BENELUX LETTER
Suddenly, she saw, in front of her, in the center of Brussels, some of the men who had thrown her into prison in Iran before she fled her country. Men who, this time, photographed her, filmed her and questioned her, in the absence of any police surveillance. Once back in Tehran, one of them publicly presented her as a woman acting “against interest” of the mullahs’ regime. A classic maneuver that puts pressure on the families of the exiles: two of them also claimed, Thursday, June 29, that their mother had since been worried and her house turned upside down.
The one who experienced this strange scene is called Darya Safai and she is a Belgian MP. After being arrested and imprisoned for having participated in student demonstrations in Iran, she went to Belgium at the beginning of the century and became, in Flanders, the symbol of successful integration.
In Parliament, facing Hadja Lahbib, a Minister of Foreign Affairs in dirty trouble for having granted visas to this funny Iranian delegation, Ms.me Safai repeatedly expressed her anger, causing embarrassment and silence among all those who, in other circumstances, would have criticized her for being one of the spokespersons for the Flemish nationalist party Neo-Flemish Alliance (N-VA ).
Belgian hostage exchanged for convicted Iranian ‘diplomat’
At the head of the delegation of fourteen people who came to attend a world congress of cities in mid-June was Alireza Zakani, nicknamed “the butcher of Tehran”, the Iranian capital, of which he is the mayor. This ultra-conservative, member of the bassidji, the paramilitary militia dependent on the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of the mullahs’ regime, participated in the bloody repression of the student protest movement, from 1999. And, recently, he virulently denounced the demonstrations following the death of the young Mahsa Amini.
A more than cumbersome guest, but who was to exercise the vice-presidency of the Brussels Urban Summit. Pascal Smet, a secretary of state for the Brussels region, driven by his enthusiasm and his desire to present his city as an example of a city on a human scale, had worked hard to bring together the hundreds of participants in this event. Including Russians and Iranians: you can apparently hold an international relations portfolio without knowing everything about the situation in the world. And forget that Iran had finally released, at the end of May, a Belgian hostage detained for 455 days, obtaining his exchange for an Iranian “diplomat” sentenced, in 2021, to twenty years in prison in Belgium for having fomented an attack terrorist in Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis). Narrowly foiled in 2018, he was to target an opposition meeting in exile.
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