Iranian People need International Help
In early March 2020, Iran’s Health Ministry welcomed the offer of Doctors Without Borders (known by its French acronym, MSF) to help containing the outbreak of coronavirus in the country. As Julie Reverse, MSF’s representative in Iran, put it “we hope our assistance will relieve at least some of the pressure on the local health system. We heard the Iranian authorities’ calls for more support to help them cope with the outbreak and, as a medical organization already present in the country, we offered to help with what we believe can provide the most value: assisting with treating the most severe cases.” Thus the MSF team comprised of nine emergency and intensive care unit medical doctors and logisticians, went to Iran to set up a 50- beds inflatable field hospital in the central city of Isfahan, one of Iran’s worst affected areas.
Before going to Iran, the MSF team had gone through visa related security check by Iranian embassy in France and had sent a consignment of medical aid to Iran, including one field inflatable hospital, medicines, respiratory masks, and protective clothing. Yet, to the astonishment of all observers, including physicians and experts working with the regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and other paranoid security agents closely associated with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected the offer of MSF and asked its team to leave Iran. This abrupt decision against the victims of coronavirus in the country echoed Khamenei’s absurd assertion two days earlier in which he had claimed that the epidemic could be some biological war waged by the US government and that any mission by US doctors in Iran had to be for an assessment of the “impact of the poison” on the ground rather than for sincere help.
Irrational and pathological assertions by Khamenei and his sycophants have become routine in the Islamic Republic, but the idea of accusing MSF members of spying and claiming that the U. S. had invented the coronavirus specifically to hurt Iran mark a turning point in the conspiratorial stories of the totalitarian theocracy. Once again, Iran’s clerical rulers have demonstrated to the world that they lack the capacity to feel empathy even for the most helpless victims of an epidemic in the country they rule.
It is becoming evident that we need the help of specialists in psychopathology to comprehend the mindset of Iran’s clerical rulers. Union of Secular Republic and Human Rights in Iran categorically condemns the decision of the Iranian regime in rejecting the assistance of MSF and urge the international human rights organizations to demand that MSF team be permitted to help victims of coronavirus in Iran. Iranian people are grateful for MSF’s offer. As an organization committed to democratic norms and humanitarian international assistance, we wish to thank MSF and want the organization to know that the behavior of the Iranian regime defies the preference of the Iranian people.
International Relations Committee
March 26, 2020
