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Approved by the Quick Decision Council of the Coordinating Committee on November 30, 2022
The Georgia Green Party expresses its support for people-centered liberation movements which respect the human rights of women and ethnic and religious minorities in Iran as well as throughout the world. The Georgia Green Party urges the decision-makers in the government in Iran to cease their brutal crackdown on protesters, end human rights violations by police, paramilitary groups and the military. We further urge that they abandon laws and practices which restrict women’s autonomy. The Georgia Green Party urges that women be afforded the same occupational opportunities as men, that their they enjoy equal rights to participate in the governing bodies of the nation and that they enjoy the protection of rights set forth in the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1979) and as reaffirmed in the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights.
The Georgia Green Party calls for the United States to refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Iran, to normalize diplomatic relations, to lift sanctions, to abide by the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, including its requirement for signatories to disarm, to cease support for human-rights violating governments and to adhere to human-rights standards in its various police, judicial, probation,prison and parole systems.
The Georgia Green Party affirms the words of Azadeh Shahshahani and Yosi Badie in their September 28, 2022 column in the online version of The Nation:
History is clear that US intervention, including sanctions, only serves US interests and works as collective punishment for the people of Iran, who are already resisting oppression by their own government. … While the people of Iran seek their liberation, we must stand against the US government’s imposition of sanctions against the Iranian people and resist any actions that seek to silence or distort freedom movements.
Background Information
Greens worldwide have long called for an end to war and violence in international relations. The
history of United States aggression towards Iran makes non-interference in its affairs an even more urgent priority. While it may take years and the courage of whistleblowers to reveal to us and the rest of the world the extent of the covert operations undertaken on the US taxpayers’ dime seeking to undermine the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran, already public documents (including some cited in the references below) are exposing the role of the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Endowment for Democracy in instigating what appears to be a color revolution.
In 1953, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor to today’s British Petroleum (BP), which operates the same gas stations where you may have filled your car’s gas tank recently, cooperated in Operation Ajax, a covert operation which overthrew Iran’s democratically-elected government and installed the Pahlavi monarchy (dictatorship), which was more pliant to the economic,strategic and petroleum interests of the USA and UK.
Since the 1979 revolution which overthrew that brutal dictatorship, the United States has overtly sought regime change by supporting Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980, implementing sanctions which have damaged the Iranian economy and providing financial and diplomatic support to various opposition groups. Prominent United States politicians have even supported Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which the Iranian government claims has killed more than 12,000 Iranians. Most shockingly, the United States assassinated by armored drone Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and others with him in Iraq’s capital Baghdad on January 3, 2022.
While the full extent of United States covert operations is unknown, it is widely believed that its covert agencies have supported sabotage of Iranian nuclear facilities and assassinations of politicians, military personnel and scientists.
The United States’s hostility towards Iran resulted in a United States warship destroying an Iranian civilian airplane over Iran’s territorial waters in the Persian Gulf on its normal flight path on July 3, 1988, killing all 290 people on that plane.
The Georgia Green Party supports abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency and all covert operations and dismantling overseas military bases, the permanent closure of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas and drastically reducing the size of the military. We must bring the troops home. There is no other way to restrain the United States’s use of military force to control other countries.
Both the United States and Iran are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits signatories to develop peaceful uses of fissionable material and mandates “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The Georgia Green Party urges all signatories to comply with the treaty, and it notes that Israel, which the United States supports financially, militarily and diplomatically, has refused to sign the treaty and has developed its own nuclear weapons.
The Georgia Green Party applauds the women and men of Iran who demand an end of laws, customs and abusive practices that discriminate against women and girls. The Georgia Green Party believes the best way to support efforts by the Iranian people is that our nation ceases its violations of women’s rights domestically and internationally. The Georgia Green Party Platform contains a variety of policies which would improve women’s lives in the United States, including fact-based sex education in public schools and universal healthcare, including abortion, and a concerted effort to end men’s violence. The President of the United States must publish without further delay, the Equal Rights Amendment which, after a hundred year long struggle. was finally ratified by the necessary 38th state in January 2020. Internationally, the United States, in its hostility to “communism” and national liberation movements, supported regressive factions worldwide, particularly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and, wherever these factions have gained power, women’s rights and human rights have been diminished.
One of the catalysts of the current uprising in Iran was the death in custody of Jîna Emînî, a woman who was detained by Iranian police enforcing a law biased against women. Jîna Emînî was from the Kurdish ethnic minority, whose political and cultural rights successive repressive Iranian governments have curtailed. In the United States, how many people from ethnic minorities and economically-disadvantaged backgrounds have been detained, fined, imprisoned, assaulted and killed by local, state and federal police and even vigilantes enforcing discriminatory and unjust laws? In Georgia, recent high profile cases include Ahmaud Arbery and Rashad Brooks. But let’s not forget about immigration detainees like Felipe Montes (January 30, 2021), Cipriano Chavez-Alvarez (September 21, 2020), Santiago Baten-Oxlaj (May 24, 2020) and others who died after being imprisoned in the Stewart INS Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. Immigrant women were sterilized when subjected to non-consensual, medically unnecessary and/or invasive gynecological surgeries while in detention at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia. Fifty-seven (57) inmates in Georgia state prisons died by homicide in 2020 and 2021. Female inmates sued the Fulton County Jail System for minimal recreational and therapeutic activities as well as for clean drinking water. The Georgia Green Party believes that the best way to promote human rights abroad is to respect human rights here at home, our home, our Georgia home.
References
United Nations General Assembly. Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-elimination-all-forms-discrimination-against-women [Adopted 1979-Dec-18]
Women’s Declaration International. Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights. https://womensdeclaration.com/documents/78/DECLARATION_-_FINAL_VERSION_AMENDED.pdf [Accessed 2022-Oct-29]
Azadeh Shahshahani and Yosi Badie. Iran’s Brutal Crackdown on “Women, Life, Freedom”. The Nation (Online, September 28, 2022). https://www.thenation.com/article/world/iran-protests-jina-emini/
Platform of the Georgia Green Party, July 24, 2021. Georgia Green Party. https://secureservercdn.net/198.71.233.128/f90.8ee.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20210724-Georgia-Green-Party-Platform.pdf
Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. The Coup Against Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh. July 31, 2015. https://adst.org/2015/07/the-coup-against-irans-mohammad-mossadegh/
Jonathan Masters. Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK). Council on Foreign Relations. July 28, 2014. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek
Zachary Cohen, Hamdi Alkhshali, Kareem Khadder and Angela Dewan. US drone strike ordered by Trump kills top Iranian commander in Baghdad. CNN. January 4, 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/02/middleeast/baghdad-airport-rockets/index.html
United Nations. Office for Disarmament Affairs. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/nuclear/npt/text (Accessed October 5, 2022)
Arash Norouzi. The Downing of Iran Air Flight 655: The US Navy “Accident” That Took 290 Innocent Lives. The Mossadegh Project. February 1, 2009 [Updated July 3, 2019] https://mohammadmossadegh.com/news/iran-air-flight-655/
Petition to President Biden. Green Alliance for Sex-Based Rights. https://greenalliance.sexbasedrights.org/civicrm/petition/sign?sid=1 (Accessed October 5, 2022)
Deaths at Adult Detention Centers. American Immigration Lawyers Association. September 6, 2022. https://www.aila.org/infonet/deaths-at-adult-detention-centers
Priyanka Bhatt, Katie Quigley, Azadeh Shahshahani, Gina Starfield and Ayano Kitano. Violence & Violation: Medical Abuse of Immigrants Detained at the Irwin County Detention Center. Project South. September 2021. https://projectsouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/IrwinReport_14SEPT21.pdf
Danny Robbins. Records reveal 57 Georgia prison inmates slain. The Atlanta Journal Constitution. March 4, 2022. https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/records-reveal-53-georgia-prison-inmates-slain/KZ3JV4MT3FH4HLBLZQIA7AFYGA
Georgia Advocacy Office, et al. v. Patrick Labat, et al. Settlement Agreement Regarding Women Who Experience Psychiatric Disabilities in the Fulton County Jail System. Case 1:19-cv-01634-WMR Document 328-1 Filed 11/01/21. United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Atlanta Division. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.262654/gov.uscourts.gand.262654.328.1.pdf
Patrick Labat is the Sheriff of Fulton County, Georgia.
Iran’s anti-morality police protests: a different view from the ground https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/09/irans-protests-view-ground/
Is the Death of an Innocent Woman Being Exploited to Advance the Goal of Regime Change in Iran? https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/10/11/is-the-death-of-an-innocent-woman-is-being-exploited-to-advance-the-goal-of-regime-change-in-iran/
Dirty money: Meet the US agent driving the CIA-led riots in Iran https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/dirty-money:-meet-the-us-agent-driving-the-cia-led-riots-in
To understand color revolutions, these articles are a good place to begin:
Russia And China to Hold Consultations On Countering US-led “Color Revolution” Efforts https://southfront.org/russia-and-china-to-hold-consultations-on-countering-us-led-color-revolution-efforts/
The Anglo-American Origins of Color Revolutions & NED
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/the-anglo-american-origins-of-color
https://canadianpatriot.org/2022/06/14/the-anglo-american-origins-of-color-revolutions-ned/
Fighting US Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) in Cyber Warfare & Winning https://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2018/08/10/fighting-us-psychological-operations-psyops-in-cyber-warfare-winning/
Is the CIA Supporting Another Color Revolution in Iran — Like the One that Installed the Shah in 1953? https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/10/10/is-the-cia-supporting-another-color-revolution-in-iran-like-the-one-that-brought-in-the-shah-in-1953/