Iranian Opposition & Solidarity - Paris Conference Updates (3)

Reprinted from Iranian Plateau:

Updated (2): I just found this article - June 15, 2007 - it mentions the names of a few people who were to attend the conference - here is an extract:
“What we want to do at this stage is to evaluate our potentials for continuing the struggle, set up two coordinating committees, one for Europe and another one for the United States to bring together all Iranians opposed to this regime and eventually, forming an Iranian government in exile”, one of the organizers told Iran Press Service.

Among the participants are well-known leftist activists, such as Kambiz Rousta and Dr. Hassan Massali, who opposed the former Shah and for years have been vilified by the monarchist camp.

Sitting next to them will be conservative former monarchists such as Mr. Shahriar Ahi, an advisor to Prince Reza Pahlavi, University Professor Dr. Shahin Fatemi, or Dr. Cyrus Amouzegar, a former government minister under the shah. Also at the table will be Mohsen Sazegara, a confidant of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini who helped to found the dreaded Revolutionary Guards but who broke with the regime in the late 1980s and was jailed repeatedly and tortured because of his calls for change and Ali Afshari, a former students leader.

“Some groups can’t accept the new political realities that require reaching across party lines, and have said they will not come”, said Baqerzadeh. “But we are not closing the door”, he added.
However, some of the participants are skeptic: “Belief in factors like democracy, political and individual freedom in a country with huge and complicated problems like Iran is not enough. The present Iranian society, the young and women who makes 70 per cent of Iran’s population have a different interpretation for freedom, especially the freedom of the individual”, observed Ahmad Ra’fat, a journalist who often talks to Iranian students and women activists in Iran observed.

“What Iranians outside are fighting for is quite different from what Iranians inside the country wants”, he noted in an article posted by “Gooya”, the most popular Iranian internet website.

Addressing the Democracy and Security International Conference that was held in Prague on 5 and 6 June 2007 and at which appeared President George Bush, Mr. Pahlavi appealed to all democratic governments of the world, especially to the Europeans for solidarity with the people of Iran against a common enemy: Islamist preachers of intolerance who turn young men and women into walking bombs, shouting death to America, death to Israel, death to whosoever resists their murderous ideology.

“To the realpolitik cynics who say Islamist theocracy is a reality we have to live with, I respond: funny – they never said they can live with YOU! To those who say the theocrats can reform if we are nice to them, I say you do not know the difference between Islamist revolution and secular ones. Those who believe they speak with the absolute authority of Allah demand absolute submission”. SOURCE HERE

Updated (3): June 18, 2007 - For those who are able to read Persian (Farsi) - please visit this website for more detailed information & recommendations regarding Paris Solidarity Conference - Neshast-e London
You can also read the latest round up of this historic 3 day conference in English by Kenneth R. Timmerman - Iranian Opposition Vows to Step Up Fight Against Tehran
Key parts of Timmerman’s round up:
One of those former opponents of the shah, Kambiz Roosta, helped to organize the Paris conference. A prominent socialist in his youth, Roosta helped devise the Solidarity Iran formula of connecting domestic opposition groups and social groups to their counterparts outside Iran.
Solidarity Iran is different from other Iranian opposition groups in that it is not a political party, nor does it represent a particular ideology.

“It allows the various groups and political parties to keep their identity, with individual leaders joining Solidarity Iran in a personal capacity,” said Iman Foroutan, another member of the newly-elected coordinating council.

Foroutan, who runs the California-based Iran of Tomorrow Movement, has been recruiting cells of activists inside Iran. “The idea is to come up with a grand plan of civil disobedience and economic action that will allow people to go out and do their own thing, while coordinating all these actions,” he said.

Messages of support for the new movement came pouring in over the weekend from activists inside Iran.

Ibrahimi read a letter sent by more than a dozen political prisoners in Iranian jails, who asked that their names be read aloud, even though they knew they would be punished for it.
Mohsen Zarafzadeh, who fled Iran after he was released from jail a few years ago, read a similar letter of support from jailed student leader Hesmatollah Tabarzadeh.

A prominent women’s activist inside Iran connected to a friend at the conference through a special computer program that allows users to talk over the Internet without detection. “She said she was willing to serve on the newly-elected Coordinating committee,” the friend said.

Kian Sanjari, a well-known Iranian blogger who was forced to flee Iran recently and is currently hiding in a neighboring country, called on a cellphone to see if he could connect as well, to post portions of the speeches on his blog.

The 20-member coordinating council, elected this Sunday, will meet in the near future to select a seven-member Executive Committee, as well as a working group to hammer out a new national compact with Iran’s ethnic minorities.

Hamza Bayezid, the representative of Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran, said his 16 member organizations will wait until the details of the national compact can be negotiated before formally joining the new movement.
In an exclusive interview just after the conference ended, the deputy secretary general the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran told NewsMax that the Congress was hopeful the negotiations would be successful.

While some Iranian nationalist organizations feared the ethnic Kurds and other minorities wanted to separate from Iran, Dr. Hassan Sharafi told NewsMax that his party and the Congress of Nationalities were dedicated to a united Iran.
“We are Iranian nationalists,” he said. “We want our rights within a federal Iran. Splitting apart Iran is to nobody’s benefit.”