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Who is Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne? |
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Friday, 11 November 2005 |
 The Baroness has for more than twelve years cooperated with
Iranian authorities and received direct and indirect funding and
support from the Iranian government for her efforts to supposedly
provide humanitarian aide to refugees from Iraq who fled to Iran during
the Iran-Iraq war. However, it seems that the refugees mostly formed
Iranian funded groups such as Hakim’s force, who took refuge in Iran
and were trained and funded by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and
the Iranian regime’s extra-territorial Qods Force, believed responsible
for coordinating parts of the insurgency in Iraq today. There is a
serious conflict of interest, therefore, in her claims against Iranian
opposition forces who seek to change the regime in Iran.
As an MEP she has actively lobbied for Iranian interests with European
governments and political parties. The Baroness played an instrumental
role in brokering the inclusion of the PMOI in the EU terror list as
part of a bargain with Tehran. In a meeting in Brussels on 19 March
2002, held on the initiative of the clerical regime and attended by
then Tehran’s deputy foreign minister, Emma Nicholson said that she
would ask the EU to declare the PMOI as a terrorist group.
Baroness Emma Nicholson was quoted in Tehran on 13 February 2003, on one of her numerous trips to Iran, as saying:
“Here, our debates on Iraq have been attended by known members of the
MKO recently… The MKO have thousands of members inside Iraq and
thousands outside… These people are a threat to world security. Their
organization strikes silently and with lethal impact. This is Saddam's
private, international terrorist army, working against us all… For the
sake of our citizens' and for global safety I urge far greater security
attention is paid to the MKO. War or no war, the criminals who make up
the MKO kill and destroy the innocent.”
The Baroness has never criticised the Iranian government for its many
abuses of human rights; nor for its support of terrorism throughout the
Middle East and beyond; nor for its illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons
in secret for 18 years; nor for its suppression of the Iranian people
(ethnic, religious and dissident political groups); nor for its hateful
words of threats to other UN member states recently.
Baroness Nicholson is a famed apologist of the Iranian regime, and a
self-proclaimed “good friend” of some top officials in the Iranian
government. In a debate in the House of Lords on 22 June 1999 she
defended Iran’s leaders against charges of violating the human rights
of women, a fact attested to by 51 UN condemnations of Iran’s human
rights violations:
“Women in Islam have traditionally and historically had more rights
than women in Christianity. I refer particularly to the rights of
widows in Islam. But women in Iran had rights before and after the
revolution of 1979…. Two successive presidents have done a great deal
to strengthen the position of women in Iran. I understand that the
current president had a very widespread vote from women, as did the
previous president, whose daughter heads the women's organisation in
Iran. She has been a friend of mine for a little while and has assisted
me in finding women to set up a women's group of Europeans and women
from a number of Islamic nations. The Iranian women who worry me most
strongly both inside and outside Iran are members of the Mojahedin
Khalq Organisation, the anti-government terrorist group. It consists of
10,000 women who train in camps inside Iraq.”
Baroness Nicholson issued a press release on 3 February 2003, on the
eve of the Gulf War and claimed to have passed evidence to Hans Blix
that Iraqi WMD were being hidden in “MKO bases.” Claims of WMD in Iraq
later proved to be totally false, but Baroness Nicholson was adamant at
the time that her “impeccable sources” had provided clear information
on the find, part of a string of allegations, that set the stage for
the bombing of neutral Iranian resistance bases in the course of the
war, and led to the death of scores of innocent Iranian dissidents.
Baroness Nicholson in an interview with Radio Farda on 18 April 2003,
openly and hatefully engaged in incitement for the wholesale killing of
Mojahedin members and dissidents in Iraq on the eve of the Gulf War:
“I welcome bombing the bases of MKO by coalition forces and I warn the
world that this group should be destroyed, otherwise they’ll start
their activities from another place in the world.”
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