Mohammad Sadeghpour
First and foremost, I wanted to show gratitude to the host and express solidarity with every one who is here participating in this important forum about Iran.
As you are all aware, 26 years ago, after overthrow of the Shah, the Mullah's regime came to power by promising to bring democracy and with the guarantee of security for the Iranian people, the region and the world.
But since that time, we, the Iranian people, with all the diversity amongst us, have only either been directly or indirectly a witness or a victim of brutal harassment by the regime.
In reality, all of the promises made about peace and democracy for the Iranian people were merely lies and propaganda in order to attain power. And indeed, the Mullahs were and are rather representatives of a fundamentally religious and counter human rights government.
At present, it is not only the Iranian people who are in great danger as a result of this regime, but there is also a serious threat to the region and the whole world.
"A foreign military attack won't take us to a peaceful solution in respect to Iran."
Before we express our position, considering Iran and its nuclear threat, let us briefly point out some of the Mullah's human rights records since they occupied the country.
The Mullah's regime has been condemned over 51 times by the United Nations General Assembly because of violations of human rights.
The international human rights organizations believe that Iran is the biggest jail for journalism.
Women's rights in the country have been in a very barbarians form; such as we can firmly state that woman's rights have been abolished completely by the regime in a systematic process.
The regime has used over 170 forms of physical and psychological torture (and those forms of torture have been registered with Amnesty International).
In the domain of politics, the regime has executed 120,000 Iranian political activists, and just in the summer 1988, 30,000 political prisoners were murdered in a mass execution. Victims included pregnant women, elderly women and schoolchildren.
In 2002, there were 474 public executions in Iran, which was twice as much as the previous year.
Presently we have five Iranian political prisoners on death row. One of the victims is a member of PMOI and four with other Iranian political parties.
Within this year, at least 75 people have been executed; roughly 40 per cent of executions have been taking place in public.
Due to an uprising in Ahvaz, a city in south of Iran, 62 innocent people were killed by revolutionary guards in late April this year. So this was a quick look at Iran's situation.
What we are campaigning for is a given right; a right of resistance and a right of struggling to improve humanity.
The solution to the conflict in Iran and the international community won't come through the means of a military occupation or a diplomatic negotiation which is content in ignoring the violation of human rights by Iranian regime.
We do believe that the Mullah's regime does not understand the language of dialogue and they will take that as an advantage to crack down on more Iranian people, whether inside the country or abroad.
The best option that we should undertake is to rely on the Iranian people themselves, so they can play a major role in determining their own future.
Therefore the responsibility to stand against this potential and very real danger comes to the international community. We have a mutual obligation to disallow this and to do our best with the strongest possible effort to avoid another bloody war taking place, this time in Iran.
To do that we need to begin by supporting the Iranian resistance movement and providing more opportunities for them to be able to continue their struggle for human rights and democracy in Iran. We could achieve that if we back up all Iran's democratic movements and accept as true that the PMOI members and Iranian people and Iranian refugees were and are victims of Mullah's regime, consequently PMOI must be delisted from the Australian government's foreign terrorist list, immediately.
For those reasons we strongly support the resolution which has been raised by Mrs Maryam Rajavi, the elected president of National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), on 15th of December 2004 in the EU parliament which gives us an opportunity for a peaceful and democratic regime change in Iran.
A foreign military attack won't take us to a peaceful solution in respect to Iran, whereas the call which has been made by Mrs Rajavi would do, because the third option consider the rights of Iranian refugees, the rights of Iranian people and the rights of resistance to determine the future of Iranian people.
And also, at the end, this is my personal advice, if we are really looking for peace in Middle East, we should have a democratic and a secular government in Iran, and without democracy in Iran, talking about peace process in Middle East would be just a dream.
Mohammad Sadeghpour is the Secretary of the Ausralian Resistance Coalition. This is the text of his address to the Iranian Resistance Council Forum:'Options for Peace', convened in NSW Parliament House on 4 May 2005.