Chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize
Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights Committees
Dear Chairman Jagland:
If you believe in human rights and peace, you must have heard the Iranian people’s cry for human rights — they have said so with their lives and their voices for the whole world to hear, from the June uprisings to today.
You must know that the Islamic regime of Iran is a theocratic, gender-apartheid dictatorship. You must know that the regime is hanging young people for the “crime” of homosexuality. You must have read over the past 30 years at least one or two of the hundreds of human rights violations reports -- about the dreaded prisons, the stonings, the hangings and the atrocities committed against the women and children of Iran.
You must know how the Iranian regime is causing the death of innocents and the destruction of property throughout the Middle East from the rockets and missiles they buy from European corporations.
And you must have heard that even with the billions of petrodollars that this regime receives unemployment is over 30%, increasing every year, and that Iran’s parks and sidewalks are home to countless homeless children.
Mr. Chairman, how can you claim that you are for peace and human rights when you ignore the current regime’s violations of human rights?
What about your responsibility and that of Western democracies to the Iranian people whose wealth is plundered and wasted n terrorism by this regime?
Mr. Chairman, don’t you know that corporations and governments in Europe (including Norway) support these dictators, not answerable to their people, precisely because they are useful corrupt dictators who can give your “progressive” governments long term gas and oil contracts for a cheaper price in exchange for bribes?
By doing this, you enable the injustices in the “third world” to continue -- which they will as long as Europe’s soft cultural imperialism continues.
Why otherwise sell peace and human rights at the price of terror, oppression and inhumane dictatorships? Why else would Europe ignore all the violations of human rights?
Don’t you know that European corporations sell arms to the Revolutionary Guards and get back some of the petrodollars that other European corporations have paid out?
In a meeting with a member of the European Parliament two years ago, she became so frustrated discussing the human rights of Iranian women and children, that she shouted: “America has taken Iraq, and now Iran is ours.” It seemed like a stunning admission of an imperialistic European attitude.
Imperialism manifests itself not only through military actions, but also through economic, trade and all sorts of unethical, if not illegal, relationships with the oppressors and dictators. This attitude enables Western “intellectuals” to legitimize appeasing their oppressor by pretending to “care,” all the while looking down on non-Westerners and discounting the importance of their human rights.
Europe claims it would like peace and human rights, but by aiding corruption for economic advantages, aren’t you really aiding and encouraging the oppressors?
Sadly, the economic strangling of oppressed nations like Iran is never the subject of attention; neither are the massive number of deaths and all the misery hidden behind the dictators’ prison walls by their friends and trading partners. And at the end of the day, there is no difference between military imperialism and cultural imperialism: in both, the country preyed upon is usurped.
Corruption not only consists of receiving bribery; it also consists of paying bribes for deals that a democratic government would never sign, such as Europe’s multinational corporations and the governments who are majority shareholders of their gas and oil corporations. Isn’t paying bribes to dictators also a violation of the human rights of people whose wealth is being plundered against their will?
Mr. Chairman, you gave the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama even though he ignored the cries of the people of Iran for freedom, and chose to stand by the Europeans and their economic interests. Some “peace.” Some prize.
