16
Sep
2007
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German-Iranian Immoral Trade

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Because of totalitarian character of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), trade with it, apart from foods and medical goods, is immoral; it helps the regime to survive and to further tighten its noose round people’s necks.

As an Iranian-born German, defending the interests of both nations, I have to mention, Germany in the past, with 12-year fascism, reminds me of today’s Iran; therefore German government, by refuting any form of fascism, must introduce moral factors in its trade with Iran.

Germany has tried to maintain its good relations with the IRI. Although in a rather “critical dialogue” of openly limited diplomacy and commerce, Germany continues and even increases its lucrative trade with the IRI in all domains.
Germany’s lucrative dealings reach billions of dollars to Iran. German officials implicitly play down the deals with the illusion that in a post-Cold War, the IRI is not threatening enough to force disaccord among western nations.

This is to justify German trade for the rest of the West despite of controversial inner conflicts among the West due to IRI’s nuclear ambitions. However, Germany seems to ignore the thread of political Islam which is IRI’s strategy and is organised and widely sponsored all over the world.

Germany kept and increased its relations with Iran after the 1979 revolution and during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, while at the same time German firms supplied Saddam’s machine war industrial and military helps, especially chemical weapons which were used against both Iranian troops and civilian Iraqi Kurds. Until 1988, German export of technology and military parts to Iran were over DM 45 billion (Deutsch Mark, old German currency= half euro).

After the war, Iranian infrastructures, which partly were ruined by German weapons in the hands of Iraqis, needed German technology to be rebuilt. Germany reached a primary trading partner of Iran, and remains still Iran’s biggest trading partner, with total goods worth about 3.6 billion euros being imported into Iran despite the increasing standoff between Iran and the West.

The IRI is the one sore spot in an otherwise highly cooperative among the EU. Since the Iranian revolution, the EU’s share of Iran’s total imports is over 40%. EU trade with Iran has even expanded since Iran’s secret nuclear programme was exposed. Russia and China represent far behind with only 15% of Iran’s total imports. Under such economic factors, the perspective of moral factors like human rights, IRI’s sponsored terrorism, and the fate of oppressed people of Iran do not seem to play an important role for the EU.

Although, Germany is the first European partner of Iran, the German-Iranian relations were periodically affected by the following events:

–Mykonos Court in Germany– in 1992 several Iranian dissidents were assassinated by a IRI’s terrorist commando in Mykonos restaurant in Berlin. The court condemned many IRI’s seniors for plotting the act.

–In revenge for it, a German detainee, or hostage in Iran, Mr. Helmut Hofer, was condemned and few years in detention for his out-of- marriage relation with a Muslim woman.

–The sensible conflict, which normally should have effectively violated the German basic law, is a vast IRI’s campaign beginning in 2005 to deny the historical facts of Holocaust.

However, despite of these cool winds between two countries, despite of withdraw of some German banks from Iran–Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, and Dresdner Bank all due to US pressure– Germany dreams of further better economic relations with the IRI.

Around 12% of international joint ventures in Iran are German, with a turnover of half a billion euros ($620 million). Some German businesses have invested directly in Iran. Linde AG, for instance, has invested almost half a billion euros in the Iranian oil industry. German carmakers such as Volkswagen and Audi have made their entries onto the Iranian business market with their assembly facilities.

German firms are promised to hold 100% shares from the ongoing privatised Iranian economic sectors, the rate is promised by IRI’s officials instead of 49% believed.

German opinion-makers now are at stake to indoctrinate a paradigm shift for this immoral trade with Islamo-fascism of Mullahs. They pretend the trade as “good relations between two friend nations”! In fact, the relations between two countries are uniquely based on lucrative interests for states and firms of both sides while both sides ignore the ongoing daily executions, amputations, stoning, attacks on women, youths, and other thinkers in Iran.

The trade takes such a determined value that no German official dares
talking on the permanent violations of human rights in Iran; the same Mrs Merkel who criticised the human rights situation in her recent trip to China is very reluctant about the same thing in Iran.

German officials, from ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl to social democrat ex-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and the current Chancellor, Angela Merkel, have never openly condemned the IRI because of its permanent violations to human rights in Iran.

According to IRI’s officials, foreign investment in Iran rose to $10.5 bln in the last Iranian (March 21, 2006-March 20, 2007) compared to $4.5 bln the year before. To attract foreign capital, the IRI promises foreign investors with insurance coverage to encourage them invest in Iran.

However, the private sectors remain in the hands of closed devotees of the regime, if not the regime’s mafia, and outsider investors, especially non-Muslims can never take the helm from business-generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, or the Mullahs heading the Islamic foundations.

In any case, the economic exchange is not between two nations, but in fact, between German government and an illegitimate Iranian regime oppressing Iranian nation. It is to mention that although Germany has been Iran’s economic partner number one, but does not rank higher than thirty-fifth on the list of Germany’s economic partners abroad, Germany does not really need Iranian goods and can import its oil from many other oil rich countries.

In this perspective, Germany must supply nothing but foods and medical goods to Iran. This is the only moral trade; the other domains of trade between two countries must be suspended. To fulfil this vacuum, Germany is expected to extend its economic relations with relatively democratic countries of the third world.

Germany as a key economic world power can also take a moral initiative by calling for a new Security Council to tackle the following issues:

–To ensure the end of unacceptable apathy for the crimes committed by the IRI, those UN resolutions should be issued that clearly highlight IRI’s human right violations in the last 28 years.

–The UN’s highest court, which has once cleared a number of Serbian authorities of direct responsibility for genocide in the 1990s Bosnian war, is now expected to clear many IRI’s crimes, especially the genocide of political prisoners of summer 1988 with the same principles that the Nuremburg Court applied to Nazi genocide criminals.

–Germany can freeze all assets of IRI’s corrupt seniors and their related institutions in Germany.

–Germany can bring under new scrutiny all Islamists, centres, foundations, institutions, media, and economic activities having ties with the IRI or its international political Islam.

–Germany should refuse any military or economic sanctions on Iran. Once again, blind economic sanctions or an eventual US attack on Iran only serve the agenda of IRI.

Sanctions must be politically and judicially so worked out that they only target the crimes and corruption of IRI’s officials, not people. Eventual blind sanctions are not the real solutions; in fact the regime sanctions should only target the repressive organs and judicial backgrounds of IRI’s officials.

Blind sanctions targeting a whole nation will bring people under a doubled-edged sword, one edge is the increasing poverty due to the sanctions; another sharper edge is the IRI’s increasing repression.

Furthermore, whatever the characters of sanctions are, such suctions will not favour to forcibly topple the regime, as we know the case with Saddam.
Another hand, IRI’s tactical manoeuvres, especially when the international community is not in harmony, will find ways to sneak out of the labyrinth.

Finally, the international atom conflict with Iran must not become a scapegoat for the IRI.
The conflict can be abused by the IRI to drum popular support. Although Mullahs ignore values and identity of Iranian people, they demagogically project nuclear programme as a national pride– in Mullahs’ trap, Iranian grass roots can still fall prey.

What remains to tackle with more support from Iranian people is the human right record of the regime.

A conditional trade due to IRI’s nuclear ambitions can always be a shady bargaining counter in the detriment of human right situation. The IRI knows how to manoeuvre to ultimately enrich uranium for its atom ambitions. The moral trade indeed means that with its over 70 million inhabitants, Iran should not be only considered as the largest market in the region, but as the largest oppressed nation too.