Agence France Presse
December 12, 2006

LUXEMBOURG – A European court annulled Tuesday a decision to freeze the assets of the main Iranian opposition group abroad, a move that could result in its removal from the EU terror list.

The Court of First Instance, Europe’s second-highest, ordered the EU to cancel a decision from May 2002 to freeze the funds of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (OMPI), which claims it should not be on the terror blacklist.

“It could imply the withdrawal from the list,” a court spokeswoman said.

The Luxembourg-based tribunal found that “the decision ordering the freezing of the OMPI’s funds does not contain a sufficient statement of reasons and that it was adopted in the course of a procedure during which the right of the party concerned to a fair hearing was not observed, and that it is not in a position to review the lawfulness of that position.”

“Accordingly that decision must be annulled in so far as it concerns the OMPI,” it said in a statement.

Founded in 1965 with the stated aim of replacing first the Shah’s and then the clerical regime in Iran with a democratically elected government, OMPI has in the past operated an army inside Iran.

It was the armed wing the France-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) but it announced in June 2001 that it had renounced violence.

Exiled Iran opposition leader Maryam Rajavi — who has residency in France, regularly visits Brussels and despite the ban has been tolerated by the European authorities — welcomed the court’s decision.

“Today one of the highest judicial authorities in Europe confirmed the Iranian resistance’s claim that the terrorist label from the beginning was a political issue which was meant to appease the mullahs,” she said.

“All restrictions resulting from the terror tag should be removed from the Iranian resistance immediately,” she said in a statement, read to AFP by a Brussels-based spokesman.

The group said the decision was “proof of the resistance’s legitimacy over the religious fascism in Iran and a victory of justice over economic interests.”

The EU blacklist was drawn up late in 2001, following the September 11 attacks that year in New York and Washington and is revised regularly.

The radical Palestinian group Hamas and the former Basque separatist party Batasuna are among those on it.

The bloc began freezing the funds of groups on it that December.

It did so to implement a UN Security Council resolution calling on all states to fight terror funding, which was adopted in the wake of the suicide hijackings.

Associated Press
December 12, 2006
By CONSTANT BRAND

BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Court of Justice on Tuesday overturned an EU decision to freeze the assets of the People’s Mujahadeen of Iran, an exiled Iranian resistance movement which is on the bloc’s terror blacklist.

The court’s ruling annuls a 2002 decision to freeze all European assets of the Paris-based group, also known by the acronym MEK. It was the first time an appeal to the EU’s terror list was successful at the Luxembourg-based EU court.

EU legal officials stressed that EU governments would not immediately remove the exile group from their terror list, arguing they had to study the full 45-page ruling of the court before any decisions will be made.

“For the time being they are on the list,” said Jean-Claude Piris, legal counsel to the 25 EU governments. “But we have to examine it as soon as possible.”

EU governments said in a statement that the court’s ruling did not call into question the EU’s anti-terror list, which includes top terror groups and suspects like Osama bin Laden, Palestinian group Hamas, and al-Qaida. It added that the judgment also did not call into question a decision by EU governments that the Mujahadeen is a terrorist organization.

“This case was annulled because of procedure,” said Piris.

The U.S. also lists the group as a terrorist organization. But the group, founded by students at Tehran University in the 1960s, insists it advocates the overthrow of Iran’s hard-line clerical regime in Tehran by peaceful means.

In its ruling, the court said the group was not given a fair hearing to defend itself against the move to blacklist it.

“Certain fundamental rights and safeguards, including the right to a fair hearing, the obligation to state reasons and the right to effective judicial protection are, as a matter of principle, fully applicable,” the court said in a statement.

The court ruling said there was “a distinction” between Mujahadeen’s appeal to the EU court and previous cases filed with the Luxembourg-based court to have names removed from the list.

The EU court last July dismissed requests by two terror suspects to annul the bloc’s moves to freeze their assets under a U.N. anti-terror order. The court said the exiled Iranian group was added to the list under EU law, and not under a U.N. order, as with the others, so EU governments are “bound to observe” fundamental rights under EU law.

Piris said the ruling would likely force a change in how EU governments add groups or persons to the list, suggesting that rules include informing those suspects after they have been added to the list, so they can exercise their right to appeal the decision at the EU’s high court.

The list, set up after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 and which was last updated in May, is done in secret by a special committee of security representatives from each member state.

The blacklist currently contains 45 people and 48 groups or entities believed to be involved in terrorist activities.

Reacting to the court’s decision, Iranian resistance leader Maryam Rajavi called for the immediate lifting of all restrictions on the organization and described the ruling as “proof of the resistance’s legitimacy over the religious fascism in Iran and victory of justice over economic interests.”

“Today, one of the highest judicial authorities in Europe confirmed the Iranian resistance’s claim that the terrorist label, from the beginning, was a political issue which was meant to appease the mullahs,” she said in a statement issued in Paris.

Agence France Presse
December 12, 2006
by Lorne Cook

A European court has annulled an EU decision to freeze the assets of the main Iranian opposition in exile, a move that will force the bloc to rethink the way it compiles its terror blacklist.

The Court of First Instance, Europe’s second-highest tribunal, ruled that the EU had not respected the right to a fair hearing of the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (OMPI), when it ordered the asset freeze in May 2002.

The EU’s decision was based on measures implemented to respect a UN Security Council resolution drawn up in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks which demanded that countries crack down on terror funding.

The immediate effects of the 45-page ruling were unclear but legal experts acknowledged that it could incite others on the terror list, which includes the Palestinian governing party Hamas, to contest such action against them.

OMPI welcomed it Tuesday as “a victory of justice” but the EU’s top legal counsel said it was merely a “judicial victory of principle” based on a procedural problem and in no way exonerated the Iranian opposition group.

“This organisation was not put on the list because of some flight of fancy of an isolated EU member. It was decided unanimously by all 25 countries. It was based on facts. We have facts,” said legal counsel Jean-Claude Piris.

The Luxembourg-based court found that “the decision ordering the freezing of the OMPI’s funds does not contain a sufficient statement of reasons and that it was adopted in the course of a procedure during which the right of the party concerned to a fair hearing was not observed, and that it is not in a position to review the lawfulness of that position.”

“Accordingly that decision must be annulled in so far as it concerns the OMPI,” it said in a statement.

Founded in 1965 with the aim of replacing first the Shah and then the clerical regime in Iran, OMPI has in the past operated an army inside Iran.

It was the armed wing the France-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) but it renounced violence in June 2001.

Exiled Iran opposition leader Maryam Rajavi — who has residency in France, regularly visits Brussels and despite the ban has been tolerated by the European authorities — welcomed the court’s decision.

“Today one of the highest judicial authorities in Europe confirmed the Iranian resistance’s claim that the terrorist label from the beginning was a political issue which was meant to appease the mullahs,” she said.

“All restrictions resulting from the terror tag should be removed from the Iranian resistance immediately,” she said in a statement read to AFP by a Brussels-based spokesman.

The group said the decision was “proof of the resistance’s legitimacy over the religious fascism in Iran and a victory of justice over economic interests.”

The court’s decision refers to a black list in force when the Iranian group launched its legal challenge in 2005, and which is now outdated.

The terror register, of more than 50 organisations and individuals, including the armed Basque separatist group ETA and the Tamil Tigers, is revised every six months.

Therefore despite the ruling the OMPI formally remains on the EU’s terror list.

In a fact sheet sent to journalists, the European Council — representing the 25 member countries — acknowledged the court’s decision, although it did not rule out an appeal.

It also said that it had begun to improve the way the list is compiled.

“We are going to try and find a way to give the people who are involved the opportunity to give their arguments in some way or another,” Piris said.

“I’m not exactly sure how,” he added.

German Press Agency (dpa)
December 12, 2006

Luxembourg- A European court on Tuesday annulled an EU decision to freeze the funds of the militant opposition group People’s Mujahedin of Iran, which says it was wrongly placed on an EU terror list.

The EU’s order to freeze the Mujahedin’s assets infringed the right to a fair hearing, the obligation to state reasons for the decision and the right to effective judicial protection, ruled the Court of First Instance.

The Luxembourg-based tribunal is the EU’s second-highest court.

While the ruling does not comment on the wider issue of the classification of the group as a terrorist organisation, it may have consequences for the EU’s policy of banning alleged terrorist groups and having their bank accounts in the EU blocked.

The EU in 2002 decided to put the People’s Mujahedin of Iran on a list of suspected terrorists whose funds are to be frozen.

The move followed an earlier United Nations Security Council resolution which called on states to freeze the funds of all those who had committed or were planning to commit terrorist acts.

However, unlike a UN resolution dealing with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Security Council did not specify a list of persons but left it up to its member states to decide who should go on the list.

The court said that the EU had not given the People’s Mujahedin the right to make their views known about its inclusion on the bloc’s list of terror organizations.

It also argued that the EU had failed to inform the movement of the reasons for ordering the freezing of funds.

The People’s Mujahedin of Iran was founded in 1965 with the stated aim of replacing first the Shah’s and then the Mullah’s regime in Iran with a democratically elected government.

In the past the group has operated an army inside Iran. The group now states that it has ceased all military action since June 2001.

The United States, Canada and Iran also classify the rebel group as a terrorist organization.

Iranian Imbroglio Gives New Boost To Odd Exile Group
Called a Terror Cult by Many, MEK Wins Friends in U.S. Because It Opposes Tehran
A Rally Near the White House
By ANDREW HIGGINS and JAY SOLOMON
Wall Street Journal
November 29, 2006; Page A1

Early this summer, as Washington fretted about Iran’s nuclear program, supporters of Mujahedin-e Khalq, an Iranian opposition group, held a rally in an auditorium two blocks from the White House. Prominent members of Congress addressed the crowd, as did the State Department’s recently retired ambassador-at-large for war crimes.

Maryam Rajavi, the dissident outfit’s leader, beamed in a stirring speech via satellite from France. Denouncing Iran’s clerical rulers and their nuclear ambitions, she proclaimed democracy “the answer to Islamic fundamentalism.”

Mujahedin-e Khalq, known as MEK, is Iran’s largest exile opposition group and, say its supporters, the best hope of bringing democracy to Iran. It reaches into Iran through its own satellite TV channel and claims an underground network of activists inside the Islamic republic. It also has a big presence in neighboring Iraq, where U.S. soldiers watch over more than 3,000 MEK members gathered in a sprawling camp north of Baghdad.

The MEK, however, has a big handicap: The U.S. government says it’s a terrorist organization. Officials cite its role in the murder of Americans in the 1970s and subsequent terror attacks that killed hundreds of Iranians. Another big blemish is the group’s long collaboration with Saddam Hussein. On top of all that, former members describe the MEK as a personality cult obsessed with celibacy and martyrdom.

So how does an outlaw organization with a bloodstained past, a history of intimacy with Iraq’s toppled despot and a reputation for oddness generate thunderous applause almost within earshot of the Oval Office?

Part of the answer lies in subterfuge: Mujahedin-e Khalq, which means People’s Holy Warriors, has a raft of support groups with innocuous names, such as the National Convention for a Democratic, Secular Republic in Iran, the host of the Washington event. These haven’t been banned and disavow violence.

More important in blurring the MEK’s status, however, is the muddle surrounding U.S. policy toward Iran. With the U.S. armed forces bogged down in Iraq and America’s military options against neighboring Iran severely limited, the MEK and its fans are lobbying hard to present the group as an ally that can help curb Tehran’s growing influence. These supporters, who include lawmakers and conservative foreign-policy analysts, insist the MEK has no links to terrorism.

Most U.S. officials scoff at forming any alliance with the MEK and dispute its claims of having a mass following in Iran, stressing that many Iranians despise the organization. A senior White House official says the Bush administration continues to view the MEK as a terrorist organization and “not an advocate for democracy or human rights” in Iran.

But some Iran analysts say the MEK’s thinly disguised presence in the U.S. makes a mockery of the administration’s antiterrorism campaign. The White House accuses Iran of supporting terrorist groups, they say, yet turns a blind eye toward the MEK. “It gives the impression that some terrorist organizations are better than others,” says Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, an Iranian-American civic organization.

Charm Offensive

Leading the push to get the MEK’s “terrorist” tag removed, with help from some members of Congress, is an outfit called the Iran Policy Committee. The committee’s president, Raymond Tanter, a former National Security Council official under President Reagan, says the MEK’s designation is “restraining” the organization’s ability to promote democratic change in Iran. His group recently published a glossy book that challenges the terrorism charges made against the MEK, and this month helped host an event on Capitol Hill arguing the same point.

The charm offensive has taken the MEK far from its origins. First set up in 1965 by vaguely Islamic left-wing intellectuals in Tehran, Mujahedin-e Khalq used to curse American “imperialism” and murdered a string of U.S. military personnel and defense contractors in the 1970s, says the State Department. The group blames the attacks on rogue Marxist factions and says they were not endorsed by MEK’s leaders, who were in jail at the time or had been executed.

Shortly before Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, the Shah’s crumbling America-backed regime released jailed MEK activists. One of them, Massoud Rajavi, a former law student at Tehran University, became the group’s paramount leader and allied with Islamist forces to topple the Shah. But the group quickly split with Iran’s new clerical rulers led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who executed thousands of MEK supporters. The MEK retaliated with a wave of terror of its own.

Mr. Rajavi fled to France, where his brother, a doctor, has a house in Auvers-sur-Oise, a sleepy town outside Paris. To rally Iranians to his cause, Mr. Rajavi sent Massoud Khodabandeh, a British-educated electrical engineer, to Iran’s Kurdish region to set up a radio transmitter. He began to broadcast taped tirades against Ayatollah Khomeini.

In France, the group swiftly fell prey to political and romantic bickering. Mr. Rajavi, who had just divorced his second wife, shocked supporters by taking up with the wife of a close friend and fellow MEK activist. They married and she took the name Maryam Rajavi.

Another contentious liaison followed. Mr. Rajavi moved to Iraq in 1986 with his new wife and forged an alliance with Saddam Hussein, then at war with Iran. Former MEK members say the Iraq dictator provided a six-story office building in Baghdad and military bases, including Camp Ashraf, named in honor of Mr. Rajavi’s first wife, who had been killed in Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime.

After a disastrous lunge into Iran in 1988, the MEK embarked on a more successful military venture. It helped Saddam Hussein crush an uprising by Kurds after Iraq’s defeat by U.S. forces during the 1991 Gulf War, according to U.S. diplomats and the State Department’s 2005 Country Reports on Terrorism.

Increasingly seen in the West as an Iraqi stooge, Mr. Rajavi sent Ms. Rajavi back to France to drum up support. Her campaign made some headway but foundered when the U.S. and Europe began looking for ways to reach out to Iran’s newly elected reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.

Senior diplomats in the Clinton administration say the MEK figured prominently as a bargaining chip in a bridge-building effort with Tehran. Washington hoped it could get Iran to back a Middle East peace initiative, stop funding terrorist groups and forswear nuclear weapons. Iran, for its part, wanted the U.S. to take a hard line against the MEK.

In 1997, the State Department added the MEK to a list of global terrorist organizations as “a signal” of the U.S.’s desire for rapprochement with Tehran’s reformists, says Martin Indyk, who at the time was assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs. President Khatami’s government “considered it a pretty big deal,” Mr. Indyk says.

The MEK also got hit by a string of defections. Among those to quit was Mr. Khodabandeh, the electrical engineer. He married another defector, Anne Singleton, an English woman who had visited Camp Ashraf, where she says she was taught an anti-imperialist song that vowed “death to America.” Ms. Singleton wrote a book denouncing the MEK as a crazed cult of enforced celibacy and brutal discipline.

Other former members describe a good cause warped by methods reminiscent of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution — a constant hunt for internal enemies, ideological “cleansing” sessions and harsh punishment of real or imagined dissent. Mohsen Abbasloo, a 28-year-old former MEK activist, says he was jailed and beaten at Camp Ashraf for over a month after he voiced mild doubts. “I went there full of hope but it was not even 1% of what I expected,” says Mr. Abbasloo, who says he spent four years at the huge desert complex of barracks, office buildings and military training grounds between Baghdad and Iraq’s border with Iran.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, a veteran MEK member and chief foreign-affairs official of its political arm, denies accusations of brutality and describes defectors as “tools of the Iranian regime.”

Throughout the 1990s, the MEK continued to operate in Washington and elsewhere through various front organizations, the most prominent of which was the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran. In 1999, the State Department banned the NCRI on the grounds that it is the MEK’s official political arm. The NCRI describes itself as an Iranian parliament-in-exile comprising 530 members and not just representing the MEK.

Its former U.S.-based spokesman, Alireza Jafarzadeh, remained a regular on the Washington lobbying and policy circuits. In recent years he appeared routinely on Fox News as a foreign-affairs analyst. In 2002, he held a Washington news conference to reveal a secret uranium enrichment facility in the Iranian city of Natanz. The International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna later confirmed the claim. President Bush and other senior U.S. officials publicly praised what they called an Iranian “dissident group” for unearthing the information.

Former MEK members and some U.S. officials say they believe the Natanz information was fed to the MEK by Israel, which wanted to make it public. The MEK derides this as nonsense.

John Moody, a Fox News senior vice president, says Mr. Jafarzadeh’s contract as a foreign-affairs analyst lapsed, but doesn’t rule out further employment. “He consistently provides accurate and sometimes exclusive information,” he says.

In 2002, 150 members of the House of Representatives signed a petition seeking the MEK’s removal from the U.S. government’s terrorist list.

As America geared up for war with Iraq in early 2003, the MEK muted its adulation of Saddam Hussein, say people who were in Ashraf at the time. Top leaders, including the Rajavi couple, quietly bailed from Camp Ashraf.

“We suddenly noticed that a lot of senior people were missing,” says Behzad Alishahi, an Iranian who spent more than 15 years at the camp working as an MEK TV presenter. Just before the U.S. invaded in March, he says, hundreds of MEK fighters rushed toward the Iraq-Iran border for an attack on Iran. They turned back, he says, after U.S. planes bombed their convoy and Camp Ashraf.

Ms. Rajavi fled to the group’s compound in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. Her husband vanished, along with his hairdresser and bodyguards. This stirred rumors that he had been picked up by the U.S. military and was providing intelligence about Saddam Hussein and also Iran.

A State Department official says Mr. Rajavi was last seen in Baghdad in March 2003 and is now either dead or in hiding. The MEK says he’s alive and evading Iranian assassins.

When American troops pulled up outside Camp Ashraf shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, the MEK offered no resistance and later agreed to disarm. Mr. Alishahi says he and colleagues at the TV station were ordered by MEK commanders to destroy film and other evidence of close ties to Saddam Hussein.

U.S. officials launched a review of camp residents to decide if they should be prosecuted for terrorism. At the same time, the Central Intelligence Agency warned French authorities to watch out for the MEK. The French dispatched hundreds of police to storm the MEK’s Auvers-sur-Oise compound. They arrested Maryam Rajavi and carted away $9 million in cash and documents detailing bank accounts in France, the U.S. and elsewhere holding tens of millions of dollars.

Also confiscated, says a senior French security official, were videos of Mr. Rajavi meeting Saddam Hussein and 99 satellite-positioning devices programmed with coordinates for Iran. The French also found what they say were signs that the Iraqi dictator had bankrolled the organization, something the MEK has always denied. These included stacks of dollar bills wrapped in Iraqi newspapers and documents relating to a gift of Iraqi oil, say French officials who were involved.

Drawing Criticism

The raid drew criticism from lawmakers and others in France and also the U.S. About 10 MEK members set themselves on fire in Europe and Canada in protest. Two died from their burns. French police released Ms. Rajavi but launched a formal terrorism-conspiracy investigation of her and 16 others.

Mr. Mohaddessin, the group’s foreign-affairs spokesman, who was also detained and later released, ridicules the raid as a publicity stunt to win favor with Iran. There were enough police, he says, “for a coup in an African country.”

The U.S. review of Camp Ashraf, which began around the same time as the French raid and finished in summer 2004, partially vindicated the MEK. Only one person has faced any U.S. charges, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran who was arrested in September in New York for allegedly providing support to a terrorist group. The roughly 3,300 now still in Ashraf were given the status of “protected persons” under the Geneva Convention, which promises humane treatment for nonnationals in a country at war. The U.S. military, as the occupying power, took on the role of protector. A White House official says this “protected” status applies only to individuals, not to the MEK as an organization.

Former Ashraf residents say MEK commanders, most of whom are women, have worked hard to woo the American soldiers who are now nominally in charge, inviting them to use a big swimming pool and serving them pizza. American forces have, under an agreement with the MEK, confiscated the group’s roughly 300 tanks, 250 armored personnel carriers, 250 artillery pieces and 10,000 small arms. They also blew up most of the MEK’s ammunition. But Camp Ashraf still functions as a bastion of opposition to Iran, shielded from the turmoil elsewhere in Iraq by American soldiers.

In June, the MEK camp hosted a mass rally of Iranian dissidents and thousands of Iraqis. Ms. Rajavi sent a message from France urging them to “cut off the tentacles of the Iranian regime.” The MEK’s satellite TV station, meanwhile, pumps out adulatory propaganda for Ms. Rajavi and her missing husband, Massoud.

Both the Pentagon and the U.S. Central Command declined to comment on the military’s dealings with the MEK in Iraq. But individual officers have expressed support for the MEK. In May 2003, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, then-commander of America’s 4th Infantry Division, commended MEK members at Camp Ashraf for their cooperation and told reporters that “this should lead to a review of whether they are still a terrorist organization.”

In 2005, following a report by Human Rights Watch detailing torture and other abuses at MEK camps in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, the commander of a U.S. military police unit that had been stationed at Camp Ashraf wrote to the U.S.-based human-rights group to defend the MEK. He said U.S. forces had not found “any credible evidence” of any such abuses and said he would “like my own daughter to someday visit these units for the cultural exchange.”

In Washington, debate raged during this time over how to deal with the MEK, say current and former U.S. officials. Amid the screening of Ashraf residents, some in the Pentagon pushed to use the MEK as a tool against Iran and Iranian-backed militants operating inside Iraq, say current and former State Department officials involved in Iraq policy.

Colin Powell, who was then secretary of state, pushed back against the idea of cooperating with the MEK, say current and former officials. Mr. Powell and his underlings argued that any flirtation with the MEK would undermine Washington’s stand against terrorism. The State Department then designated the group’s previously tolerated U.S. affiliate, NCRI-U.S., as a terrorist front for the MEK. In August 2003, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down its offices at the National Press Club in Washington.

“There was this kind of language [being offered by Pentagon officials] that one man’s terrorist was another man’s freedom fighter,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Mr. Powell’s chief of staff at the time. He says the State Department pushed through 2003 and 2004 for the MEK’s disarmament.

Douglas Feith, who served as the Pentagon’s No. 3 civilian official until last year, denies any desire by the Pentagon to cozy up to the MEK. “The idea that we would use them against Iran is fantasy,” he says.

MEK leaders sheltering in the West are now ramping up a campaign, along with their American and European fans, to present Maryam Rajavi and her missing husband as the only way to stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. This summer, thousands of their supporters gathered in a Paris convention hall. Ms. Rajavi arrived in a chauffeured Bentley, stepping onto a red carpet to the sound of trumpets. Rose petals were strewn at her feet. A former French prime minister and other VIPs applauded.

Among the MEK’s Washington supporters are a significant mix of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican who chairs the International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, drafted legislation this year that would require the White House to provide funding to Iran’s largest opposition groups, although the bill doesn’t explicitly name the MEK.

Mr. Abbasloo, the former Camp Ashraf resident, who is now in Europe, says he doesn’t like Iran’s current regime but mocks the MEK as an alternative. “This would only replace a snake with a crocodile,” he says. “I hope America is not going to be that stupid.”

FrontPageMagazine.com
By Ali Safavi
Friday, January 27, 2006

[Below is Ali Safavi’s response to Michael Rubin’s article on the Mujahedeen-e Khalq in our Leftwing Monsters series. Michael Rubin’s response to Mr. Safavi is also in this issue. You can read it by clicking here — The Editors]

As a sociologist who has known, closely studied the history and followed the activities of the main Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), in the past 34 years, I read with amazement and somewhat dismay Michael Rubin’s “Monsters of the Left,” (FrontPageMagazine, January 13, 2006)[i]. His article purports to be a scholarly survey of the assistance provided by “the Left” to the MEK.

I was amazed because the author claimed that “the Left [had] subsequently bolster[ed] [Massoud] Rajavi and empower[ed] the MKO [MEK].” Had he visited the voluminous literature[ii] on the MEK especially after the invasion of Iraq, he could have easily discovered that his anti-Mujahedeen tirade does nothing more than repeat what those who claim to champion the left have been uttering against the MEK on websites or in tabloid publications.

And I was dismayed because Rubin’s superficial and erroneous recounting of the history of the MEK degenerates into nothing more than a thinly-veiled effort to give his MEK-bashing the veneer of a well-researched paper. The effort, of course, fails miserably. The author attempts to denigrate the support that the MEK has enjoyed for more than two decades in the U.S. Congress and in Parliaments in Europe. He explains this away by suggesting that the MEK has enticed members by sending “pretty young women” to cultivate “friendly lawmakers and commentators” by offering them “Christmas baskets full of nuts and sweets.” Not only is this insulting to lawmakers, but it is also too shallow and silly to merit a response. (Jack Abramoff could have saved millions of dollars and career-destroying scandal if he had only known that Members of Congress have a weakness for pretty girls bearing dried apricots!) In some sense, Rubin’s snideness is perhaps a reaction to the unrivaled role women[iii] have been playing in the leadership of the Mujahedeen, particularly in the past 20 years. The MEK’s leadership council consists entirely of women and its Secretary General, elected every two years, is also a woman.

Recognizing that the attack on the MEK from the left flank got nowhere despite the discredited May 2005 Human Rights Watch report, Rubin claims now to be charging from the “right flank” toward the same objective: to thwart the growing consensus on both sides of the Atlantic that the last vestige of appeasement of the mullahs, the terrorist listing of the MEK as a terrorist organization, should be discarded. It is sadly ironic that when discussing the regime in Tehran and its main opponent, Mr. Rubin dances to the same tune as Tehran’s “leftist” apologists do.

As for the specific stale and discredited allegations wheeled out in Rubin’s piece, the following should be noted:

1.      The Mujahedeen have never denied they opposed the unconditional support given by the U.S. to the Shah’s corrupt dictatorship beginning with the August 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s only nationalist and democratically elected government of Dr. Mossadeq, whom Rubin accuses of “flirting with mob violence.” After all, in recent months, both President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have boldly criticized the policy that justified backing dictatorships in the name of stability. “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe — because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty,” President Bush told the National Endowment for Democracy last November.[iv]

2.      The three founders of the MEK were executed on the eve of President Nixon’s visit to Tehran in 1972. Those facts are not lost on the Iranian people who suffered under the Shah’s brutality for nearly a quarter century. The distorted assertion that the Shah’s “reforms catalyzed their [oppositionists’] growth” and the wishful contention that “ordinary Iranians… ask about Reza Pahlavi,” provide a glimpse into the author’s nostalgia about the return of the Pahlavi dynasty. There’s no dispute that Reza Pahlavi does not even have a number on the bench in any game plan for Iran’s political future.

3.      The familiar slur that the MEK is an “Islamic-Marxist” movement is an attempt to undercut its legitimacy. The Iranian scholar, Afshin Matin-Asgari describes the term “Islamic Marxism” as “an ingenious polemical label” used by the Shah’s regime in the 1970s to describe its enemies.[v] In fact, the history of the MEK shows a pronounced rejection of the premise and theory of Marxism. Massoud Rajavi’s philosophical discourse, delivered in a series of lectures in Tehran University in late 1979, clearly demonstrates this. Syracuse University professor Mehrzad Boroujerdi, points to Rajavi’s work as “perhaps the best example of the Mujahedeen’s ideological contemporaniety” which can be found in the pages of a 15-volume book Tabiyn-e Jahan (“Comprehending the World”), the organization’s foremost work on ideology. In it, Rajavi presents the Mujahedeen’s critique of the limitations of the positivism of August Comte, Max Planck, and Kant; the pragmatism of William James; Freudian psychoanalysis; Darwinian evolution; and a host of other Western “isms” such as scholasticism, scientism, empiricism, and rationalism. Rajavi saves his most extensive critical commentary for Marxist materialistic epistemology. The book’s chief target is the Russian biochemist Aleksander Ivanovich Oparin (1894-1980), whose theory on the origin of life was first formulated in 1922. By subjecting the materialistic doctrines of Oparin and a host of other orthodox Marxist thinkers to a philosophical critique, the Mujahedeen hoped to challenge the vigorous presence of Marxism within Iranian intellectual circles. The group remained skeptical of Marxism’s philosophical postulates and rejected the latter’s cardinal doctrine of historical materialism. It held firm to the beliefs in the existence of God, revelation, the afterlife, the spirit, salvation, destiny, and the people’s commitment to these intangible principles.[vi]

4.      Rubin absurdly tasks Rajavi with the belief that “death during armed struggle, was consistent with traditional Shi‘i glorification of martyrdom.” Suffice it to quote Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”[vii] No one likes to see their loved ones killed, but many around the world who find themselves in that situation derive solace from the notion that their deaths promoted the cause of freedom. The Mujahedeen does not believe in violence as a matter of philosophy. Here’s what Rajavi said on the subject 22 years ago: “The Islam we profess does not condone bloodshed. We have never sought, nor do we welcome confrontation and violence. To explain, allow me to send a message to Khomeini through you… My message is this: If Khomeini is prepared to hold truly free elections, I will return to my homeland immediately. The Mujahedeen will lay down their arms to participate in such elections. We do not fear election results, whatever they may be… If Khomeini had allowed half or even a quarter of the freedoms presently enjoyed in France, we would have certainly achieved a democratic victory.”[viii]

5.      The author cites Ervand Abrahamian to substantiate the claim that the Mujahedeen “opposed the Islamic Republic only after Khomeini purged them from power.” Ironically, in a 1984 report to Lee Hamilton, then chairman of the House International Relations Committee, the Department of State wrote the opposite: “The Mujahedeen have never accepted the Khomeini regime as an adequate Islamic government. When Khomeini took power, the Mujahedeen called for continued revolution, but said they work for change within the legal framework of the new regime. The Mujahedeen also entered avidly into the national debate on the structure of the new Islamic regime. The Mujahedeen unsuccessfully sought a freely elected constituent assembly to draft a constitution.”[ix] It is rather baffling that Rubin has chosen to ignore the fact, obvious even to laymen in Iran, that the MEK’s dispute with Khomeini began in the mid-1970s, before he came to power, when Massoud Rajavi, then serving a life sentence in prison, wrote that Khomeini was a reactionary cleric. Rajavi’s principled position on the absolute need to respect hard fought freedoms also highlighted the differences between the Mujahedeen and Khomeini immediately after the anti-monarchic revolution. In one of many speeches, entitled “The Future of the Revolution,” in 1980 in Tehran University, Rajavi said, “How fitting that today we are again speaking on freedom at the university, the bastion of freedom. No progress and mobilization for the revolution would be conceivable without guaranteeing freedom for all parties, opinions and writings. If by freedom we specifically have in mind free and just relationships domestically, independence speaks to the same meaning in our foreign and international relations. We do not accept anything less in the name of Islam. Anything to the contrary would be deviation and regression and nothing more.”[x]  

6.      Similarly, the assertion that “the group sought to replace Khomeini’s dictatorship with its own,” flies in the face of what Rubin’s claimed “scholarly source,” Abrahamian, actually wrote about the MEK’s views in the days after the fall of the Shah: “In criticizing the regime’s political record, the Mujahedeen moved the issue of democracy to center stage. They argued that the regime had broken all the democratic promises made during the revolution; that an attack on any group was an attack on all groups; that the issue of democracy was of ‘fundamental importance…”[xi] This was entirely consistent with what Rajavi said in 1982 about the MEK’s profound belief in the electoral process: “The Mujahedeen profoundly believe that to avoid the deviations that beset contemporary revolutions throughout the world, they must remain wholeheartedly committed to the will of the public and democracy. If they are to act as a leading organization, before all else, the populace must give them a mandate in a free and fair election. It is not enough to have gone through the trials of repression, imprisonment, torture, and execution under the Shah and the mullahs. The Mujahedeen must also pass the test of general elections. If the Mujahedeen were to choose to compensate for the lack of popular mandate by relying on their past sacrifices or organizational prowess, or arms, their resilient, lively, and democratic organization would soon become a hollow, rotten bureaucracy… If the people don’t vote for us (after we have overthrown the mullahs’ regime), we shall remain in opposition, holding firmly to our principles.”[xii]

7.      “Terrorism, the deliberate targeting of civilians for political gain, should never be acceptable. Mitigating factors do not exist,” Rubin writes. I agree completely. But nothing that the Mujahedeen has done in waging a struggle against the turbaned tyrants of Iran can be described as terrorism. To his credit, Rubin acknowledges that the ruling regime has denied the democratic opposition the chance to express itself peacefully and has slaughtered thousands of Mujahedeen. But accusing the Mujahedeen of terrorism is rather like accusing the movement for American independence, or the French resistance against the Nazi occupation, of terrorism. The Mujahedeen has never targeted civilians, period.  The fact is that in the face of Khomeini’s bloody onslaught, the Mujahedeen exercised its inalienable right, stated in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.”[xiii] This right has also been recognized by the Catholic Church.  In a press conference in 1986, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the President of the Pontifical Biblical Commission and now Pope Benedict XVI, unveiled a document, “Christian Liberty and Liberation,” according to which “Armed struggle is the last resort to end blatant and prolonged oppression which has seriously violated the fundamental rights of individuals and has dangerously damaged the general interests of the country.”[xiv] America’s Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1775, “In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.”[xv] And the late John F. Kennedy added, “Those who make peaceful change (reform) impossible, make violent change (revolution) inevitable.”[xvi] So, yes, there has been armed struggle, but no, that is not the same as saying that there has been terrorism, practiced, sponsored, or supported.

8.      With reference to the allegations of Mujahedeen’s involvement in the suppression of Iraqi Kurds and Shiites after the 1991 Iraq war, Rubin has quoted a convenient source, whose group’s ties with the mullahs, especially before the fall of Saddam Hussein, are too well known. There is simply no truth to such allegations. In a 1999 letter to a court in the Netherlands, Iraq’s current Foreign Minister, another Kurd, wrote, “(We) can confirm that the Mujahedeen (sic) were not involved in suppressing the Kurdish people neither during the uprising nor in its aftermath. We have not come across any evidence to suggest that the Mujahedeen have exercised any hostility towards the people of Iraqi Kurdistan.”[xvii] More recently, after an exhaustive 16-month investigation of each and every member of the Mujahedeen by seven different agencies of the U.S. Government acknowledged that “there was no basis to charge any member of the group [MEK] with the violation of American law”[xviii] The Multi-National Force-Iraq in 2004 recognized the rights of the Mujahedeen as “protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention.”[xix] Had there been any evidence of Mujahedeen collusion with the former Iraqi government on any issue, let alone suppressing the Kurdish uprising, it would have surfaced by now. The recommendation by U.S. Lt. General Raymond Odierno that the terrorist designation of the MEK should be reviewed was not an isolated remark by an unsuspecting commander. Indeed, many U.S. officers and soldiers who have been dealing with the MEK in Camp Ashraf in the past three years, where a mutually cooperative and friendly spirit governs the MEK-U.S. relationship, readily acknowledge that the MEK is not a terrorist group, but a legitimate resistance.

9.      Rubin’s hostile invective belies his academic posturing. Here are some examples (there are others): “Rajavi’s life-long megalomaniacal quest for power and his backward blend of Marxism and Islamism;” “in the West, the group forbids its members from reading anything but MKO newspapers and publications;” and “in Camp Ashraf, Iraq, where many members sit in limbo following Saddam’s fall, MKO [MEK] minders enforce celibacy, employ cult methods to break down individual will, and shield members from unsupervised exposure to outsiders.” I seriously doubt that anyone can believe that in the Information Age, an organization can prevent its members from reading publications of outsiders. A 2005 report published by a group of European Parliamentarians, who visited Camp Ashraf last fall, refutes Rubin’s claims.[xx] One can only wonder how much such absurd mind-control could go on, while a couple of U.S. Military Police battalions are on guard around Camp Ashraf 24/7. Maybe this too can be explained through the offering of “baskets of nuts and sweets” by “pretty young women,” this time in military uniforms!

10.  The Mujahedeen has made it clear that it had nothing to do with the killing of U.S. military advisors and contractors in Iran 30-plus years ago, in the early 1970s. Absent again is any reference in Rubin’s “academic” work to the MEK’s repeated and unequivocal denials of involvement in those incidents. Even Rubin admits that the Shah’s CIA-trained secret police, the SAVAK, arrested the entire leadership and 90 percent of the MEK members by August-September 1971. All of the leaders, including the three founders, were executed by May 1972, before the attacks on the U.S. advisors. The assassins of the Americans were Marxists who took control after the sweeping raids in 1971 decimated the organization. The same Marxists also murdered those Mujahedeen who refused to espouse Marxism.[xxi] While in prison, Rajavi wrote that the killing of the Americans was an attempt to bolster the coup plotters’ credibility and to overshadow the bloody purge they had carried out in the MEK.[xxii] The Council of Foreign Relations wrote in summer 2002, “Some experts say the attack may have been the work of a Maoist splinter faction operating beyond the Rajavi leadership’s control.”[xxiii] Rubin does not tarry to consider such a possibility.

11.  As for the MEK’s supposed lack of support within Iran and abroad, Rubin’s article actually demonstrates the opposite. How in the world could an organization survive without any popular support, after it was dealt a “mighty blow” by the Shah, had tens of thousands of its members massacred by Khomeini, had its bases heavily bombed by U.S. and British warplanes, despite its neutrality in the Iraq war, and had its name included in the terrorist watch list with dire and ongoing consequences? Mr. Rubin and like-minded pundits used to claim that the MEK got millions from Saddam. Could they please explain who bankrolls the MEK now?

12.  At a rally in Brussels last November, some 35,000 Iranians of all walks of life turned out to voice support for the MEK. Earlier, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to address the United Nations in September, some 20,000 were on hand at a pro-MEK rally across the street. (By the way, there were a grand total of 200 monarchists also present).  And this past Thursday, thousands turned out at a rally outside the White House, voicing support for the group. As for the extent of support for the MEK in “the power centers of Washington,” the Mujahedeen has enjoyed the support of a majority in the House of Representatives and of 30 senators on a number of occasions. The lawmakers have rejected the “terrorist” label assigned to the MEK, which they consider a legitimate opposition group. And they have voiced that support while fully aware of all the tired allegations rehashed by Rubin.

13.  Rubin’s rationale in dismissing the MEK’s effectiveness in revealing Tehran’s nuclear secrets is also bizarre. He concedes the point, but then writes that “is more a result of corruption and the Islamic Republic’s crumbling control over its periphery. The MKO–and any other group–can bribe officials and penetrate defenses,” he wrote. Earlier, those on the “left,” were claiming that it was actually Israeli intelligence services that had obtained the information, but passed it on to the MEK to reveal![xxiv] If that is all it takes, one wonders why have western intelligence services, as resourceful as they are, not succeeded in “brib[ing] officials and penetrate[ing] defenses?”

14.  The source of Rajavi’s power lies not in Washington, Paris, London, Berlin or Rome; it lies in the hearts and minds of millions of Iranians, many of whom continue to join the ranks of the MEK even after the war in Iraq. I happened to see a photograph of graffiti on a Tehran wall after the MEK voluntarily handed over its weapons to the U.S. military in May 2003. It said, “Disarmed Mujahedeen, our hearts are your weapons.” Ironically, the venomous campaign of character assassination by the “left,” Rubin and, of course, the Iranian regime, have put Rajavi in the company of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mohammad Mossadeq, Charles de Gaulle and Martin Luther King, Jr., as a champion of liberty. Frankly, that’s not bad company.

15.  The fact remains that neither the U.S. nor the Europeans have succeeded in formulating an effective policy to contain the growing nuclear and fundamentalist threats posed by the Tehran regime. The MEK’s warnings about Islamic fundamentalism emerging as the new global threat, beginning in 1993, have gone unheeded.[xxv] Attempts at striking a deal with the cunning mullahs of Iran failed in 1985, when the U.S. sent them a cake, a pistol and the Bible, and, of course Hawk missiles and was willing to declare that the MEK was terrorist.[xxvi] The same thing happened when the Clinton administration eased the sanctions on Tehran and designated the MEK as terrorists in 1997,[xxvii] when the Bush administration bombed MEK camps in 2003[xxviii] and when the European Union blacklisted the group in return for Iran’s compliance with its nuclear obligations in 2004.[xxix] The efforts to appease Tehran led not to moderation but to the ascension of Ahmadinejad who is dubbed the “terminator” in Iran, not for his likeness to the California governor in his acting days, but for personally delivering coup de grace shots to more than 1,000 political opponents.

16.  The West is now faced with the prospect of the world’s most dangerous regime arming itself with the world’s most dangerous weapon. How does one thwart this threat? Rubin’s lashing out at the MEK, albeit cloaked under a facade of anti-Tehran rhetoric, would have the opposite effect. His implausible proposal to support nameless and faceless Iranians is more a pie in the sky than a practical and concrete solution to prevent the proliferation of fundamentalism sponsored by a nuclear power, headed by unaccountable and increasingly unpredictable leaders. Because, regardless of one’s opinion about the Mujahedeen, the litmus test of crafting any effective policy on Iran is how one deals with the MEK as Tehran’s greatest and most feared nemesis. The solution, as the Iranian opposition leader Maryam Rajavi articulated during an address at the European Parliament in December 2004, lies neither in appeasement, nor in a shooting war. It is democratic change by the Iranian people and their organized resistance.[xxx] Labeling the main component of the resistance, the MEK, as “terrorist,” however, has hamstrung its potentials and posed as a serious barrier to realizing that change. The terrorist designation must be removed. As an anti-fundamentalist Muslim movement, the MEK is an ally and an asset in the fight for democracy in Iran and as the world is trying to grapple with the specter of Islamic fundamentalism threatening not just the Middle East, but Europe and America as well. A quarter century ago, former Undersecretary of State George Ball wrote, “The sloppy press habit of dismissing the Mujahedeen as ‘leftists’ badly confuses the problem. Masud [Massoud] Rajavi… is the leader of the movement. Its intention is to replace the current backward Islamic regime with a modernized Shiite Islam drawing its egalitarian principles from Koranic sources rather then Marx.”[xxxi] Had his advice been heeded, the history of Iran and the Middle East would have taken a very different course. We should not let the opportunity get by this time. The choice is ours.  

      Ali Safavi of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, is President of Near East Policy Research, a foreign policy analysis firm in Washington, DC. You can visit his website at www.nepr.us.

Notes:

[i] Michael Rubin, “Monsters of the Left: The Mujahedeen al-Khalq,” http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=20780. 

[ii] Justin Raimondo The Lying Game Revisited, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=4031.    

[iii] Douglas Jehl, Camp Ashraf Journal, “Mullahs, Look! Women Armed and Dangerous,” The New York Times, December 30, 1996.

[iv] Remarks by President Bush at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C., November 6, 2005, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/11/20031106-2.html. See also Condoleezza Rice, The Promise of Democratic Peace, Op-Ed, The Washington Post, December 11, 2005.

[v] Afshin Matin-Asgari, 2004. From social democracy to social democracy: the twentieth-century odyssey of the Iranian Left. In:  Cronin, Stephanie, editor. Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left: London and New York: Routledge Curzon. pp. 37-64 (cited originally in Iran Policy Committee, White Paper, Sept. 13, 2005, p. 42. http://www.iranpolicycommittee.org).

[vi] Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. Syracuse (cited originally in Iran Policy Committee, White Paper, Sept. 13, 2005, p. 42. http://www.iranpolicycommittee.org).

[vii] http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/thomasjeff109180.html.

[viii] Massoud Rajavi, interview in L’Unité, Paris, January 1, 1984.

[ix] U.S. Department of State, unclassified report on the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran, December 1984 (originally cited in Democracy Betrayed, a publication of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, March 1995, p. 100).

[x] Massoud Rajavi, “Future of the Revolution,” speech in Tehran University, January 10, 1980, text published in Mojahed, Vol. 2, no. 19.  January 15, 1980.

[xi] Ervand Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mujahedeen, (New Haven: Yale University, Press, 1989), p. 215.

[xii] Massoud Rajavi interview, in Nashriye Ettehadiye Anjomanhaye Daneshjuyane Mosalman Khareje Keshvar (Journal of the Union of Muslim Iranian Students Societies outside Iran), Paris, January 9, 1982, p. 3.

[xiii]  Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the General Assembly, December 10, 1948.

[xiv]  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, President of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, L’Osservatore Romano, Vatican, publication, April 5, 1986.

[xv]  Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms, 1775.(*) Papers 1:203, Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government, http://famguardian.org/Subjects/Politics/ThomasJefferson/jeff1478.htm 

[xvi]  Historical Quotes, http://www.muckraker-report.org/id88.html.

[xvii]  Jonathan Wright, US says Iraq-based Iran opposition aids Iraq government, , Reuters news agency, May 22, 2002

[xviii] Douglas Jehl, U.S. Sees No Basis to Prosecute Iranian Opposition ‘Terror’ Group Being Held in Iraq, The New York Times, July 27, 2004.

[xix] Official Statement by the Multi-National Force-Iraq, Maj. General Jeffrey Miller, Deputy Commanding General, July 2, 2004.

[xx] “The People’s Mujahedeen of Iran,” Mission Report, by Friends of A Free Iran, André Brie, Paulo Casaca (members of the European Parliament), Azadeh Zabeti, Esq., L’Harmattan, Paris:2005

[xxi] Sazman-e Paykar dar Rah-e Azadi-e Tabaqeh Kargar (Organization of Struggle in the Path of Emancipation of the Working Class),  The Middle East Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2, Spring 1987.

[xxii] Massoud Rajavi, writings in prison in 1976, first published as “Tahlil-e Amouzeshi-ye Bayaniye Apportunist-haye Chapnama,” (Educational Analysis of the Statement of the pseudo-Leftist Opportunists), (People’s Mujahedeen of Iran: spring 1979), pp. 237-239.

[xxiii] Council on Foreign Relations, summer 2002.

[xxiv] Seymour M. Hersh, The Coming Wars, What the Pentagon can now do in secret, New Yorker Magazine, January 24, 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content?050124fa_fact.

[xxv] Mohammad Mohaddessin,  Islamic Fundamentalism: The New Global Threat, (Seven Locks Press: 2002, 2d Ed.).

[xxvi] John G Tower, Edmund S Muskie, Brent Scowcroft ,The Tower Commission Report, Introduction by R.W. Apple Jr., New York: Bantam Books: Times Books, c1987. pp. 359-361.

[xxvii] Norman Kempster, U.S. Designates 30 Groups as Terrorists, The Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1997. 

[xxviii] David S. Cloud, U.S. Bombs Iranian Fighters On Iraqi Side of the Border, The Wall Street Journal, April 17, 2003.

[xxix] Preparatory text for European proposals on Iranian nuclear program, Agence France Presse, October 21, 2004.

[xxx] Future of Iran: Oppression or Democracy, Friends of A Free Iran, European Parliament, December 15, 2004.

[xxxi] George W. Ball, Op-Ed, “Iran’s Bleak Future,” The Washington Post, August 19, 1981.

Christian Science Monitor
Wednesday, 20 July 2005

By John Hughes

SALT LAKE CITY – Over the phone from Paris, in heavily accented English, Maryam Rajavi says: “I hope one day we can meet in Tehran.” Then, in apology for her command of English, she says “we’ll continue this interview [through an interpreter] in Persian.”

But in whatever language it is offered, her message is one of frustration with a turn toward extremism in her Iranian homeland, and hope that what she sees as the “appeasement” of Iran by Europe and the US will now be replaced by more aggressive action.

Mrs. Rajavi heads the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the political front for the militant People’s Mujahedeen that, with thousands of other Iranian exiles, yearns for the overthrow of the mullahs’ regime in Iran.

The recent election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner, is widely interpreted as a move by the mullahs to consolidate their power. Mrs. Rajavi calls him a “terrorist” who, she says. was involved in an attempt to assassinate Salman Rushdie and other enemies of the Iranian regime. She dismisses the election as a sham, manipulated by “vote-buying,” and the issuing of “5 million fake identity cards,” and “$15 million to the Revolutionary Guards to produce fake ballots.” But she thinks the regime is on the defensive, operating from an “emaciated base,” and therefore vulnerable to a newly aggressive policy by the West.

How does she see this developing? A propaganda offensive? A program of broadcasting democratic values into Iran? Cross-border incursions by the militant mujahideen? All these are possible, she muses, but she dismisses “foreign military intervention,” and “Western appeasement” as options.

There is a third option, she says: Western support of the Iranian people and the resistance movement – a “huge release of energy that is locked up” – in support of democratic change in Iran.

The “locked up energy” to which she refers includes the 3,500 or so mujahideen fighters being held in protective custody by US forces in Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein they were permitted to use Iraq as a base for guerilla operations against the Iranian regime. But with the US invasion, they were neutralized and restricted. The US has long listed the mujahideen as a terrorist organization for its support of the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, but its leaders argue that times have changed, the terrorist label should be lifted, and the mujahideen freed to operate against the current Iranian regime.

Specifically, Rajavi wants the US to lead the effort to bring Iran before the UN Security Council for its “support of terrorism, its development of nuclear weapons, and its abuse of human rights.” This, she says, would send a galvanizing signal to the opposition in Iran, energize cells in Iran with which NCRI has contact, and bring closer the prospect of Iranian regime change.

“Islamic fundamentalism and terror is on the rise,” she says, “and its epicenter is Tehran.”

The answer, she argues, isn’t a foreign military invasion of Iran but a “political, cultural, and ideological solution.” This must come from the emergence of a Muslim force comitted to democracy and “stopping the nuclear clock.”

Mujahideen operatives inside Iran are thought to have been instrumental in producing intelligence about clandestine uranium enrichment plants set up by the regime in its quest for nuclear weapons. In the case of Iraq, the Bush administration was burned by Iraqi exile groups purporting to have evidence of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false.

So there has been understandable questioning about the quality of intelligence offered by the Iranian exiles. Some experts in Washington treat the Iranian mujahideen reports with skepticism, others argue that the mujahideen have a good track record with earlier such reports.

There are similar divisions in Washington about the political value of NCRI. Some members of Congress are in favor of lifting the organization’s terrorist connotation, as are some right-wingers in the Bush administration. Others are leery of the organization.

However, as Iran appears to harden its position on its right to develop a nuclear enrichment program, and the US and its European allies ponder alternative inducements or pressures that might cause Tehran to desist, the role of Iranian exile organizations like NCRI is likely to be a continuing topic of discussion.

• John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, served as assistant secretary of State in the Reagan administration.

International Herald Tribune
February 1, 2005

By Maryam Rajavi

PARIS – How should the world deal with the challenges posed by the Iranian regime, with its continuing support for terrorism, increasing meddling in Iraq and relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons? Approaches under debate range from engagement, with the hope of empowering the “moderates,” to military invasion. But the best option is to initiate change through the Iranian people and the organized resistance movement.

There is no need for war; no one would want to see an Iraq II played out in Iran. But engagement, which has shaped policy toward Iran on both sides of the Atlantic for two decades, has been a disaster, strengthening the most radical factions of the ruling theocracy.

The failure to isolate a religious dictatorship bent on spreading its fiery brand of Islamic fundamentalism and acquiring nuclear weapons has led to the current stalemate. Now Tehran’s missiles, capable of bearing weapons of mass destruction, can reach eastern and southern Europe.

No concession is going to dissuade the mullahs from continuing their ominous objectives. Only days after Tehran signed an agreement with Britain, France and Germany to temporarily suspend its uranium enrichment activities, Iran’s powerful former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, boasted, “Tehran is set to be a member of the nuclear club soon and will resume enrichment after a maximum of six months.”

The engagement policy failed even to keep President Mohammad Khatami and his camp, dubbed as moderate in the West, viable. Today, the most extreme faction dominates the political establishment, and the Revolutionary Guards control most levers of power, including the Parliament.

But there is another answer: democracy.

The more than a thousand students who shouted antigovernment slogans during a speech by Khatami at Tehran University last month are evidence that Iranians seek a change in the totality of the regime.

As a first step in that direction, Western governments must not assist the ruling theocracy. And that means removing the terrorist tag that has been put on the People’s Mujahedeen Organization. The group is the pivotal force in the largest Iranian opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance, which has revealed Tehran’s nuclear, missile and terrorist plans.

In 1997, the U.S. State Department placed the People’s Mujahedeen on the list of foreign terrorist organizations as a goodwill gesture to Khatami, who was Iran’s new president. But after a 16-month investigation in Iraq, where the group has had a presence on the Iranian frontier for 18 years, the United States determined that its members were “protected persons under the Fourth Geneva Convention” and that there was no basis to charge any of them.

Over the years, many U.S. Congressmen and their counterparts in Europe, citing the group’s widespread popular and religious roots in Iran, have described the People’s Mujahedeen as a legitimate resistance movement and the antithesis to Islamic fundamentalism, stressing that it should be removed from the terror list. In November, the International Conference of Jurists, a convention of 500 human-rights lawyers in Paris, declared that blacklisting the organization was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the fundamental right to defense and the presumption of innocence.

The Iranian resistance is committed to holding free and fair elections within six months of regime change, to electing a constituent assembly and handing over affairs to the people’s elected representatives. It seeks a peaceful Iran without weapons of mass destruction, on good terms with its neighbors and dedicated to friendship with the world community.

More than fifty years after the coup that toppled the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh, fate has again put America at a historic crossroads. This time, unlike in 1953, the United States must identify itself with the Iranian people and their aspirations for freedom, democracy and a secular state. Only such an approach can guarantee lasting peace and stability in the Middle East.

Maryam Rajavi is president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Justice: Label triggers law freezing assets, denying visas and punishing Americans for financial, arms support.

The Los Angeles Times
Thursday, October 9, 1997
By NORMAN KEMPSTER

WASHINGTON–Secretary of State Madeleine Albright designated 30 foreign organizations as terrorist groups Wednesday, triggering a law that freezes their financial assets in the United States, denies U.S. visas to their members and subjects Americans who give them money or weapons to 10 years in prison…

Newly listed organizations include the People’s Moujahedeen, an anti-Iranian guerrilla group based in Iraq that maintains an office in Washington and has parlayed its anti-Tehran activities into substantial support on Capitol Hill.

One senior Clinton administration official said inclusion of the People’s Moujahedeen was intended as a goodwill gesture to Tehran and its newly elected moderate president, Mohammad Khatami. The People’s Moujahedeen was once accused of anti-American terrorism but in recent years has concentrated on paramilitary attacks on Iranian targets. Iranian warplanes invaded Iraqi airspace last month to bomb the group’s bases…

U.S.-Iran Relations Since Khatemi’s Election
Updated January 14, 2000
CRS Report for Congress

On October 8, 1997, the State Department officially designated the Iranian opposition People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) as a terrorist group, in accordance with the provisions of the Anti- Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (P.L. 104-132). Two years later, the Administration designated the PMOI’s umbrella group, the National Council of Resistance (NCR), as an alias of the PMOI, thus applying the same restrictions on the NCR as apply to the PMOI (a ban on contributions by U.S. persons to the group, and a ban on entry into the United States by group members, and a freezing of group assets in the United States). However, the NCR continues to operate in the United States. Some in Congress consider the PMOI/NCR a legitimate organization fighting the regime in Tehran, and that the U.S. terrorist designation represented an unwarranted concession to Tehran.