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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

playing with Mojahedin as the football

‘Alternative World Cup’ playing with Mojahedin as the football

Group tied to terror seeks U.S. inroads — Anti-Tehran exiles have some support despite hostile past

Washington — AS TENSIONS between the U.S. and Iran continue to mount, an Iranian exile group viewed here as a terrorist organization is lobbying to play a greater role in the struggle against Tehran. And it is winning some support in Congress.

The Mojahedin-e Khalq, or People’s Mojahedin of Iran, was formally listed as a terrorist group by the State Department because of its attacks on American military personnel and Iranian officials. It fiercely opposed the Shah and his supporters during the 1970s and allied with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his 1980-88 war against Iran.

But today, the MEK and its supporters say the organization should be supported by the Bush administration as part of a broader effort to promote regime change in Tehran. They say the group has developed among the most-sophisticated intelligence operations covering Iran’s leadership and nuclear operations, and it has networks inside Iran that can spread propaganda on democracy and on the need to remove the Islamic regime. The MEK also has 4,000 fighters that can target Iran from Iraq, though they have been demobilized by U.S. military commanders and held in a kind of house arrest.

As the White House deploys $85 million this year to promote pro-democracy groups in Iran, the MEK says it can support this campaign without receiving a penny. "We seek neither money nor weapons from the U.S. We just want our legitimate right to resist tyranny in our country," says Mohammad Mohaddessin, a Paris-based member of the MEK who serves as foreign-affairs chairman of its affiliated organization, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. "Let the Iranian people deal with the mullahs."

[Note: Mohaddessin is currently awaiting trial in France on terrorism charges.]

Mr. Mohaddessin and other MEK leaders say they want the U.S. to remove their organization from the terrorism list so that they can more easily raise money and support globally. They also want their fighters released in Iraq.

For more than a decade, the MEK has been employed as a political football in the diplomatic games played between Washington and Tehran, say current and former U.S. officials. The Clinton administration placed the MEK on the State Department’s terrorism list in 1997, as Washington sought to appeal to moderate leaders inside the theocratic government in Tehran. A blacklisting of the MEK was among the actions the Iranians sought in exchange for better relations, these officials say.

The State Department’s 2006 terrorism report says the MEK has been launching attacks on Western and Iranian targets since the 1970s. In the last years of the Shah’s rule, elements of the MEK assassinated U.S. security advisers and military contractors, and assisted in the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran. It subsequently turned on Iran’s new theocratic government due to ideological differences and launched bombing campaigns against senior Iranian officials.

Under pressure inside Iran, MEK fighters shifted their base to Iraq, conducting operations from there against Iran’s Islamic government throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Most of their activities were concentrated on Iranian military installations and commanders. But the U.S. also accuses the MEK of conducting terrorist strikes outside of the Middle East, including simultaneous attacks in 1992 on Iranian embassies and installations in 13 countries.

Some U.S. diplomats say that to delist the MEK now would make Washington appear inconsistent on terrorism and could further incite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They also believe Iran’s leadership could use U.S. support of the MEK to further strengthen Mr. Ahmadinejad’s position, due to what is perceived as widespread antipathy toward the MEK inside Iran. "It could be incredibly provocative in Iran’s eyes," a U.S. official said.

In 2003, the Bush administration also placed the National Council of Resistance of Iran on the terrorist list, as U.S. military planners sought assistance from Iran in stabilizing post-Saddam Iraq. Among the issues the Iranians and Americans discussed that year, said officials involved in the talks, was a plan to swap MEK members it was detaining in Iraq for al Qaeda leaders hiding inside Iran. But the talks ultimately bogged down, as American commanders grew increasingly convinced that Tehran was working to destabilize Iraq.

"Iran wanted the MEK first" before they would hand over al Qaeda leaders, says Michael Rubin, an Iran specialist who served in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans during the first Bush term. "We made it clear to Iran, that if al Qaeda planned an attack, they’d be held responsible."

The MEK, however, has used the Iraq invasion to try to build bridges to the Bush administration. U.S. officials say the MEK has largely cooperated with U.S. military commanders in agreeing to disarm their troops based in Camp Ashraf, which sits about 100 kilometers north of Baghdad. The fighters are being held as protected combatants under a United Nations charter, though some groups in Iraq have sought to try the MEK for atrocities it allegedly committed in league with Mr. Hussein.

Leaders of the MEK and National Council of Resistance, meanwhile, have aggressively moved to highlight the threats posed by Iran’s nuclear programs. In a string of news conferences tracing back more than a decade, first the MEK and then the resistance council have accused Tehran of flouting its international treaty obligations by clandestinely seeking to produce nuclear-weapons fuel.

In an August 2002 news conference, council leaders in Washington specifically charged Iran with running a stable of centrifuges to enrich uranium in the central Iranian city of Natanz. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would confirm the accusations a few months later. U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, have cited the role played by Iranian exile groups in exposing Iran’s nuclear programs.

Still, the MEK remains a deeply divisive issue inside Washington. In 2002, 150 members of Congress signed a letter seeking the MEK’s removal from the terrorism list. Lawmakers also have quizzed the State Department on the MEK’s status in recent weeks, after it was again named to the U.S. list of global terrorist organizations.

"It’s the only group on the terrorist list that’s been more helpful to the U.S. and more harmful to our enemies," said Rep. Brad Sherman (D., California), who is among those representatives questioning the MEK’s designation. "It played a very important role in telling us what happened in Natanz. We should be clear on what we expect of them to get off the list."

Despite this support in Congress, however, many current and former U.S. officials say the Bush administration should stay clear of any dealings with the MEK. They describe the group as operating like a cult under the control of its founder, Massoud Rajavi, and his France-based wife, Maryam. They say the two have very little support in Iran and face deep hostility from the populations of Iran and Iraq, due to the MEK’s alleged complicity in Mr. Hussein’s atrocities.

"An enemy of my enemy is not my friend" in this case, said Mr. Rubin, the former Pentagon official. "From a policy standpoint, the problem with the war on terrorism is the propensity for moral relativism. But we shouldn’t accept certain terrorists and not others."

By Jay Solomon  –  The Wall Street Journal Europe  –  22 May 2006

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

U.S. AGENDAS IN IRAN MAY PRESENT A PUBLIC DIPLOMACY QUAGMIRE

Editor’s Note: Research Associate Reza Aslan, a scholar of religions and the author of No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (Random House), recently published in paperback, submits this examination of a public diplomacy challenge for the United States and its image in Iran and surrounding Muslim countries. Aslan offers that current U.S. policy considerations may provide an untenable challenge for public diplomacy practitioners.

Over the last few months, there have been an increasing number of reports that the Pentagon, under special instructions from the vice president’s office, has been using an Iranian terrorist organization called the Mujahedin-e Kalq (MEK) to conduct stealth operations in Iran in anticipation of a possible military attack. Indeed, a number of recent bombing attacks in Baluchistan and Khuzestan have been linked to MEK fighters who have infiltrated Iran’s borders from bases in Iraq and Pakistan. It seems the purpose of these infiltrations is not only to set up possible staging grounds for an invasion but also to stir up Iran’s small Sunni community (centered in these regions) to help bring down the clerical regime once the bombs start falling. The strategic use of the MEK, therefore, is a sign that, as Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker, the Administration believes that a sustained bombing campaign would not only halt Iran’s nuclear program, but would also weaken the clerical regime to the point that Iranians would be compelled to rise up and overthrow it.

The idea that the MEK could serve as an Iranian version of the Iraqi National Congress once again demonstrates the almost willful ignorance this administration when it comes to the people, politics, religion, and culture of the Middle East. The MEK is a pseudo-Marxist organization that, along with its Paris-based political wing, the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), has been on both the U.S. and E.U. terrorist watch-lists for years. However, since the invasion of Iraq brought with it the specter of seriously pursuing regime change in Iran, the MEK has begun to transform itself into the Iranian equivalent of Ahmed Chalabi’s ill-fated INC. In fact, the MEK may be the only internationally recognized terrorist organization in the world with offices in D.C. and an open line to some very influential members of Congress, including Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan) and Representatives Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Bob Filner (D-CA), not to mention neo-con avatars Richard Perle and Daniel Pipes.

Formed in the 1960s as an anti-imperialist organization, the MEK gained fame for their guerilla tactics, which killed dozens of Muhammad Reza Shah’s political cronies and several American soldiers and civilian contractors working in Iran. However, after the Shah’s expulsion in 1979, both the secular-minded democrats who formed the provisional government and the religious factions who followed the Ayatollah Khomeini rejected the MEK and their radical Marxist agenda, forcing its members to flee to Iraq. There, in exchange for assistance and intelligence during the Iran/Iraq war, the MEK was protected and armed by Saddam Hussein.

The ceasefire between Iran and Iraq in 1988 put the MEK in a vulnerable position. Isolated in remote camps on the border of Iraq, the group gradually transformed from a revolutionary Marxist guerrilla organization into a fanatical cult of personality centered on absolute devotion to its husband-and-wife leaders, Maryam and Massoud Rajavi. As with most cults, it is incredibly difficult to break through the veil of secrecy that shrouds the MEK. However, based on the research of Professor Ervand Abrahamian, who has written extensively on the group, and the testimony of former members who have escaped the organization, a horrifying history of terrorist activity, mass murder, and human rights abuses has emerged.

According to published reports by Human Rights Watch, MEK members are forced to line up every morning in front of pictures of Maryam and Massoud to salute them and sing their praises. Members who have criticized the Rajavis or their organization have been detained against their will — some have committed suicide to escape. The Rajavis have outlawed all contact between their male and female followers. Celibacy is strictly enforced, and all members must undergo weekly ideological cleansings in which they are compelled to publicly confess their sexual desires. Many MEK members are orphans who joined the organization as children. They refer to themselves as martyrs and have been conditioned for absolute obedience to the Rajavis. Indeed, when French authorities arrested Maryam Rajavi in 2002 for her involvement in terrorist activities, nine of her followers immolated themselves in protest.

After the American invasion of Iraq, the MEK was rounded up and detained while diplomats in the U.S. and Iran began negotiations for a prisoner exchange. The Iranians were willing to hand over dozens of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters they had captured trying to cross the country’s borders in return for members of the MEK who had been charged with terrorist activities in Iran. The Iraqi leaders of the interim government encouraged the exchange of prisoners and called for the expulsion the MEK from Iraq. The Iraqis had good reason to want the MEK brought to justice. After all, the group took an active role in Saddam Hussein’s brutal massacre of the Kurds and Shi’ites who rose up after the Persian Gulf War.

But before negotiations with Iran could continue, the MEK was inexplicably granted protected status under the Geneva Convention. At the time, the move was lauded by neo-cons like Daniel Pipes, who wrote an op-ed for the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy arguing that the MEK offers "an excellent way to intimidate and gain leverage over Tehran." Since then, the organization has been increasingly viewed as the most viable alternative to Iran’s clerical regime. More than 150 members of Congress have signed a letter to the State Department demanding that the MEK be removed from its terrorist list. Speaking at a rally organized last year by the NCRI in D.C., Representative Bob Filner (D-CA) referred to the group as, "our best hope to counter the [Iranian] regime." Filner is not alone in trumpeting the MEK. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas), whose Iran Freedom Act calls for funding Iranian opposition groups like the MEK, told me in a phone interview conducted last year that, "there are serious questions to be raised about [the MEK’s] terrorist designation, particularly in light of the intelligence they have provided on Iran’s nuclear program."

It is true that the MEK has been a major source of U.S. intelligence on Iran’s clandestine nuclear activity. Some of that intelligence, including information on Iran’s nuclear program at Natanz, seems to have originated with Israeli intelligence services, who then filtered the information to the US through the MEK. However, a great deal of the intelligence provided by members of the MEK has proven to be unsubstantiated and unquestionably tainted by the organization’s own personal interests. Moreover, the MEK’s support for Saddam Hussein during his horrific eight-year war with Iran has made it the only group Iranians detest. It is for this reason that some of the most ardent opponents of the clerical regime are wary of their influence in the U.S. Michael Ledeen, founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI) and one of the most vocal supporters of regime change in Iran bluntly dismisses the possibility of cooperating with MEK. "I do not think we should have anything to do with…a terrorist organization despised by most Iranians."

Still, despite its checkered past and its dubious intelligence claims, the MEK seems to have once again emerged as a viable partner in the pursuit of regime change in Iran. Of course, when an unreliable and, as some would argue, criminal exile group begins furnishing the U.S. government with intelligence designed specifically to encourage it to preemptively strike a foreign country so as to bring about regime change, we should all stand up and take notice.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, the president assured Americans he would exhaust all his diplomatic options before considering war. We now know this was a lie. Plans for the invasion of Iraq had begun soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and were unlikely to be derailed by any act of diplomacy short of Saddam Hussein’s withdrawal from Iraq. If the reports about the MEK’s infiltration into Iran are true, then it could mean the president is once again lying about working toward a diplomatic option in Iran, even while preparing for an second pre-emptive invasion.

Reza Aslan – USC center on PUBLIC DIPLOMACY BLOG –  MAY 19, 2006

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Massoud Khodabandeh
Former members of the MEK

Brief Biography by Masud Khodabandeh

Born into a middle class family in Tehran in 1956, I completed my elementary schooling in Alborz High School, in 1974. A year later I joined my brother, Ebrahim Khodabandeh in the UK where he was already studying Electrical Engineering in Newcastle University (Newcastle-upon-Tyne).

I graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumberland University) in Electrical and Electronic engineering and spent another year in Leeds (UK) to gain my Chartered Engineering Diploma, before moving to Loughborough University to study for a Master’s degree.

I was first introduced to politics in Iran, but became more interested in the various opposition groups while a student in Newcastle. I joined groups of students opposing the Shah’s regime, and in the last years of my stay in Newcastle became more and more interested in the so-called ‘revolutionary groups’, one of which was the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation of Iran (MKO).

In 1978, when Ayatollah Khomeini moved from Iraq to Paris, I joined a group of young people who went to visit him. This had, of course, a profound effect on me. On my return, I started a Society for Iranian Students in Newcastle Polytechnic, and soon joined with another group of people who were supporting the Mojahedin and who were in contact with them. By doing so, I was able to establish a strong ‘foothold’ in our university. In those days the Mojahedin comprised no more than a group of martyred or imprisoned young people who were following Ayatollah Khomeini – or at least that’s what they told people like me!

Later on I became more involved and was instrumental in the foundation of the “Committee for the Support of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation”. The Committee was founded and led by a known member of the organisation, Dr. Reza Ra’eesi, who had come to London a few years previously; a man of principle, with a wealth of philosophical, political and organisational skills and knowledge. (Shortly after the Revolution, Ra’eesi left the organisation due to his belief that the organisation was no longer following the minimum standards of democratic practices.)

During the course of the revolution in Iran the Committee went through dramatic changes. The name changed to the Moslem Iranian Students’ Society, and the members, who studied and followed the teachings of the Mojahedin literature, became full-time ‘Revolutionaries’. Demonstrations, printing and distributing publications, fundraising, and etc became not just part of my (and my colleagues’) life, but all of it. Individual rooms and flats were given up and we were now living in communal houses, incorporating offices and dormitories. I was soon transferred from Loughborough, where I was studying a research course, to London, and was given the task of heading the organisation in the north of England.

In 1980, I and another 51 members occupied the Iranian embassy in London for which we were sentenced to some months of imprisonment. Dr. Ra’eesi had already left the organisation by this time and had returned to Iran, and we were now receiving direct orders from the Mojahedin HQ in Tehran. I believe that the Mojahedin ordered attacks on Iranian embassies to all of the branches in different European and north American countries as a last show of power before Massoud Rajavi fled Iran following his failed coup d’etat on June 20, 1981.

When I was released from prison, Massoud Rajavi had already arrived in Paris. I joined him and the other Mojahedin after a few days, and spent a few months in the Paris base handing over my responsibilities as head of all the Societies outside Iran. The Moslem Iranian Students’ Society was the only asset left for the Mojahedin outside Iran, and it was rapidly transforming itself into the “Union of Moslem Iranian Students’ Societies” with the HQ in Paris. I was being relieved from all my responsibilities in order to start my next assignment: to go to Iran for a specific mission.

I met with Mr. Saeed Shahsavandi in Germany. (Shahsavandi was a well-known member of the Mojahedin who had suffered in the prisons of SAVAK. He later left the organisation due to disagreements with Massoud Rajavi; in particular over the Internal Revolution of Massoud and Maryam.) Shahsavandi headed a team tasked with purchasing a 10 Kilowatts radio transmitter as well as other telecoms equipment – intended to connect Iran to the Paris HQ – and other materials and to transfer them to Iranian Kurdistan where the new Iranian Government could not exert its power. I was appointed as technical advisor and subsequently, the technical head of broadcasting once the stations were installed in Kurdistan.

Saeed and I ended up in Baghdad airport the same day that Mousa Khiabani and Ashraf Rabiee (who had been left in Iran after Massoud Rajavi had fled to Paris) were killed in a gun battle with the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran. We had with us a huge load of telecoms and other equipment. We were working under the protection of the Kurdish Democratic Parity (KDP) which would allow us passage from Iraqi into Iranian Kurdistan. The equipment was shipped by the Iraqi military to Soleimanieh – where the Iraqis would go no further – and from there we were taken towards the border of Iran by Kurdish people sympathetic to the KDP. It was winter and it took us several months to transfer the dismantled pieces of radio equipment into the mountains of Sardasht (in Iran) from where the transmitter started broadcasting the clandestine short and medium wave ‘Radio Mojahed’ into Iran. The transmitter (and therefore me and my team) had to change place in the mountains of Kurdistan more than 7 times over the next two years in order to survive the air attacks. We survived as a team (though of course some individuals didn’t) and continued our broadcasting successfully.

When we first arrived in Iranian Kurdistan, the Mojahedin base was inside the KDP compound just outside Sardasht. But our numbers were growing rapidly. Kurdistan was becoming the HQ for training terror teams to carry out operations inside Iranian cities and it was the major transit route for transferring Mojahedin executives from Iran to France (via Turkey or Iraq/Jordan).

It took two years of military battles during the summers and fighting with nature in the mountains of Kurdistan in the winters before the Iranian army reached the ‘Free Zone’ of Iranian Kurdistan. After a few days of battle, we had no other choice than to abandon everything and, crossing the border river Zab, to retreat into Iraq. We had to blow-up everything we had in order not to let them fall in the hands of enemy but managed to bring the transmitter with us and even managed to get it up and running again in only a few days to broadcast Radio Mojahed. But now we were living alongside an Iraqi military base with direct connection to roads, and after two years I enjoyed the luxury of moving around with cars instead of mules! It didn’t take long before I was given the go-ahead to return to Paris. Now that transmission was taking place from Iraqi territory with the help of the Iraqi Government, I was perhaps needed more in Europe than in Iraq. So, I went back to Paris.

With fluent English and a little French, I was assigned to a team specifically taking care of Rajavi’s personal affairs. He was then married to Firoozeh Banisadr and my main job was partly her protection and partly working with the Mojahedin intelligence system which was mainly occupied with intelligence gathering about other opposition forces outside Iran. My boss for the specific matters involving Firoozeh was Maryam Azodanloo (who was the head of a team providing personal needs of Massoud Rajavi. She later became the 3rd wife of Massoud and co-leader of the organisation), and for the intelligence section I had Bijan Rahimi as my boss. When Massoud divorced Firoozeh and married Maryam (then the wife of his friend Mehdi Abrishamchi), I was freed from my other responsibilities to move into the HQ of Auvers-sur-Oise to become an overt member of the personal protection of the Leadership, which meant Massoud and his new wife (my old boss) Maryam. My responsibilities were mainly security, liaison with French Security and above all, updating and reforming the system of security according to the available resources in Europe. Technical aspects of the matter were my main focus. This continued until the departure of the organisation to Iraq.

I travelled to Baghdad a few weeks before the arrival of Massoud Rajavi from Paris. I took Maryam with us and she prepared for his arrival.

I was now in a new environment. We were now working in a totally different atmosphere. In Paris everything was systematic and at the end of the day we were a force outside the government. In Paris, security meant a totally different thing than in Iraq. Here we desperately needed training in every aspect if we were going to work and survive with the Iraqi security. But I could also see that there were a lot of things we had brought with us that the Iraqis hadn’t known about. We were now expected to be confident, very confident with arms. We needed to adjust ourselves and become a military force. We were going to be trained to become part of Saddam’s apparatus and that’s what we did.

During the years to come I never separated myself from telecoms, IT and electronics. It was needed both for security and for the army. I would make a few trips to Europe every year to update myself on security and telecoms issues. I would attend Interpol and other security exhibitions and meetings, and of course buy and import the necessary materials for ourselves and for the Iraqis, from simple closed circuit cameras to metal and explosive detectors, up to sophisticated surveillance and counter surveillance equipment, coders, decoders,…, . I also became the person entrusted with arranging for the personal needs of Massoud and Maryam, providing them with whatever was necessary for the ‘Leadership’. During the years of my stay in Iraq I participated in many joint projects and training with the Iraqi army. These included military and security training, special forces training specific to the Republican Guards of Saddam Hussein, as well as joint projects in VIP Shelter technology and infrastructural projects in electrical and telecommunication grids. During these years I even escorted Maryam Rajavi on her holidays to European as well as Arab countries across the world. And of course, every now and then, I would be part of the team carrying messages between Iraq and whichever country they were destined for. I have been responsible for the telecommunication of all the major military operations of the MKO, sitting in the command room connecting Rajavi and his top commanders to the field commanders from his HQ (usually part of an Iraqi military base near the border). Many memories from the four days of the Forough-e Javidan operation (aka Mersad or Eternal Light), the few months of the First Gulf War (Kuwait), and many other events, perhaps need more time and space. I have to bring myself to start writing about them but not right now.

In 1994, after two years of push and pull by Massoud to convince a few remaining non Mojahed members of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to accept Maryam as ‘the President Elect'(!!), he sent her to Europe to “create a foothold for Massoud if things don’t go as well as they should” (maybe he was thinking about a rainy day like today!). As usual it was up to me to bring her to Paris. We were supposed to take her to the USA where she could impose herself as a refugee, but by over-estimating the connections we had, she insisted on getting a valid visa for the US before departure. (She of course, did not even have valid papers for France and the French did not know that she had again been brought to Paris.) The visa application alerted the Americans, and of course after they rejected her we had to surface Maryam in Paris. That was annoying enough, but not as annoying as the fact that she tried to put the blame on Mohammad Mohaddessin (Rajavi’s Pentagon contact who after being arrested in Paris in 2003 and awaiting trial alongside Maryam, has now been replaced by Alireza Jafarzadeh), accusing him of not using his influence with the Americans enough.

In 1995, after a period of disagreements, now directly conducted with Maryam Rajavi, over what was going on in Iraq as well as her increasingly un-diplomatic and un-political and in many cases inhumane conduct, the culmination of years of disagreement was reached and I demanded to leave. Being in Paris was of course to my advantage. But even so, I was forcefully kept and even injected with sleeping and other drugs to the point that even a few days after they stopped the injections I still could not stand up for more than a few minutes. This was of course the minimum just to keep me quiet. After some compromise, agreements and accepting some of my criticisms at face value, I was sent back to Iraq (I was told that the VIP (anti nuclear) shelter compound in Ashraf camp had malfunctioned, which they could not sort out and the engineers had asked for me). In Iraq, I found out that I was being checked by Massoud himself and there I realised that I would lose everything (including my life!) if I continued to insist on my criticisms. I acted compliant for a few weeks until I got my Iraqi and Jordanian documents back and was allowed to get out of Iraq once more. This time I left for London. Soon I contacted Maryam (and later Massoud) and told them of my final decision to have noting to do with them any more.

I presented myself to the British authorities (and later the French authorities) and told them about my exit from the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation. (In those days they had not yet been proscribed as terrorists). In the same year (1996) Maryam Rajavi went back to Iraq after a totally disastrous failure in achieving what she came for. The money Saddam had invested was spent on dinner meetings promoting the ‘Ideological Revolution’ and expensive gatherings “teaching feminism to Western women” and the human resource which went back to Iraq was considerably less than what she had come out with.

Having left the Mojahedin with nothing but a few pounds in my pocket, I went to an old student friend of mine in the north of England for help. To his lasting credit, he gave me more than just financial help at a time when I needed every help possible to stand on my feet again. Rajavi tried a few times to get me back and even called to convince me to go back to Iraq for a few days (we both knew he would not let me out again!) But as soon as he became convinced that I am no longer his man, he started announcing that I am, and had been for some time, working for the Iranian Intelligence ministry, a label he has used for more than 800 ex members and critics of the MKO among Iranian opposition forces in Europe and America. In one way this was good news. It meant he has accepted the fact that I have escaped him. Now the problems he would make for me could not be more than some annoyance in the western security services or the British Home Office. I had run away safely. I was much luckier than many of my friends. I couldn’t believe it myself.

When I left the Mojahedin, I was a high ranking commander of the National Liberation Army in charge of the security of the leadership. I was a member of the Executive Committee of the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation and I was a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the so called political wing of the Mojahedin. My departure coincides with the departure of many, many others including high profile people Dr. Massoud Banisadr, Dr. Bahman Etemad and Dr. Hedayat Matindaftary and Mrs. Maryam Matindaftary and … . later Rajavi even blamed me for the departure of others!

It was not surprising that one year after we came out, in 1997 the US government despite all their grievances with the Iranian government, added the name of the Mojahedin in their list of terrorist entities. In the year 2000, Britain followed suit and announced the MKO as a proscribed terrorist organisation. In 2002 the European Union announced them as terrorists and in 2005, Canada officially listed the organisation. In May of the same year, Human Rights Watch published a 40 page report about human rights abuse inside the Mojahedin. I always consider myself one of the luckiest ones. Those who stayed after me have gone through a much harsher experience, many lost their lives, many their sanity.

After leaving the Mojahedin, it took me a few years to retrain myself, get a proper job and stand on my own feet. In 1997 I met Anne Singleton whom I had seen a couple of times before in the Mojahedin’s bases. She had also left them alongside many others outside Iraq. Later we married and now have a son called Babak.

I started working with my friend in his factory for a year and after retraining got back to my main line of work, Telecoms. I have since worked for a variety of companies in direct employment and/or subcontracting, including Ericsson in the UK, Alcatel in Germany and France, and a range of smaller companies outsourcing parts of their Intercontinental Terrestrial Transmission projects.

In 2001 together with Anne we founded Iran Interlink organisation to help the people who leave the organisation to come to terms with their experiences inside the organisation. Now our organisation along with many other similar organisations throughout the world are of themselves a noticeable weight among the opposition forces outside Iran – opposed to the Mojahedin and to the Islamic regime. Many of my friends have been killed during the past two decades, but the ones whose backs did not break under the cruelties of Rajavi and Saddam have now grown even stronger.

In 2002 I joined the centre de recheche sur le terrorisme in Paris as an analyst on terrorism, with which I still work closely. I have widened my circle ever since and now have very good friends across the world from Tel Aviv to Riyadh and from Moscow to Washington. In 2003, after the fall of Saddam and the arrest of Maryam Rajavi I added my own complaints against her to the court case in Paris. The investigations are still ongoing but I certainly hope that one day the truth about what has happened will come out whether in a court room or elsewhere.

After the fall of Saddam many of my friends have managed to leave Iraq and the Mojahedin; some from Abu Ghraib prison. Their stories are horrifying. To think that one day I was a member of such an organisation sends shivers down my back. Now over a thousand people have freed themselves from the cult. Some have gone back to Iran, and some live in western countries. Of course many have lost their lives and many are still trapped inside – about 3500 in Iraq and about 300 outside Iraq in western countries and of course none in Iran. Their average age is approaching 50. You can guess about their morale yourselves. I can’t ignore the number of Iranians killed during the Mojahedin’s so called operations either. To come to terms with these events – on whichever side you find yourself – will certainly take a generation if not more.

As a brief biography, I have tried my best not to enter into specific events and/or specific instances, each of which will need their own article or even book.

One day I may enjoy the luxury of having the time to write a thorough biography of my life (or even write about the Mojahedin), but for the time being I see my time as more beneficially spent putting more time in my work as a consultant, supporting my family and raising my child Babak as best as I can, and of course sparing all the effort possible to help those people who joined the Mojahedin with the sole purpose of helping bring about prosperity and democracy to Iran, but who found themselves siding with the enemies of their own country and with no escape.

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Mujahedin Khalq 's Function

Abedin’s interview with Banisadr & reaction of the terrorist MEK

As expected the terrorist Mojahedin-e-Khalq showed a knee-jerk reaction to Mahan Abedin’s interview with Masoud Banisadr at iranefshagar website.

Here is Mr. Abedin’s comment on  the  MEK reaction:

There can be no dialogue with people who reduce everything to such slanderous and  libellous gesture politics! FYI Masoud Banisadr translated the unedited version of the interview into Persian and displayed it on his website:

http://banisadr.info/

But in regards to the MEK’s Iran-efshagar website , it may interest you to know that this forum is controlled from Germany by the organisation’s intelligence section. The core mission of this website is to use existing members to attack former members.

The ultimate objective is to make it difficult for existing dissident members to defect. Therefore every character that appears on that website is considered to be "dissident" or "potentially dissident" by the organisation. By forcing them to attack their former comrades the organisation hopes to maintain a degree of ideological and organisational cohesion. Yet another Stalinist policy by an organisation that was branded a serious abuser of human rights by the New York based Human Rights watch in May 2005. You can access my article on that designation:  A recent report by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) that documents and condemns serious human-rights abuses by the Iraqi-based and formerly armed Iranian opposition group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) came as welcome relief to dozens of former members of this controversial organization who have consistently complained of gross human-rights abuses in MEK camps in Iraq since 1991.

The MEK insists that it should lead a US-backed effort to bring what it has termed democratic rule to Iran. Last month it organized a rally, attended by several powerful Republican lawmakers and billed as the "2005 National Convention for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran", at Washington’s historic Constitution Hall.

Since the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, where the MEK had been based since 1986, the group has tried to persuade Washington that it holds the key to overthrowing the Islamic republic next door. It has been backed in this quest by right-wing lawmakers, a group of hardline neo-conservatives and retired military officers called the Iran Policy Committee, and some US officials – particularly in the Pentagon – who believe the MEK could be used to help destabilize the Iranian regime, if not eventually overthrow it in conjunction with US military strikes against selected targets.

While the group’s supporters in the Pentagon so far have succeeded in protecting the several thousand MEK militants based at Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border from being dispersed or deported, they have failed to persuade the US State Department to take the group off its terrorist list, to which it was added in 1997 based on its attacks during the 1970s against US military contractors and its participation in the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in Teheran. The European Union also cites the MEK as a terrorist organization.

After a year-long tug-of-war between the two US agencies, a truce between the State Department and the Pentagon was apparently worked out. MEK members at Camp Ashraf were designated "protected persons" under the Geneva Conventions. Since then, the Pentagon has recruited individual members of the MEK to infiltrate Iran as part of an effort to locate secret nuclear installations, according to recent articles published in The New Yorker and Newsweek magazines. At the same time, nearly 300 members have taken advantage of an amnesty in Iran to return home, leaving a total of 3,534 MEK members inside Camp Ashraf as of mid-March, according to the HRW report.

Given that the HRW report is a major strategic setback for the MEK, it is not altogether surprising that this controversial organization and its Western backers have started a major propaganda campaign, accusing former members of maintaining ties with Iranian intelligence services. It is important to review both sides of the argument to understand the full significance and the implications of the HRW report.

 

A controversial organization

By all accounts, the MEK is a controversial organization. The group emerged in the mid 1960s as a splinter faction from the Freedom Movement of Iran (itself a splinter group from the National Front). In the 1970s, the MEK gained notoriety by assassinating five US military technicians in Iran. The organization enthusiastically welcomed the Islamic revolution of 1979 and was even more enthusiastic about the seizure of the US Embassy later that year. However, the organization’s inability to penetrate the inner sanctums of power, coupled with the misgivings of the revolutionary regime toward this quixotic group, eventually propelled them into conflict with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

From 1981-83, the MEK prosecuted a serious campaign of violence against the Islamic republic; in the process, eliminating many of its top officials and ideologues. But this came at a terrible cost to the organization, which lost more than 8,000 of its members in executions and street battles with revolutionary guards. Indeed, by late 1983 the MEK network had been completely eliminated inside Iran. The group’s entire leadership and more than 90% of the remaining members took refuge in Paris, where the group underwent a series of bizarre transformations in the mid-1980s.

Always a quixotic and perplexing organization, the MEK promoted an ideology based on Marxism-Leninism and Shi’ite theology. However, in January 1985 Massoud Rajavi – keen to consolidate his dominance over the organization – married the wife of his right-hand man and set in motion an "ideological revolution" that was theoretically designed to turn the MEK into the antithesis of the Islamic regime. The result was the wholesale "feminization" of the organization and the placing of females – irrespective of competence – in all top positions.

Consequently, the MEK banned all relationships within the group and commanded their members to fully eschew their individualism and devote all their energies to the cause. Given the extremity of these transformations, even sympathetic observers could not dismiss the notion that the MEK had become an isolated cult. But to the MEK, these changes were necessary to maintain the unity of the organization in the face of the Islamic republic’s relentless security and propaganda onslaughts.

Another hugely controversial feature of the MEK was its decision in 1983 to ally itself with the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. Massoud Rajavi moved to Baghdad in 1986, and the following year announced the formation of the National Liberation Army. The NLA fought alongside Iraqi forces against Iranian troops, thus completely destroying the organization’s rapidly diminishing credibility inside Iran. Moreover, a number of Iraqi Shi’ites and Kurdish organizations have alleged that MEK forces played a role in the suppression of the so-called Safar Intifada of March 1991 against the former Iraqi regime. In a remarkable reversal of fortunes, the same forces that the MEK allegedly helped suppress in 1991 are today in power in Baghdad and thus – at the very least – anxious to expel them from Iraqi territory.

 

MEK and its dissidents

Historically, the MEK has had major problems with internal dissidence. In the mid-1970s, the organization was almost destroyed as a result of an internal "Marxist" coup. The root cause of the problem was the organization’s awkward mixture of Marxism-Leninism with Islam. In the mid-1980s, another wave of dissenters caused a major crisis inside the organization. This time the dissenters, led by Parviz Yaaghoubi, were objecting to Rajavi’s "ideological revolution" and his increasingly bizarre personality cult.

Anxious to suppress any signs of internal dissidence, the MEK labeled all dissenters as either "quitters" or "agents". The former category applied to those former members who left the MEK quietly and did not raise their objections publicly, thus saving the organization from embarrassment. The latter – and far more sinister – category was applied to those former members who chose to publicize their differences with the organization. As a highly centralized, disciplined and overly pretentious organization with impeccable authoritarian instincts, the MEK is unable to accept criticism from any quarter, let alone criticism from those formerly in its ranks, whom it sees as lacking the quality and stamina to continue the fight against what it anachronistically calls the "Khomeini regime".

The MEK’s problems with its dissidents became much more serious following the ending of the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which saw its Ba’athist hosts being decisively defeated and driven out of Kuwait by an international coalition led by the United States. Several dozen members and active sympathizers deserted its Ashraf base, northeast of Baghdad, protesting, among other things, the MEK’s complicity in the suppression of Kurdish and Shi’ite rebels in the aftermath of the Kuwait war. The arrival of these former members in Europe and their organized attempts at spotlighting the alleged abuses and deviations of the organization, led the MEK to intensify its character assassination campaigns against its former members. The organization even coined a new term, borideh-mozdoor (quitter-mercenary) to denounce its former members. This term had a simple logic; the former members were quitters simply for leaving the organization and they were mercenaries because their disclosures – irrespective of accuracy – coincided with the propaganda of the Iranian government.

The MEK went even further and accused the active former members of having been "bribed" and effectively recruited by the Iranian intelligence services. These accusations had worked well against one former senior member, Saeed Shahsavandi, who had been captured by Iranian forces during the MEK’s ill-fated "Eternal Light" operation at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Shahsavandi spent nearly two years in Iranian prisons before he was released and allowed to leave for Europe. Having settled in Germany, Shahsavandi began to outline his perspective on why things had gone so badly wrong with the MEK. Not surprisingly, the MEK started a merciless character assassination campaign against Shahsavandi, not only accusing him of having been sent to Europe at the behest of the Iranian intelligence services, but also of having taken part in executions of imprisoned MEK members. The accusation of complicity in executions was particularly outrageous, but it had the desired effect; Shahsavandi was forced into silence. Nearly 15 years after the events, it has turned out that accusations that Shahsavandi had Iranian intelligence links were completely unfounded. Indeed, it was revealed earlier this year that certain personalities inside the MEK, including veteran member Mohsen Rezai (better known as "Habib") had maintained a relationship with Shahsavandi throughout these years.

 

HRW report and MEK dissidents

The 28-page HRW report, "No Exit: Human Rights Abuses Inside the MKO Camps", details how dissident members of the MEK were tortured, beaten and held in solitary confinement for years at military camps in Iraq after they criticized the group’s policies or indicated that they planned to leave the organization. The report is based on the direct testimonies of a dozen former MEK members, including five who were turned over to Iraqi security forces and held in Abu Ghraib prison under Saddam’s government. The witnesses also reported two cases of deaths under interrogation by MEK operatives.

Disclosures on detentions inside MEK camps and torture at the hands of senior members are nothing new and date back from as early as April 1991. However, this is the first time that a credible and high-profile human-rights organization has verified the testimony of former members and thus given a major boost to a wide spectrum of people who want the MEK to admit to their abuses and correct their behavior accordingly.

It is not only former members who have been putting pressure on the organization in the past several years, but a wide array of Iranian organizations and personalities, including the hugely respected Iranian human-rights lawyer and activist Karim Lahiji and Farah Karimi, a Dutch member of parliament of Iranian origin. But true to form, the MEK prefers to label its critics as "agents" and "apologists" of the Islamic republic rather than address the very serious and altogether credible allegations that have been made against it in the past 15 years.

In the bizarre ideological cosmos of the MEK, Human Rights Watch, by lending credence to the disclosures of MEK dissenters, has become an agent of the "Khomeini regime". Historically, the MEK has never seen the virtue of being open with the public that it is trying to address. The fate of the MEK’s "ideological leader", Massoud Rajavi, is a case in point. More than two years after the downfall of Saddam, not a word has been heard from Rajavi, who is believed to be hiding in the Ashraf camp, in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province.

But what of the MEK allegations that the most active and vocal former members are disinformation agents at the behest of the Iranian intelligence services? First and foremost it is important to note that not a single shred of credible evidence has ever been presented to establish a relationship between any former member and Iranian intelligence. Instead, the MEK has relied on "confessions" from former members before they are "expelled" from the organization. But more than anything else, these signed confessions point toward the existence of torture and aggressive interrogations at MEK camps. The MEK also issue reports from their "sources" inside the Iranian government, which strangely coincide with their own propaganda. Not surprisingly, these "confidential" reports have all the trappings of disinformation and propaganda in its most amateurish forms.

Consider, for instance, how the MEK has tried to tarnish the reputation of one former member, Mohammad Hossein Sobhnai, who spent eight years in solitary confinement in a MEK prison and whose testimony to HRW was particularly damning. The MEK claimed that its sources in Iran had secured an internal memorandum of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence (VEVAK) containing the following information:

In an internal VEVAK report dated February 20, 2002, Ramin Darami, a member of the Sobhani ring, wrote to Haj Saeed, his new handler, "After we entered Iran through legal channels [from Iraq], we were sent to Marmar Hotel in Teheran and were given a high-level reception. While we were in Marmar Hotel, the head of our team was brother Mohammad Hossein Sobhani and others in our group were Ali Qashqavi and Taleb Jalilian. Our brothers from the Ministry of Intelligence paid us daily visits and resolved all our problems, and during this period I spoke to Haj Mahmoud … My stay in the hotel lasted 10 days … During the period we stayed in Marmar Hotel, your proposed plans were reviewed several times by brother Mohammad Hossein Sobhani within our team and we were briefed on it."

While these so-called "disclosures" are only intended for a select audience (namely the MEK’s sympathizers), it is unlikely that even the most hardcore of MEK supporters could really believe such puerile concoctions.

In fact, it has been claimed that the MEK’s relentless efforts at branding active former members as Iranian intelligence agents has made it easier for the "real" agents to operate covertly inside the organization. Indeed, by all accounts the MEK has been heavily penetrated by Iranian intelligence. The organization has on occasion accepted this and published lists of alleged infiltrators. One of the most successful infiltrators was Mohammad Edalatian, whose entire family was connected to the MEK (and whose brothers were executed in Iranian prisons). While in Iranian detention (on charges of MEK activity), Edalatian was recruited by Iranian intelligence and on his release from prison was tasked with penetrating the MEK organization in Iraq. On completing his mission, Edalatian killed three MEK operatives on the Iran-Iraq border and subsequently returned to his handlers. At first the MEK reported that Edalatian had been "martyred" alongside his other three comrades, but several months later Edalatian turned up on Iranian TV and disclosed his mission.

Broadly speaking, the pattern of Iranian intelligence activity against the MEK over the past 24 years has been more geared toward penetration and subversion, rather than elaborate disinformation campaigns. There is a good reason for this: the MEK suffers from a severe credibility problem inside Iran and among Western political and media elites. In other words, there is no real need to tarnish the image of an organization that has no presence inside Iran and which has no serious widespread Western audience.

 

Conclusion

Even if we accept at face value the MEK accusation that its former members are working at the behest of Iranian intelligence, this still does not absolve them of their human-rights abuses, for surely even agents have human rights too. The signs of torture and mistreatment are all over the bodies of the former members who have consistently lobbied human-rights organizations for the past 15 years to get the MEK officially listed as a serious abuser of the human rights of those closest to it.

The HRW report has tremendous long-term consequences for the MEK, and at the very least deprives it of yet another propaganda plank. For as critics of the organization have pointed out, a group that is a serious human-rights abuser cannot effectively protest at the human-rights abuses of the Iranian government. More broadly, the HRW report complements US government reports of 1994 and 1997 that branded the MEK as undemocratic and terrorist, respectively. The combination of these official listings means that no matter how hard the MEK and its handful of Western supporters try to win the group a measure of respectability, they are likely to be thwarted time and time again.

 

Mahan Abedin is the editor of Terrorism Monitor, which is published by the Jamestown Foundation, a non-profit organization specializing in research and analysis on conflict and instability in Eurasia. The views expressed here are his own.

 

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GF08Ak02.html

Iranian exile group strikes back

By Mahan Abedin  

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Duplicity of the MEK nature

The most hated Iranian group;MEK terrorists

Here comes the most hated Iranian group again,"MEK terrorists" The MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq) is organizing major conferences in Paris and in Washington, DC in the coming week, in an effort to shore up support for the group among European and American law-makers. In recent years, the MEK has shifted its rhetoric, abandoning earlier statements, contained in Maryam Rajavi’s "16 Points" that it planned to ban all opposition once it seized power through a violent uprising.

Now the MEK claims to be a non-violent, pro-democracy group.

The Paris meeting will take place on Monday, May 22, from 5-8 PM, at the Salons Hoche, 9 avenue Hoche, 75008 (near l’Etoile). No prior reservations are necessary. An announcement from the group says it is being organized by the London-based "Gulf Intelligence Monitor," a subscription-based website. Several of the U.S. participants told FDI they were going to Paris to "attend a conference with the leaders of the National Council of Resistance of Iran," the main MEK front organization.

The five American participants – Ray Tanter, Maj. Gen (ret.) Paul Vallely, Lt. Gen (ret.) Thomas McInerney, Navy Capt. (ret) Chuck Nash, and LtCol.(ret). Bill Cowen – are all members of the Iran Policy committee, an organization set up by Tanter and by former CIA officer Clare Lopez in early 2005. The group has published a number of "white papers" — all of which have one thing in common: they urge the Bush administration to take the MEK and its various front organizations off the State Department list of international terrorist organizations. The group regularly has hired rooms at the National Press Club to hold press conferences. While it lists "members" on its website, it provides no information on a board of directors, and is not registered in the corporations data bases of Washington, DC, Maryland, or Virginia. The NCRI website links to the latest IPC White paper, calling IPC "an independent U.S. policy group."

No sponsor is listed for the May 25, 2006 Washington, DC conference, but the logo accompanying the on-line registration form is identical to the "lion and the sun" logo the MEK adopted from the Iranian flag of the shah’s period.

So where is the MEK getting the money to finance these elaborate public relations activities? And why is the FBI allowing a group that is on the State Department’s list of international terrorist organizations to operate openly in the United States?

iranian.ws  –   19/05/2006

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Mujahedin Khalq 's Function

MKO a False Pro-Democratic Movement

[Mojahedin.ws comments: In spite of its extensive propaganda activities to epitomize itself as a pro-democratic group to fulfill the Western incited regime change in Iran, the MKO fails to convince many advocates of regime change to regard it as representing the Iranian people. Kenneth R. Timmerman, Executive Director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, warns against the allure of false democratic movements like the Mojahedin. In a discussion symposium directed by Front Page Magazine, he tipped off people to the traps laid before the democratic aspirations of bringing freedom to Iran.]

Trap number one: we must not fall for the allure of false democratic movements, such as the Mujehedin-e Khalq. This Islamist-Marxist cult hides behind a number of fronts, including the National Council of Resistance and a host of U.S.-based “Iranian-American community” groups, and pretends to support democratic ideals. But make no mistake. The Mujahedin murdered Americans in the 1970s, took part in the Khomeinist revolution, helped the regime seize the U.S. embassy and take U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979, and remains committed to an Islamist state in Iran. Additionally, the MEK has aroused widespread hatred in Iran because it sided with Saddam Hussein during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.

This is a group that attempted to invade Iran militarily in April 1988 with the help of Saddam Hussein’s army, and was repulsed by 16-year old kids and grandfathers armed, literally, with pitchforks. The overwhelming majority of Iranians consider them as traitors.

The MEK has for years claimed to head a “coalition” that formed a “parliament-in-exile.” In fact, the 500-or so front groups that belong to this “coalition” are just MEK fronts –and some of them just individuals – not independent groups. Ultimately, they elevated the leader’s wife to become “president-elect.”

Kenneth Timmerman, Front Page Magazine –  May 19, 2006

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Mujahedin Khalq; A proxy force

US becomes a state sponsor of terrorist groups

In Raw Story today, a report that the Pentagon has unleashed the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), an exile Iranian organizationpreviously identified as a “foreign terrorist organization” by our State Department in its annual report on terrorism.*

The Pentagon is bypassing official US intelligence channels and turning to a dangerous and unruly cast of characters in order to create strife in Iran in preparation for any possible attack, former and current intelligence officials say.

One of the operational assets being used by the Defense Department is a right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), which is being “run” in two southern regional areas of Iran. They are Baluchistan, a Sunni stronghold, and Khuzestan, a Shia region where a series of recent attacks has left many dead and hundreds injured in the last three months.

One former counterintelligence official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the information, describes the Pentagon as pushing MEK shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The drive to use the insurgent group was said to have been advanced by the Pentagon under the influence of the Vice President’s office and opposed by the State Department, National Security Council and then-National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice.

The MEK, in fact, was the only identified terrorist group with substantial operations on soil controlled by Saddam’s regime. Other terrorist camps were located in the Kurdish-controlled north. From page 116 of the State Department’s 2002 report:

Description

The MEK philosophy mixes Marxism and Islam. Formed in the 1960s, the organization was expelled from Iran after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and its primary support now comes from the Iraqi regime. The MEK’s history is studded with anti-Western attacks as well as terrorist attacks on the interests of the clerical regime in Iran and abroad. The MEK now advocates a secular Iranian regime.

Activities

The worldwide campaign against the Iranian Government stresses propaganda and occasionally uses terrorist violence. During the 1970s, the MEK killed US military personnel and US civilians working on defense projects in Tehran and supported the takeover in 1979 of the US Embassy in Tehran. In 1981, the MEK detonated bombs in the head office of the Islamic Republic Party and the Premier’s office, killing some 70 high-ranking Iranian officials, including chief Justice Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, President Mohammad-Ali Rajaei, and Premier Mohammad-Javad Bahonar. Near the end of the 1980-88 war with Iran, Baghdad armed the MEK with military equipment and sent it into action against Iranian forces. In 1991, it assisted the Government of Iraq in suppressing the Shia and Kurdish uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the north. Since then, the MEK has continued to perform internal security services for the Government of Iraq. In April 1992, the MEK conducted near-simultaneous attacks on Iranian Embassies and installations in 13 countries, demonstrating the group’s ability to mount large-scale operations overseas. In recent years, the MEK has targeted key military officers and assassinated the deputy chief of the Armed Forces General Staff in April 1999. In April 2000, the MEK attempted to assassinate the commander of the Nasr Headquarters—the interagency board responsible for coordinating policies on Iraq. The normal pace of anti-Iranian operations increased during the “Operation Great Bahman” in February 2000, when the group launched a dozen attacks against Iran. In 2000 and 2001, the MEK was involved regularly in mortar attacks and hit-and-run raids on Iranian military and law-enforcement units and government buildings near the Iran-Iraq border, although MEK terrorism in Iran declined throughout the remainder of 2001. Since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, the tactics along the border have garnered almost no military gains and have become commonplace. MEK insurgent activities in Tehran constitute the biggest security concern for the Iranian leadership. In February 2000, for example, the MEK launched a mortar attack against the leadership complex in Tehran that houses the offices of the Supreme Leader and the President. Assassinated the Iranian Chief of Staff.

After the fall of Saddam’s regime, the Bush administration granted MEK “protected status“, while insisting it was not “protecting” them, and now reportedly has sought to use its members as irregular combatants against Iran.

If these reports are accurate, we are now employing these same terrorists in operations against Iran.

Supposedly we invaded Iraq because, apart from false reports of WMDs and spurious connections with al Qaeda, because Saddam was a state sponsor of terror. Now, we’ve seemingly taken over sponsorship of what is by far the single largest terror group Saddam sponsored. As the Raw Story report states: “These guys are nuts,” this intelligence source said. At first I thought the source was referring to the MEK, but on second glance, he appears to be referring to the Bush apparatchiks who dreamed this one up.

I guess it’s a good thing the State Department stopped issuing its annual report on Patterns of Global Terrorism, or else we might have to identify ourself as a state sponsor of terror. (link via Talk Left)

 

*The Department’s annual report has been discontinued by the Bush administration after the reports noted substantial increases in terrorist attacks following the Iraq invasion, and past reports are no longer available on the Department’s web site.

Posted by Alex on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 12:10 pm, filed under Martini Republic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Martini Republic  –  posted by Alex  – April 13th, 2006

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Mujahedin Khalq 's Function

Mojahedin Struggle in Defiance of Democracy

Mario Lana, head of Italy’s Lawyers Union for Human Rights, in an article published on 29 April penned in support of the MKO refuted the crimes and allegations attributed to the organization claiming that “he who struggles for democracy, cannot be a terrorist”.

Mr. Lana’s comment can be regarded from both simplistic and realistic angles. Simplistic because, from a historical point of view, almost all political struggles, at least in their mottos and sketches of their political objectives, chanted democratic slogans and represented the paradigms of a democratic society as a requisite to encourage supporters and to recruit parties. Atop of all the currents dazzles the Left movement. History tells us that the outcome was the most atrocious model of dictatorship that ever fought under the banner of emancipating man from class and political totalitarian systems.

Stalinism evolved into one of the most influential liberation movements in half of the world. Contemporary world history recognizes Stalinism as a paradigm for all practiced forms of stabilizing an authoritarian party. It theorized and exercised imprisonment, execution, political assassination, terror, and … in many ideologically justifiable forms, not only against dissidents but also against insiders. In fact, the chief victims were the movement’s linchpins rather than the foes of democracy and freedom.

Stalin exiled Trotsky, who rose to power alongside Lenin after the Russian Revolution and was in charge of foreign affairs, and then had him assassinated because of his opposition to Lenin and Stalin, a line followed by most parties and currents that were inspired by Marxism or had faith in its strategy and ideology. The true expenses of Stalinism were exposed only after its fall; no one denies Stalin’s role as the most fervent patriot fighting against the Nazism invasion, yet, he is indisputably the most tyrannical dictator recorded in history. This paradox is the essence of a theorized ideology evolved with the wear of freedom and democracy. That is to say, the thought dealing with freedom and democracy emerged out of a counter-democratic ideology, a criterion to conduct the extent of internal and external violence. It is the ideology that legalizes the conduct and recognizes its innate terrorism as a blessed act; adherents become devotees of a cause constructed on pillars of freedom and democracy.

There is good historical evidence to prove Mr, Lana’s comment can be attributed as simplistic. The discrepancy between chanted mottos and the actual practice of democracy is a product of disapproving democracy itself. To bring off democracy, the mottos should tally with real practices. The Mojahedin’s past modus operandi depict clearly that the group had taken a wrong direction for the cause of democracy. The autocratic structure of its leadership has depreciated it to a kind of Stalinist dictatorship. Thus, how can the Mojahedin guarantee that it doesn’t adapt its claims of democracy for the practice of autocracy?

It is precisely correct to say that ‘those who struggle for democracy cannot be a terrorists’, because democracy absolutely discards any form of violence. The Mojahedin’s favoured democracy, if borrowed from the West, should be defined as “a system of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives”. Can the Mojahedin really tolerate such a system? That is to say, does the group respect dissidents, recognize peoples’ rights, and draw no limitation for its assumed democracy? Even now, far away from assuming any political power, the NCRI intimidates the critics and dissident parties.

Violence has been an innately distinguishable feature of the Mojahedin from the beginning. The key solution to accomplish its organizational and ideological achievements was through the practice of violence. It believes the Iranian peoples’ uprising in 1978 was a total failure because it lacked absolute bloodshed and violence. The Mojahedin’s ideology is in no way identifiable with democracy.

Mr. Lana’s comment is dearly accepted, but the Mojahedin’s past is a negation of its claims to be struggling for democracy. The mere claims fail to endorse the group wholeheartedly as pro-democrats and the Mojahedin has proved to be anti-democratic in practice. Mr. Lana’s comment can be paraphrased as “no terrorist struggles for democracy” and the Mojahedin, knowing this fact, seek legal excuses to justify its terrorist and violent acts by referring to them as “legitimate defence”.

Mr. Lana fails to remember that the Mojahedin is at the crossroads of a critical juncture and in need of applicable instruments to survive. That is why the group takes advantage of the anxieties, well-founded or groundless, sweeping over the West in order to legitimize its political being. The great challenge the world faces today is terrorism and the Mojahedin has to be dealt with in some way; it is clever enough to realize it is walking on the verge of a slippery slope.

In representing definitions of democracy, the Mojahedin oversteps those of the West. By drilling its exaggeratedly theorized democracy into the West, the group reminds the West that it has a rather more enormous capacity to overshoot the Western adopted democracy. At the same time, it has not the least respect for democracy so as to practice it, not even in its primitive form, inside the organization. Nowhere can you find so ruthless methods of brainwashing put into practice under the cover of democracy. Mr. Lana is under the illusion that the embrace of democracy by Mojahedin defies a terrorist nature. An unbiased, realistic look would explain everything.

Mr. Lana should be reminded that his refutation of terrorism changes nothing. The fact is that the Mojahedin is innately a terrorist group and its keeping hold of the democracy motto never washes its hands of its past crimes. Democracy is a no laughing matter and a terrorist group’s struggle under the clothing of democracy, is a viper in your bosom. The supporters of terrorism must keep in mind that they too share the blame if the terrorists betray their trust.

By Omid Pouya  –  10 May 2006

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Ali Reza Jafarzade

More on Mojahedin cult member Alireza Jafarzadeh’s Comments

The Mojahedin-e Khalq’s Hambastegi Meli website reflected Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph reports quoting Mr. Alireza Jafarzadeh (a member of the Mojahedin’s international relations section) saying "Iran conducted 14 big projects and several small ones last year."

Since the MKO’s report was aimed at demonizing Iran’s nuclear programs, I thought it would be better to review and analyze the sentences one by one:

1. Imam Hussein University has a Nuclear Physics section– It should be noted that Imam Hussein University was established after the revolution without any foreign help and having a section for Nuclear Physics is not a crime at all; in fact, it should be considered a scientific and technical achievement for Iran after the revolution.

2. Fereidoon Abbasi, 48, who was present in Iraq-Iran war fronts, is the head of this section– He studied inside Iran and participating in fighting against the enemy during the war can’t embarrass him. In fact conversely, participating in the war, but on the other side of the borders and beside Saddam Hussein the aggressor, cannot bring honour for the MKO and its leaders!

3. [Abbasi] supervised the transfer of a number of nuclear experts from other institutions to Imam Hussein University– Is there any problem with this? If yes, I am really interested in knowing the reasons.

4. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 45, nuclear expert, is one of the key elements– He also studied inside Iran and I don’t think it’s a crime to be nuclear expert.

5. Mansour Asghari, 48, is a laser specialist– He has also studied inside the country and no one can accuse him for his specialty.

6. These two teach at Imam Hussein University– I couldn’t find any problem with this! More explanation may be needed for those who couldn’t get this.

7. They are based in the Defense Ministry’s Center for Technological Preparations– First, what’s the problem? Second, if they teach at that university, how are they based at another location?

8. Where the Iranian regime has not allowed inspections of by IAEA– As news reports indicate, the IAEA has no problem with Iran’s nuclear programs and it has always announced that Iran has cooperated with the IAEA on inspections. This is of course the political request of the US, Israel and the MKO who, against the will of all Iranians, ask for the suspension of even nuclear research in Iran; they say even research at Iranian universities should be stopped.

9. Fereidoon Abbasi has recently supervised experiments on strong neutron’s radiations from a neutron generator– I couldn’t find any problem with this. It’s natural that there are a series of experiments in the nuclear physics section of a university.

10. Other works focus on Beryllium Oxide, laser enrichment, nuclear trigger, and neutron experiments on other parts of a nuclear bomb– So, this is what he wants to say: that Iran is producing a nuclear bomb. However, the MKO has not given the details, just as the details of its third option were never revealed. It appears that the MKO thinks Iranians are its own members who accept anything without details. Or, Iranians may have been omitted entirely in the MKO’s comments and the only thing important for Mojahedin is to win the attraction of the West, particularly the US.

11. Iranian regime is advancing a covert parallel nuclear military program– I don’t think there’s any other opposition group that claims Iran is advancing a covert nuclear military program! The targets of this statement are the US and Israel, the main addressee’s of the third option.

12. According to sources in Iran, Revolutionary Guard Corps is building underground installations to be used in the case of destruction of Iran’s nuclear sites– In this part, Mojahedin directly asks the US to attack Iranian nuclear sites and destroy them, or maybe (as far as MKO’s concerned) the license for this has been issued. MKO has even warned that destruction of Iran’s existing nuclear sites will not be the end for the US and that they should go further and attack and occupy Iran under the pretext of destroying underground installations.

13. Iran conducted 14 big projects and several small ones last year– The Iranian nation is proud of its young men and women who have achieved such success without foreign help.

14. Some of them have been considered for creating nuclear sites and others for guarding weapons dumps– There’s no doubt that no one inside the country would welcome this MKO’s war drumming and invitation for a US war on Iran. Rather, these moves increase the hatred toward the MKO and its policies, as happened when the MKO went to Iran to stand along the enemy in fighting the Iranian people.

In the end, I’d like to address Alireza [Jafarzadeh] and other former partners and advise them out of my own experiences. We are used to doing what others dictate to us. I believe there’s no problem if you try to know the positions and stances of other opposition groups (whether inside the country or abroad) and analyze them. You judge! Have you ever seen monarchist Rightists encourage Americans to take military action against Iran, destroy nuclear installations and justify such actions, as you do?

Have you ever asked yourself whose interests are being met in the international levels by your policies and functions? Are the current policies of the MKO consistent with the policies I was attracted to? How many of Iranians do you think support MKO’s policies on Iranian nuclear programs? If you know the answer and yet, you choose the current way, then I have nothing to say. But the problem is that members in the MKO don’t allow themselves to even think about question, let alone questioning about them. My only advice to my friends is "think about what you are going to say, open your eyes and see whose interests you are following". The strategy of investing in the Iran-Iraq war failed. There will be no interest in investing in the gap between Iran and the US. Isn’t it better to resort to MKO’s early trainings and rely on God and the people, not on desperate hopes and the enemies of Iran?

Ebrahim Khodabandeh  –  May 10, 2006

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Mujahedin Khalq 's Function

Third Option: A Window to Nowhere

Mojahedin-e Khalq has been for long time promoting so-called "Third Option" in its propaganda as a strategic solution. As far as I have been able to study, after inevitably undergoing significant changes three years ago, Mojahedin-e Khalq has maintained a new solution for overthrowing Iranian regime and assuming control in Iran. In this regard, MKO rejects invasion to Iran as well as compromising with Iranian regime in return for political deals, and instead insists on lifting group’s name from terror lists in the West and rearming the NLA in Iraq; if rearmed and backed logistically, NLA in Iraq can move from Iraq toward Iran, defeat Iranian forces and take control of the country.

First, it’s crystal clear that this option addresses the West, and particularly the US. In fact, this strategy requires the US to do what MKO orders. It doesn’t say what would happen if the US rejects the group’s requests. As usual, Iranian people have been omitted from this equation. As far as I know, the strategy of an independent revolutionary group should be based on what it does, not what others can do (here, the US).

Mr. Bizhan Niabati says that "MKO’s ideal is to be recognized by Americans as a military force in the form of National Liberation Army (NLA) and as a unified political alternative under the form of NCRI". Of course, this has been considered wholly wrong since the only alternatives accepted and recognized by the US are Monarchists and Republicans; Americans will never back a violent revolution in Iran unless they can handle its military force all by their own.

Second, let’s pretend that the West and the US have accepted all MKO’s requests (in other words, MKO has been lifted from the list and their confiscated weapons given back). This situation is still similar to the golden times after Forogh operation. The organization enjoyed similar situation in Iraq for years but there was no move from NLA! How could it be helpful for the time being? MKO may be looking for greater support than that of Saddam; for instance, a joint military operation! In that case, the US is unlikely to initiate a war against Iran and support the MKO (to get to power) at the same time. The fact is that the US and the West will lift MKO’s name from terror lists only if the organization firmly renounces armed struggle, renounces its past, and dismantles the NLA. Also, the US will only support MKO’s alternative if it is a "dependent alternative". In short, the organization should completely change its strategy before being accepted by the US; in this significant change, many of MKO members will be dropped. Is the MKO, now hanging on the US, ready for such a change?

Third, the MKO always claims that group’s designation as terrorist, bombardment of its camps, and disarmament of its army were all done in response to the requests of Islamic Republic. If the US and the West do have such a good relationship with Iran (to meet its requests despite all differences), will there by any hope for sudden changes in their policies to turn their support for the MKO? Even if we accept this assumption that the West is meeting Iranian regime’s requests, there are undoubtedly advantages for it; can MKO secure West’s advantages (more than Iranian regime) when it expects them to accepts Mojahedin’s strategy?

However, what has occupied my mind is that whether this so-called solution can really be the plan and the agenda of a revolutionary, Islamic, popular, anti-colonialism, anti-exploitation organization with more than 40 years of nonstop struggle and a long line of martyrs? It seems as if experts in Pentagon have presented a solution for the US to easily get to its goals. I wonder if MKO founders could recognize their organization after a search in the Internet and different websites of Mojahedin-e khalq! Had they really joined the MKO if they could see group’s current situation 20 years ago? I recommend MKO members to look back at early books and magazines of Mojahedin, although those books and magazines are unlikely to be available now.

In fact, "Third Option" is not a strategy; it’s the same American military option in which the MKO wants a share. The US believes it has two ways to confront the Islamic Republic: one is military option (like what it did to Iraq) and the other is political solution (in other words, forcing the regime to withdraw and giving more freedom of movement to pro-US forces). There’s no place for the MKO in both solution, and that’s why the MKO tries to convince the US to overthrow the regime under the name of NLA so that the role of MKO in Iran’s future is guaranteed. This dream, which has been presented as a strategy, will never come true.

I should note that the organization, now and in the past, adopted two wholly wrong policies. In the past, it tried to achieve its goals by taking advantage of Iran-Iraq war, winning the support of Saddam Hussein, standing along the enemies and forming NLA in Iraq; currently, the MKO is seeking American support to fill the gap of Saddam Hussein. In both cases, MKO stood right against the interests of Iranian people, therefore there will be nothing for the group except defeat and failure. Mojahedin moved to Iraq and invested on the war (between Iran and Iraq) but everything reached a deadlock as Iran accepted the UN resolution (for ceasefire). Recent investment (by MKO) on the gap between Iran and the US as well as nuclear issue will bring a similar experience for the group.

Of course, I believe that even Mojahedin leaders know that they will not benefit from this strategy. Therefore, they don’t elaborate on its details. From my point of view, the story of "Third Option" is only for preserving remnants of forces and keeping them busy. I believe that as members in Iraq, Europe and the US were for years busy with the story of NLA and toppling regime from Iraq, this recent story has been written only to postpone the determined dismantling of the organization. MKO leaders, who have created this story, and their audience in the US, are well aware of this fact. The only people who count on this issue are the surrounded members inside the organization. This solution tries to open a way out for desperate members of MKO, but similar to previous strategies and solutions of the organization, it’s a window that opens to NOWHERE.

Ebrahim Khodabandeh  –  2006/05/08

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