Camp Ashraf residents victims in latest propaganda move by Mojahedin-e Khalq
According to a Court of Appeal ruling, the UK Government is now being urged to recognize the Mojahedin-e Khalq as an organisation which does not believe in violence to achieve its political aims – although the MKO has never formally announced in either English or Farsi that it intends to renounce violence.
Iran-Interlink reported from Iraq in February about the plight of MKO members trapped in Camp Ashraf under American protection. The report highlighted the Iraqi Government’s insistence that the foreign terrorist group be expelled from Iraq. The problem was that western countries also classified the group as terrorist. With the MKO de-proscribed in the UK, moves should immediately be underway to have the Camp Ashraf militants moved to safety in the UK where they can continue their peaceful opposition to the Iranian regime. The MKO’s supporters in the UK parliament will no doubt be active in this respect. They have used the group for thirty years and cannot now abandon them.
At present, the prisoners in Camp Ashraf will be being congratulated on their huge victory over the Iranian regime and told that they will ‘soon be in Tehran’, although nobody will tell them how this is to be achieved. Iran-Interlink, May 7, 2008
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Iranian resistance wins ruling against UK ban
By Mark Trevelyan
Reuters, May 7, 2008
LONDON, May 7 (Reuters) – An Iranian resistance group claimed victory on Wednesday in a seven-year legal battle when three top judges upheld a ruling that the British government was wrong to ban it as a terrorist organisation.
The judges at the Court of Appeal threw out a government challenge to a ruling last November that its refusal to remove the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (PMOI) from its list of proscribed terrorist organisations was perverse.
The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Nicholas Phillips, said the appeal bid by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had "no reasonable prospect of success", and added: "The appropriate course is to dismiss her application."
Maryam Rajavi, head of the PMOI’s political wing, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, told Reuters: "The ruling proves the terror label against the PMOI was unjust."
In a telephone interview from Paris, she said: "Western governments and the UK owe the Iranian people and the resistance an apology for this disgraceful labelling. It’s time for them to recognise the Iranian people’s struggle for democracy."
Removal from the British list will unblock frozen assets of the PMOI and enable it to raise funds from supporters in Britain, Rajavi said, adding that she hoped the ruling would lead to the end of similar sanctions by the European Union.
Britain and the EU should recognise and open negotiations with the Iranian resistance, she said.
"Regime change by the Iranian people and organised resistance is the only option to confront the increasing threat of the mullahs’ regime."
The PMOI began as a leftist-Islamist opposition to the late Shah of Iran but fell out with Shi’ite clerics who took power after the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Western analysts say it has little support in Iran because it joined Iraqi forces fighting Iran during the two countries’ 1980-88 war.
Rajavi rejected that view, saying Iranians were not free to show their real support for the movement and that Tehran’s concerns about it were a sign of its strength. (Editing by Keith Weir)