The Honourable Anita Anand
Minister of National Defence
101 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa ON  K1A 0K2

Dear Minister,

We, the undersigned, express our objection in the strongest terms to the public funding of the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy (IPD) through Canada’s Department of Defense MINDS and Targeted Engagement grants. We request that an investigation be conducted into how the grant was awarded and that all future funding to IPD be stopped.

Canadian taxpayers have so far funded this organization a total of $110,000 including a $10,000 funding awarded in 2020-2021 for a panel on geopolitical impacts of COVID-19, $50,000 for the 2nd Annual Middle East Strategy Forum 2022 which was held on May 11th and 12th, 2022, and an additional $50,000 for East Asia Strategy Forum 2022 held on November 1st and 2nd, 2022, in Ottawa’s Delta Hotel, just a stone’s throw away from your office

A summary of the activities, positions, and ties of IPD which have been a major source of concern for those of us who have been following this organization follow:

•         The IPD’s funding is completely opaque. This organization refuses to publicly disclose the source of most of its funding. We have been able to track the questionable ties of one of their sponsors, InterVISTAS consulting, an aviation/airport consulting firm has been a close collaborator of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and its Vice-President has been featured on many of their panels. InterVistas is owned by RoyalHaskoning DHV, a Dutch consulting firm whose subsidiary, Netherlands Airport Consultants (NACO). NACO was part of a consortium with three local companies, NACO+3T, which was awarded a major project for building Imam Khomeini Airport City (near Tehran), which started in 2015 but has been suspended since 2018. A number of the executives, owners or directors of these three local companies are former IRGC or Government senior staff[i].

•         In IPD’s recent forum on Middle East Strategy, no reference was made to Iran’s volatile situation. Any expert or observer with knowledge of Iran’s domestic conditions would have known that the status quo at the time would have been untenable. For a forum dedicated to the Middle East strategy and funded by a program whose objective is to develop “evidence-based policy” and assess Canadian “defence policy challenges”, such striking absence of an analysis of Iran’s domestic situation is unjustifiable, to say the least. In the same forum, interests of Islamic Republic were portrayed as Iranians’ interests, failing to distinguish between a totalitarian, corrupt regime with terrorist activities across the globe and a nation under its repressive rule. In this forum, which was obsessed with JCPOA, the Islamic Republic was portrayed as an ordinary government like any other, and any mention of the Iranian people was strikingly absent. The events unfolding in Iran today are the clearest evidence for the misguided approach taken by the organizers of the forum.

•         Individuals who associate with IPD have deeply questionable ties to totalitarian regimes:

§  Trita Parsi, invited panelist at the Middle East Strategy Forum 2022, is the founder and former president of National Iranian American Council (NIAC) whose lobbying activities for Islamic Republic are well-known.

§  Victor Gao, previously invited as panelist, is a former translator for Deng Xiaoping and works at the Center for China and Globalization Department, an institution directly overseen by Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s Central Committee

§  Hossein Mousavian, contributor and a panelist in 2021, is Islamic Republic’s former ambassador to Germany in the 1990s when the assassinations of four Iranian opposition figures in a Berlin restaurant, “Mykonos” by Islamic Republic’s intelligent agents took place. A Berlin court found that “the highest levels of Iran's Islamic fundamentalist government gave orders to carry out the gangland-style slaying of three Kurdish dissidents”.

§   Piotr Dutkiewicz, an IPD’s Senior Fellow, is a member of Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club, which Carnegie Moscow Center’s Nikolat Petrov has called “a project used as blatant propaganda by the Kremlin" and Lilia Shevtsova describes as “a faithful army ofKremlin propagandists”. The members of the club meet Vladimir Putin in their annual meeting. Various researchers and journalists look into Putin’s remarks at these meetings to understand his policies and visions.

§  Nasser Hadian, invited panelist in Middle East Strategy Forum 2022, who admits in his presentation that he was in contact with high security officials in Iran  to discuss Iran’s nuclear deal and was in a one on one meeting with Ali Shamkhani, commander of Islamic Revolution Guardian Corp (IRGC) and secretary of all-powerful Supreme National Security Council since 2013. Shamkhani is number 3 on the growing list of individuals sanctioned through Special Economic Measures (Iran) Regulations. 

§  Harry Wang is a speaker in November 2022 forum. He is the founder of Center for China and Globalization in Beijing, a Chinese think tank who "has denied Beijing is committing genocide in Xinjiang” . On February 22, 2022, Canada’s House of Commons voted unanimously for the motion declaring China is committing genocide against Uyghurs.

It is very disconcerting that the DND, which Canadian citizens have to trust with defending our interests and safety at home and aboard, has failed to conduct due diligence before awarding the organizers $100,000 of Canadian taxpayer money. 

The timing of this funding, as the courageous Iranian women and men of all ages and creeds are being murdered while standing up to the brutal regime of Islamic Republic in Iran and while Ukraine and the world are dealing with the repercussion of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only added to our shock and dismay.

While Iranian Canadians were heartened by Canadian government's recent measures in solidarity with the Iranian people, your government’s support of the IPD is a slap in the face of those tense of thousands of Iranian Canadians who have poured onto the streets of Canadian cities from coast to coast to coast to be the voice of the Iranian protestors.

We thank you for your considerations and look forward to DND's investigation into the funding and assurance that all such funding will be stopped and cancelled in the future. 
 

Yours Sincerely

[i]The now defunct website of NACO+3T Consortium described it as “an Iranian-Dutch joint venture, formed by three Iranian consultant companies: Tadbir Omran Iranian (TOI), Tarh-e-NowAndishan(TNA), Tana Energy Group(TEG) and Netherland Airport Consultants (NACO)”