A Paris Party With the Mujahideen

MKO terrorists hire Polish students for demo

Polish students are going to Paris to support an organisation recognised by the US as terrorist. The students aren’t aware of this, they’re going to have fun

‘A friend called me: a trip to Paris for 20 zlotys. If you decide quickly, we’ll be all together on one coach’, Ania, a sociology student in Poznań, tells us.

Another student: ‘I’m going to have fun! We drop in to Paris and rule For pennies!’.

Several thousand students from all over Poland left for France yesterday. Twenty five coaches from Poznań alone. Students from other European countries will be there too.

The students were officially told that the trip was sponsored by the Berlin-based Iranian Association, which pays for transportation, lodgings and board through Sunday.

The only condition of participation is to attend a rally Saturday at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The rally is being co-organised by the radical Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mujahideen of Iran. In the US, Canada and Iran, is it on the list of terrorist organisations.

The People’s Mujahideen are responsible for the deaths of Iranian civilians in the 1980s. They fought a relentless struggle for power then against the Shia ayatollahs. They were financed by Saddam Hussein, who took the People’s Mujahideen under his wings following their flight from Iran, helping them to organise across-the-border raids and attacks.

After invading Iraq, the Americans didn’t decide to destroy the People’s Mujahideen base, because they didn’t really know what to do with them, as the Mujahideen could prove useful in fighting Iran’s theocratic regime. The Mujahideen leaders were received by US senators, who are afraid of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Today, the People’s Mujahideen are fighting for rehabilitation in the West’s eyes. They accuse the Iranian government of violating human rights, even though at the Mujahideen’s own base in Iraq, members willing to leave are persecuted.

The leader of the organisation’s political wing, Marjam Radjavi, will deliver the key speech at the Saturday rally. A French resident for years, the organisation wants her to become the president of a democratic, secular Iran.

Most of the students aren’t aware they’ll participate in a People’s Mujahideen rally. ‘I’ve heard it was to be a protest against the stoning of women in Iran’, Bartek sounds surprised.

Iza, a 22-year-old politics and law student at the Adam Mickiewicz University: ‘I’m going to have some good fun in Paris. I don’t really know what it’s all about with this rally. I’ve heard the organisation is on the terrorist list and that is opposes human rights violations’.

Kinga, her fellow student: ‘Terrorist organisation? Yasser Arafat was also perceived like that, and then he got the Nobel Peace Prize’.

A list of attendance will be checked at the rally. Those absent will have to reimburse the full cost of the trip. Before entering the airport terminal, each attendant will be searched by security guards. Photo cameras and mobiles phones won’t be allowed.

The students will be taken care of by coordinators, the same ones who recruited the participants and to whose bank accounts the fees were paid. Above them are two persons who are personally in touch with the Iranian Association. Yesterday neither of those returned phone calls.

Natalia, a coordinator, about the controversies surrounding the rally’s organisers: ‘Compared with, for instance, what the Home Army did during WWII, the People’s Mujahideen are innocents’.

Anna Potyrała, PhD, an international relations expert at the Adam Mickiewicz University’s Faculty of Political Studies and Journalism, warns: ‘The students should be aware they may be pawns in the political game that the People’s Mujahideen are playing’. She adds than in 2002 the EU recognised the organisation as terrorist, but in 2006 the European Court of Justice and national courts dropped it from the list.

translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak

Źródło: Gazeta Wyborcza

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