On 11 December, beneath the great stone arches of the Menin Gate in Ypres, we gathered to mark International Human Rights Day. The setting was not incidental; it was essential. Few places on earth speak so powerfully about the price of freedom, the scale of human sacrifice, and the cost of indifference as this small Flemish town in Belgium, whose very name is etched into the conscience of humanity.
Ypres was a focal point of the First World War, a crossroads where empires collided and where industrialized warfare reached a terrifying crescendo. The Third Battle of Ypres, around the village of Passchendaele, fought from 31 July to 10 November 1917, remains one of the most harrowing chapters in military history. British, Canadian, ANZAC and French forces fought for months across a landscape reduced to a hellish swamp by unrelenting rain and incessant artillery fire. Men drowned in mud. Horses vanished into shell holes. Nearly half a million soldiers on all sides were killed or wounded for the sake of a few miles of devastated ground.
Ypres itself was almost erased from the map. Its medieval cloth-halls and churches were pulverised into rubble. And yet, what endures in Ypres today is not despair but dignity. The rebuilt city stands as a testament to resilience. The endless rows of white headstones stretching across Flanders fields speak silently of lives cut short. The Menin Gate bears the names of more than 54,000 Commonwealth soldiers who died in the Ypres Salient and have no known grave. Every evening, without fail, the Last Post is sounded beneath its arches. Rain or shine, war or peace, that ritual continues, reminding us that freedom is never free. It is paid for, generation after generation, by those willing to stand against tyranny, whatever the cost.
It was precisely because of this history that we stood at the Menin Gate to remember another vast community of martyrs: some 100,000 men, women and children in Iran who have been executed by the mullahs’ regime for supporting the democratic opposition, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK). Their crime was not violence or treason. Their crime was hope, hope for a secular, democratic Iran, hope for freedom of speech, belief and assembly and hope that their children would not be born into a life of fear and repression. Among them were teenagers, even children.
One name symbolizes this horror: thirteen-year-old Fatemeh Mesbah, hanged simply for distributing leaflets. Like so many others, she was denied even the dignity of a marked grave. Families were forbidden to mourn. Names were erased. The regime believed that by killing the body, it could kill the idea.
History teaches us otherwise. Just as the young soldiers of Passchendaele faced machine guns and artillery for liberty, Iran’s martyrs faced the rope, the bullet and the torturer’s chair for the same universal ideals. In both cases, overwhelming force was deployed to crush resistance. In both cases, the perpetrators believed terror would bring submission. And in both cases, they were wrong.
For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic has tried to wipe these martyrs from history, just as the guns of the First World War sought to wipe Ypres itself from the earth. Yet, like this city, they endure. Their sacrifice lives on in the determination of the Iranian Resistance; in the courage of women who tear off compulsory veils in open defiance, and in the young men and women who chant for freedom in the streets. It lives on in political prisoners who refuse to recant and in the Resistance Units who challenge the forces of repression every day and night, despite the mortal risks.
International Human Rights Day is often marked by worthy speeches and well-meaning declarations. But in Ypres, beneath the Menin Gate, words acquire a sharper edge. They confront us with an uncomfortable truth: mass graves and destroyed cities do not happen by accident. They happen when ideology dehumanizes the individual, and when the world looks away. In 1917, the world was engulfed in total war. The scale of catastrophe overwhelmed diplomacy, morality and restraint. Today, too, the world is consumed by crises, wars in Europe and the Middle East, economic turmoil, climate anxiety and political polarization. Against this cacophony, the daily repression in Iran, the executions, torture and silencing of dissent, can too easily fade into the background noise of global affairs.
Ypres warns us against that temptation. Memory is not optional it is a duty. If we forget those who died here, we dishonour the foundations of our own freedoms. If we forget the martyrs of Iran, we abandon a people who are still fighting to win theirs. That is why the presence of Mrs Maryam Rajavi at the Menin Gate was so deeply significant. As President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, she embodies the continuity between sacrifice and hope. Her message, that Iran can and must be a republic based on the separation of religion and state, gender equality and respect for human rights, stands in stark contrast to the barbarism of the regime in Tehran. It is a vision rooted not in vengeance, but in dignity. Standing in that sacred place, it was impossible not to draw a direct line between the courage of the Allied forces at Passchendaele and the courage of Iran’s Resistance today. Both stood against overwhelming power. Both refused to surrender their ideals. Both demonstrated that even when crushed by tyranny, the human spirit cannot be extinguished.
As the Last Post echoed through the cold December air at the Menin Gate, its notes carried a message far beyond Ypres. They called on us to stand with those who resist oppression today, not tomorrow, not when it is convenient, but now. They reminded us that neutrality in the face of tyranny is not neutrality at all, it is complicity.
May the sacrifice of those who fell in Ypres strengthen our resolve to defend human rights everywhere. And may the memory of Iran’s martyrs guide the international community towards a world in which no regime, no dictator and no theocracy can ever again believe that terror will triumph over truth.
Struan Stevenson is the Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CiC). He was a member of the European Parliament representing Scotland (1999-2014), president of the Parliament's Delegation for Relations with Iraq (2009-14) and chairman of the Friends of a Free Iran Intergroup (2004-14). He is an author and international lecturer on the Middle East. Struan Stevenson joined Mrs Rajavi and former Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, as guests of Katrien Desomer, the Burgermeester of Ypres, in the ceremony at the Menin Gate.