Back in July, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) Maryam Rajavi gave an interview to the Washington Times about her work with the NCRI, but we think it’s important to revisit it now. In this part, we will look at her comments on the coronavirus.
Please bear in mind that when these comments were made, coronavirus deaths in Iran were at 70,000, while the figures from Friday, November 20, were over 161,500.
The Washington Times spoke of how the Coronavirus was “ravaging” Iran, according to both independent reports and the Iranian regime, before asking Maryam Rajavi why the death toll was so high and how she would respond to comments by Iranian officials that US sanctions have prevented Iran from getting medicines, sanitizing equipment, and the like.
Maryam Rajavi began by reminding us that, while the coronavirus pandemic has caused great harm to all nations of the world, it has been much worse in Iran because of the “inhumane policies” that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani have pursued, therefore the deaths are on their hands.
“Despite the fact that they [have known] about the outbreak of the virus in Iran since mid-January, the mullahs delayed making any announcements with respect to the spread for about a month, in order to proceed with their celebrations on the anniversary of [the regime] coming to power on February 11 [1979] and to avoid disrupting parliamentary elections on February 21. This led to rapid and widespread transmission not only in various provinces of Iran but to neighboring countries,” she said.
Maryam Rajavi further advised that other countries with democratic governments have provided hundreds of billions of dollars to aid their people throughout the pandemic, from investing more in the healthcare system to actually paying the wages of non-essential workers who could not work-from-home. Iran, she said, has done none of that. Instead, the money stolen from the Iranian people is used to fund terrorist proxy groups, missile and nuclear programs, and the oppression of Iranians.
“Additional reasons for the spread of the coronavirus in Iran are ubiquitous corruption at the highest echelons of the regime, as well as ineptitude and incompetence. Khamenei has said that the regime must turn this crisis into an opportunity for itself. By inflaming the unpatriotic Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, [regime founder Ruhollah] Khomeini’s strategy was to use it as an instrument to avoid meeting the demands of the Iranian people for freedom. He left one million dead and millions more injured, disabled, and displaced,” she added.
Maryam Rajavi advised that Khamenei and Rouhani are following that same logic today with the aim of preventing uprisings and their inevitable overthrow by using the pandemic as a method of suppression, i.e. those who come out into the streets against the mullahs could catch coronavirus and die.
“Sending people to work and refusing to quarantine cities and provinces is in pursuit of this ominous objective. But this strategy is neither strong enough nor sustainable because the mullahs are stuck in the whirlpool of being overthrown,” the NCRI President-elect said.
