already existing. Those people and ideas are the future. They don’t want this regime and the sanctions that come with it anymore.

We urge you: help Iran and the Iranian people by stopping your business as long as this regime is in power. Take away the rulers options to keep pursuing their inhumane, fundamentalist policies by publicly announcing that you are withdrawing from Iran. Fight with us to show that freedom is a value that Iran shares with us.

We would be happy to meet you for a talk and to discuss the economical future of an Iran that is once again a peace loving, progress-oriented part of the international community.

Sincerely yours, Fathiyeh Naghibzadeh and Ulrike Becker, STOP THE BOMB Coalition

11 more representatives of exile-Iranian groups