The terrorist status of the exiled Iranian resistance might be used to
pressure Iran's regime over the next few months as the US, the UN and
the EU step up efforts to get the country to comply with specific rules
on its nuclear program. The proposition is simple: the Mujahiddeen stays
on the terrorist list for at least another two years and in return for
this goodwill, Iran is more forthcoming in its nuclear pledges.
There wouldn't be all that much substance to such a deal, but comments
from diplomats reveal that it's been pondered rather matter of factly
time and again as a feasible bargaining ploy. The exiled Iranian
resistance groups' terrorist label can either be used as little more
than a bargaining chip or -less likely- they might find that they might
be fitted into a US cooked up plan for inciting popular uprisings inside
Iran. Both ends of the spectrum have implications that might be
unforeseen.
At the center of the action would be the dissident National Council of
Resistance of Iran (NCRI). It is also known as the Mujahiddeen el Khalq
(MeK) or the National Liberation Army (NLA). Some 3,000 of its members
have been granted protection in July 2004 by the US in their camp in
Ashraf, northwest of Baghdad. The organization's main appeal to Western
backers, of whom the Europeans are even more enthusiastic than the
Americans, is the result of intensive campaigning over the last 15
years. In a sense, it has found the perfect organizational formula to
win over Western hearts and minds - it puts women's rights at the heart
of its philosophy. Women make out 30 percent of the group yet they are
covering 70% of all leadership functions.
The MeK has successfully attracted world media attention and it appears
that it charmes work. US congress member for Florida, Illeana Ros
Lehtinen, who frequently campaigns for the recognition of Iranian
resistance groups certainly will have bought into the female message.
However, it appears that the group got some wires crossed when it made
news headlines that indicated practices in stark contrast with such
lofty idealism. The freedom fighters have a dysmal appreciation of human
rights according to a report last May by Human Rights Watch (HRW). The
report exacerbated the controversy surrounding the terrorist status of
the group, and highlighted some rather gruesome incidents inflicted on
people trying to leave the group. One of the instances involved a former
bodyguard of Rajavi. Le Parisien describes what happened to him. "When
he decided to leave MKO, they injected narcotics into his body and
Tahmasebi was under heavy mental torture". The former bodyguard's fate
was relatively mild compared to the punishments the leadership cooked up
for other members and which frequently ended in the death of the people
punished.
Even though in some eyes the MeK has made significant strides in
becoming an acceptable organization, vowing to lay off terrorist
actions, insiders say that the last decade its leaders have adopted a
cult like aura that not everyone has found to be admirable and which
likely contributed to its difficulty in recruiting new members. In the
early 1990s, the husband and wife team leading the group, Masoud Rajavi
and Maryam Uzdanlu, asked all its members to undertake their own
"ideological revolution" by divorcing their spouses. One of the victims
of this kind of brainwashing operation is the Iran affairs analyst Ali
Reeza Jafarzade who frequently appears on Fox TV. An Iranian exile,
Jafarzade is an ex MeK member, as well as the head of a think tank that
is not part of the group. It was Jafarzade who was the NCRI's official
spokesman breaking the news to the world of Iran's undeclared nuclear
facilities in Natanz and Arak two years ago.
Iran Interlink, an organization that claims to reveal the MeK's true
face to the world, runs a website that claims that Jafarzade married his
wife, Robabeh Sadeghi of Babol, in 1986 on Massoud Rajavi's orders. Four
years later, the couple divorced after Rajavi told all the group's
members to do so for ideological reasons. Iran Interlink published a bio
of Jafarzade, that cast a shadow of doubt over his links with Fox News.
"Fox News now introduces Jafarzadeh as either their employee or as the
head of a consultancy company. But as recently as 2002 the same man was
interviewed by Fox News as the MKO's representative in the US Congress",
according to the website. "There are serious allegations that Jafarzadeh
has been involved in illegal deals in the USA, including deals involving
chemicals which can be used to produce WMDs. There are also allegations
that the MKO, with him as its representative, have been involved in
serious money laundering and drug trafficking in the USA. These
allegations, as well as his and Fox News' dodgy connections in
Washington, are currently under investigation," Iran interlink contends.
Jafarzadeh apparently was such a committed member that he repeatedly
volunteered for suicide operations, Interlink claims, adding that in one
of the organization's publications he is quoted as saying that he is
ready to burn himself in front of the UN's New York office whenever it
is needed.
Even though it is unlikely that the MeK is not at all involved in
helping out the covert agents running around inside Iran, it is equally
unlikely that they are being heavily relied upon as an organization,
observers believe. Ron Jacobs at counterpunch.com believes that it is
not necessarily logical to expect that the US would immediately enlist
the services of the NCRI's members to conduct a foreign invasion of the
country, even though this group has been actively publicizing the
locations of Iran's nuclear sites. "Should change come to Iran with
minimal US interference, it seems likely that those groups and people
with the fewest connections to DC will be those held in greatest favor
by the Iranian people", Jacobs believes. But it is difficult to get a
clear picture on this issue.
The only recent official sign that the Bush administration is working on
the situation was the release by the US State Department to members of
Congress of a classified report entitled 'non compliance report',
covering the nuclear situation in Iran and a few other countries. Parts
of the report were publicized, but it was also announced that there is a
"secret" as well as a "top secret" version of the report in circulation
- a clear sign that Washington wants the world to know that the wheels
are turning.
For all that it matters, the main investigations that are ongoing into
the role of individuals and groups like the NCRI are also mostly
classified. It is virtually impossible to gain access to even the review
dates of the three State Department lists that brand the MeK as a
terrorist organization and which happens every two years.
This is bad news for the MeK, which has focused on losing the terrorist
stigma for the last Decade. In recent years, the MeK appealed three
times to the United States Court of Appeals to review the 1999 and 2001
decisions of the state Department to designate it as a foreign terrorist
organization. But from a rational point of view it would be hardly
possible to grant the MeK its wish. The Bush administration has named
the organization a major reason for its invasion in Iraq, believe it or
not. In a white paper released in September 2002, the US administration
restated a claim President Bush had made before in a speech to the UN
General Assembly, saying that one of the main reasons it had invaded
Iraq had been its "sheltering of terrorist groups including the
Mujahideen-e-Khalq Organization, which has used terrorist violence
against Iran and in the 1970s was responsible for killing several U.S.
military personnel and U.S. civilians." Michele Steinberg, a writer for
the Executive Intelligence Review says that "the only major concrete
charge that the Bush administration made about a terrorist organization
was against, rather than in favor of the MeK.
One of the allegations to haunt the organization most persistently is
that it was actively involved in suppressing an uprising of the Kurds in
Northern Iraq in 1991. One of its official spokespeople has a lot of
experience countering this threat and says that even the PKA dismisses
these allegations. That's one example of putting out a fire that
showcases the organization's potential use yet again as an outfit that
conveys reliability. If the US administration is at all orchestrating
the publicity, it's casting the group as precisely this - a reliable
source of information.
Aside from the revelations on the two nuclear power plants that the
Iranian leadership had not told the IAEA about, Jafarzade has recently
started to take to repeating stories. News broken to the world by the
Financial Times a few months ago was regurgitated once again, as well as
the allegations that there are some 4,000 centrifuges spinning at full
speed inside Iranian nuclear facilities. What the point is of such
allegations is dubious. Outside observers believe that Washington might
be readying the public opinion for a military strike against Iran's
nuclear sites. Analysts say that the majority of the policymakers in
favor of attacking Iran favor this option over inciting an uprising.
"Even so, the fate of democracy in Iran will hardly be determined solely
in Washington. A year after NATO bombed Serbia to halt Milosevic's
brutal crackdown against the Kosovo Albanians, Serbian students led a
peaceful struggle to overthrow Milosevic. The forces that lead to regime
change are often unpredictable -- and not easily suppressed", writes
Laura Rozen, who is voicing just what some analysts at lobby groups are
banking on. It remains to be seen whether such a scenario will be
volunteered as easily. People at NCRI say they have a very difficult
time educating the population on just how much money the Iranian regime
is spending on the nuclear program. If the population finds it has any
bones to pick with their government, it will likely be more inspired by
economic incentives that are more readily digestible.
Rozen believes that a strike wouldn't be without considerable risks
either. "However, an unfortunate link might be made between the even
more unfortunate bombing by US troops of Sarajevo .. in 1998 ... US
leaders might be dreaming of a similar scenario, when, a month after the
bombing, a peaceful demonstration of a bunch of students led to the
revolt that ousted the then president Slobodan Milosovic. However, it's
unlikely that policymakers will be so naieve as to think history repeats
itself at their whim even without making an attempt whatsoever."
The main challenge the Iranian resistance abroad poses aside from the
controversy surrounding the status of the MeK in the US and France are
widely convering views within the organizations. For all the MeK hype's
worth, one wonders whether alternative support of Iranian dissidents
exists besides the choice of this flagship group. The Europeans appear
to be dedicated enough to supporting opposition to all Iranians that
want more freedom in their country and tend to be less discrimate than
their US brethren in power. But this is offset by equally few scrupules
over trading the MeK's terrorist status for better nuclear pledges from
the Iranian regime. From the ground up however, there is a growing
movement among Brussels politicians that wants to end the restrictions
on the MeK as an organization. The French closed the organization down
two years ago but failed to find considerable evidence leading to
terrorist activity. They kicked out the organization before too, when in
1986 it forced the movement to relocate to Baghdad and effectively hire
itself out as Saddam Hussein's private army. Surprisingly, the French
are said to be most effective in garnering results from nuclear
negotiations.
It's most likely the MeK is only used to incite terror inside Iran in a
non official capacity. Or even without direct approval from the very
people that are responsible at the top in the US Bush administration.
This won't be a unique development. The officials like Bush and Rice
were not informed of the decision by the US army to give the Mujahiddeen
fighters their arms back upon invading Iraq and very shortly after the
group were bombed by the Iraqi army. Yet as soon as she got wind of what
the Vice President Dick Cheney and a few like minded friends were
condoning, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cancelled this agreement
and declared the Asraf grounds a protected zone later on. It is US
policy not to allow dealings between US officials and members of
organizations that officially are listed as terrorist. The US, round
about the same time as France, closed the MeK offices in the summer of
2003.
Even from the more recent State Department documents it appears that
there is scepticism within the State Department. The Decades old claim
that the group is essentially Marxist and that it does not envisage Iran
as an Islamic state has obviously not been updated for years save on its
stay in Iraq. "The MeK philosophy mixes Marxism and Islam. [...] Its
primary support came from the former Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein
starting in the late 1980s. The MeK conducted anti-Western attacks prior
to the Islamic Revolution. Since then, it has conducted terrorist
attacks against the interests of the clerical regime in Iran and abroad.
The MeK advocates the overthrow of the Iranian regime and its
replacement with the group’s own leadership."
Massoud Rajavi confirms that a Marxist coup d'etat took place within the
group when he was in prison following the street rallies in the MeK's
heydays, but that he managed to regain control even from his prison
cell. In a bid to make the organization acceptable overseas, he has
repeatedly repudiated all Marxist leanings. Aside from its dodgy
philosophical makeup, information about how the group functions
internally reads much like the accounts of the Davidian Waco cult that
was butchered by the FBI in Texas in 1993. Radio messages are broadcast
every day to induce members to the gospel according to its leaders and
psychological pressure is the standard way of conveying orders. The
MeK's long history starts in 1965, when three former students of Tehran
University -Mohammad Hanifnezhad, Saeed Mohsen and Asghar Badizadegan
set up the movement to help topple the regime of the much hated Shah.
They made Marxism and Islam the foundation of their ideology, a trend
that most groups of the time participated in. The MeK found soon after
the revolution that the new Ayatollah-run regime would simply not trust
it or allow it any role in public life and took to arms. On June 20
1981, the movement started to organize mass rallies and soon thousands
of its members inside Iran were arrested and executed in the streets
because they had participated in regime hostile activities. With the
anti-shah revolution still fresh in the Iranian people's minds, the new
regime's leaders had legitimate worries that a similar fate could rather
easily befall them.
The Mujahiddeen nowadays is not seen by experts as a major military
outfit, but it has known its moments and could be up for a similar
refashioning. Maryam Rajavi has been arrested while hiding in France and
is currently awaiting trial on terrorism related charges. Husband
Massoud hasn't been seen in two years. Meanwhile, Iran Interlink reports
that Maryam has been replaced by someone who served in Saddam Hussein's
private army, and who in turn is succeeding a deputy leader that has
mysteriously disappeared from the scene. All is very sensitive in
Tehran. The European Parliament invited Maryam to outline an alternative
view for state organization in Iran and outraged the Iranian regime. It
shows yet again that the organization's international standing is
somewhat of a potent bargaining chip with Tehran.
The impression one gets from the official organization is however that
the MeK's aspirations to topple the Iranian regime and replace it with
its own officers are still going strong. But the ambitions are rather
hopeless without some staunch backing. "The presence of a
female-dominated army prepared to fight the mullahs and Iran's
Revolutionary Guards is a powerful symbol to all women in the region.
Its effectiveness is not in its military might. The fact that the army
exists at all is a huge threat to all male-dominated fundamentalist
regimes. It shows what women can do", says Anne Land, a Danish Human
Rights lawyer who visited Camp Ashraf. Yet last Summer's human rights
watch report has set the scene once again for a review of the group's
'sins of the past'. It looks increasingly difficult to fit the
organization in any official US plan for regime change. For all its
campaigning however to lose the terrorist label and to muster
international support for the dream team of husband and wife aided by an
army of innocent virgins, the MeK simply has too much blood on its hands
for it to be feasibly considered suitable material by even the most
unconscionable neocon in Washington.
Within Iran, the MeK won't be greeted with open arms either. "The MKO
are highly disliked and disregarded by Iranians worldwide. During the
Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein financed and utilized the MKO to institute
several attacks against Iranians," a writer at the IranTruth blog
writes. These reports are confirmed time and again. It appears that it's
likely going to be rather difficult to gain trust as an organization
that once has taken up arms against its own people -in the 1988 Iran
Iraq war- rather than against only the regime in Tehran. The group is
also widely perceived by the Iranian population to have been actively
involved in suppressing the Kurds in 1991, together with Saddam's army.
"The MKO do not gain immunity for their previous actions simply by
refraining from targeting European and American targets for 30 years",
according to the IranTruth blog.
Angelique van Engelen is a former Middle East correspondent and
currently runs a writing agency
http://www.contentclix.com. She also participates in a writing
ring
http://clixyplays.blogspot.com/
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