The National

MKO terror group members refuse to relocate

WASHINGTON // Hundreds of members of an Iranian opposition militant group exiled in Iraq defied yesterday’s deadline to vacate their camp, a move that may jeopardise the group’s removal from a US terror list. Iranian terror group members refuse to relocate

Nearly 2,000 members of MEK have relocated from the land they were granted by Saddam Hussein in 1986 at Camp Ashraf in north-west Iraq to Camp Hurriya, a former US military base on the outskirts of Baghdad.

About 1,300 resisted the deadline set by an Iraqi government eager to improve relations with Iran. Tehran wants Ashraf closed: under Saddam Hussein, the MEK conducted military operations from there across the border. The group has also been implicated in the recent assassinations of Iranian scientists

The MEK members who are holding out say conditions at Camp Hurriya are inhumane and refuse to be relocated. But Iraq’s government, the United Nations and the US State Department say the claims are just stalling tactics.

This month, Daniel Benjamin, the US State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, urged the group to cooperate.

"It is past time for the MEK to recognise that Ashraf is not going to remain an MEK base in Iraq," Mr Benjamin told reporters during a briefing on July 6.

"The Iraqi government is committed to closing it, and any plan to wait out the government in the hope that something will change is irresponsible and dangerous."

State Department exasperation with the MEK’s demands – which according to US officials range from the reasonable, more air conditioners, to the absurd, private cars – comes in the middle of an unprecedented lobbying effort in the US to see the group removed from the US list of Foreign Terrorist Organisations, a designation it has had since 1997.

Over the past year, advertisements in support of the group have appeared at Washington bus stops, in newspapers and on network news channels.

A prominent cast of current and former US politicians and officials – including the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations and Howard Dean, a former Democratic presidential candidate – have been involved in the campaign.

The effort culminated with a Washington district court ruling on June 1 that imposed a four-month deadline on Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, to reach a decision on the group’s designation.

The campaign has been "highly effective", said Trita Parsi, the head of the National Iranian-American Council, a Washington-based community interest group,

It might also be illegal, he said. Under US law, receiving money from a designated terrorist organisation is considered as material support. In March, the US Treasury Department opened an investigation into the source of the considerable amounts of money being paid to speakers and lobbyists on behalf of the MEK.

The Treasury is investigating whether the source of the money is the MEK, in which case it would be material support but MEK supporters say the money comes from the Iranian American community.

A department spokesman declined to comment on the investigation other than to say that as a designated terrorist group, "US persons are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with or providing services to this group".

Without the lobbying effort, Mr. Parsi said, the group’s designation would not be an issue. There was no controversy relisting the MEK under the Bush administration, and the group is still engaged in military operations, he said.

In March, NBC quoted unnamed US officials who said the MEK played a role in the assassinations of Iranian scientists. Tehran blames Israel’s Mossad spy agency for organising the operations.

To delist the MEK, said Mr Parsi, would not only "make a mockery" of the terrorism list, it would "send shock waves" through America’s Iranian community, which, he said, was fearful of a group described as a "cult" in a 2011 Rand Institute report.

"They terrorise people, they threaten people, they intimidate people."

Nevertheless, the State Department has indicated that should the MEK agree to a peaceful transfer from Camp Ashraf, it would delist the group. The European Union removed the MEK from its list of terror organisations in 2009, and Mr Benjamin on July 7 suggested the group’s conduct during the evacuation of Camp Ashraf was crucial.

"This is the MEK’s moment to show that it has taken on a fundamentally different character."

Supporters of the MEK say the US should delist the group whether or not it leaves the camp.

There is a lack of "unclassified evidence" of any MEK terrorist activity since 2001, said Raymond Tanter, a member of the National Security Council during the Reagan-Bush administration and now a professor at Georgetown University. Mr Tanter rejected suggestions that the MEK could have been involved in the assassination of Iranian scientists.

"How can a group that is confined, monitored and protected by US forces in Iraq for over half a decade and now under siege and searched regularly by the Iraqi military have a capability to conduct terrorist activities or commit terrorism?"

Ultimately, the decision is likely to be political, said Wayne White, a former high-ranking State Department intelligence official.

The MEK was designated a terrorist group long after it had carried out attacks on Americans during the Iranian revolution, Mr White said, and as part of an outreach campaign to then Iranian president, Mohamed Khatami.

Now the political figures pushing for the delisting are those who also want to take the hardest line on Iran, he said.

"It’s just a political football, this time being bounced in another direction."

By Omar Karmi

July 21, 2012 0 comment

Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

MEK to push US for another war

It is a bizarre, exiled Iranian opposition group that has existed mostly on the fringes of history. But the cultish Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), or "people’s holy warriors", will seize the international spotlight if the US State Department decides in coming weeks to remove the group from its list of foreign terrorist organisations.

The well-funded organisation, once allied to Saddam Hussein, has friends in high places in Washington.

Removing the MEK from the US’s terrorism blacklist would make already frosty relations between Tehran and Washington even icier.
It also "would allow the Mujahedin to receive US funding and become a powerful force in support of war with Iran, just like the Iraqi exiles who deceived us into war with Iraq did," Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), warned last week.

Iran’s domestic opposition meanwhile insists that lifting the MEK’s terrorist designation would spell disaster for the Green Movement. [..]
The MEK, dedicated to overthrowing Iran’s Islamic regime and considered a terrorist group by Iran as well as the US, is despised by ordinary Iranians because it fought alongside Saddam’s forces in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war.
In response to an MEK lawsuit, a US federal court last year ordered the State Department to review the group’s terrorist designation.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, is due to announce her decision next month. The MEK was blacklisted as a terrorist organisation in 1997 by her husband’s administration.
The group, however, has been taken off similar terrorism lists by the European Union after court decisions found no evidence of terrorist activity in recent years.

The MEK is led by the husband-and-wife team of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. The latter, touted by the MEK as Iran’s "president-in-waiting", lives in suburban Paris.

Her spouse is a spectral figure who has not appeared in public for years. His whereabouts are unknown, although informed speculation suggests that he spends most of his time at Camp Ashraf, the MEK’s main base, a sprawling, mini-state within a state 65 kilometres north of Baghdad.

The MEK was founded in 1965 as an urban guerilla movement opposed to the US-backed Shah and played a key role in the 1979 Islamic revolution. Its ideology was a blend of revolutionary Islam and Marxism.

The MEK vehemently opposed US involvement in Iran and the State Department links the organisation to the deaths of at least six Americans in Iran during the 1970s.
The MEK also backed the takeover of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979. When the hostages were freed 444 days later, the MEK berated the regime for "capitulating to imperialism".

But the MEK soon broke with the late Ayatollah Khomeini in a violent power struggle and was forced underground in 1981 when thousands of MEK members were arrested and many hanged. Most of its senior leaders fled to France. Another wave of executions followed in 1988.

But the MEK also got in punishing blows, assassinating scores of regime officials. The right arm of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, remains partially paralysed from an MEK bomb attack in 1981.

In 1986, under pressure from France, the MEK relocated to Iraq, where Saddam armed and funded it. Its main base there was Camp Ashraf, conveniently located 50 miles from the Iranian border for attacks against the Islamic republic.

But in 2003 the MEK suffered a devastating blow when Saddam was toppled by the US-led invasion. American forces stripped the group of its tanks and heavy weaponry but accorded its members "protected person" status.

About 3,400 Iranian former rebel fighters, many of them women, have since lived a limbo-like and precarious existence at Camp Ashraf.
Their plight made headlines in early April when Iraqi troops raided the camp, leaving at least 34 residents dead, according to a UN investigation. The MEK is strongly disliked by Iraq’s Shiite-led government, which is on good terms with Iran.

Many rights activists describe the MEK as a cult whose leaders have brainwashed members and dictate every aspect of their lives.

Former members paint a grim picture of life in Camp Ashraf, most of whose inhabitants are said to be middle-aged.

Massoud Khodabandeh, a former senior high-ranking MEK member, said: "People aren’t allowed to get married. Some there haven’t heard or seen a child for 25 years. There are no phones, no internet, no postal services, nothing.."

Mr Khodabandeh runs an organisation helping those trying to quit the MEK, and believes many at Camp Ashraf want to leave but are effectively held hostage by the Rajavis.
"Those caught trying to run away get severely punished," he said in a telephone interview from Leeds, England, on Sunday.

One of the most detailed studies of the MEK was conducted in 2005 by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the US-based watchdog.

Outlandish practices ordered by the Rajavis included "divorce by decree of married couples, regular writings of self-criticism reports, renunciation of sexuality, and absolute mental and physical dedication to the leadership," HRW said.

Its report focused on cases of would-be defectors being tortured at Camp Ashraf, including two who died under interrogation.

Yet the MEK has powerful supporters in Washington and European capitals.

Among the MEK’s heavyweight cheerleaders in the US are Jim Jones, President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Dennis Blair, the former director of national intelligence, and James Woolsey, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency.

Iran specialists are baffled by the vocal backing the MEK enjoys among some heavy-hitters in Washington. Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University in New York, said: "Their [the MEK’s] support inside Iran is very, very limited.

"The fact that they’re against the government in Iran doesn’t make them good," he added in a recent telephone interview. "The only thing that I can think of that would be worse than the present government of Iran is a government of the MEK."

Michael Theodoulou (Foreign Correspondent)

July 26, 2011 0 comment

The cult of Rajavi

Ex-member says MEK is like a cult

Ex-member says MEK ‘is like a cult’
Anne Khodabandeh, a former member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq organisation at her Leeds home. Lorne Campbell / The National
When the European Union removed a militant Iranian opposition group from its blacklist of terrorist organisations last month, it drew not only protestations from Iran but also the contempt of a former member who claims the group is little more than a cult.
The Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK, or the People’s Mujahideen of Iran, and sometimes known as MKO), a leftist Islamist organisation that has vehemently opposed the Islamic Republic since its establishment in 1979, was taken off the EU’s terrorism blacklist on Jan 26 at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, the culmination of intensive lobbying by the group and its European supporters.
But Anne Khodabandeh, née Singleton, a former member of the group for 20 years, was sceptical.
“Well, at least this shows the EU blacklist for what it really is – nothing more than a list of friend and foe,” she said.
“But realistically I don’t think it will make any difference to them in Europe. They will continue to carry on with their propaganda and fund-raising activities. They will continue to have their base in Paris where they hold their own members captive in isolation.”
Mrs Khodabandeh, 49, now a computer programmer, runs Iran-Interlink, an organisation that aims to inform the public about what she says is the reality of the MEK and provide assistance to former members, as well as current members who want to leave.
Mrs Khodabandeh said the group enforces strict segregation of men and women – even forcibly separating or divorcing couples – and employs psychological manipulation and mind control. She pointed to the practice of self-immolation at MEK demonstrations in Europe and the United States as further evidence of the group’s “cult-like” characteristics.
“The MEK is a cult, with every implication that has,” she said. “The leadership is unelected, unaccountable and perpetrates abuses against its own members.”
The MEK was established in the 1960s by a group of radical students in violent opposition to the US-backed shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and took part in the 1979 revolution.
But it soon fell out with Iran’s new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the the country’s religious establishment and many members were jailed and executed. Most fled the country for Europe and the United States while thousands of others set up a base in northern Iraq at Camp Ashraf, which is in the process of being closed down.
Various estimates put the group’s membership at anywhere between 5,000 and 20,000.
For its part, the MEK describes itself as a secular, democratic organisation that wants to bring democracy to Iran and enjoys significant support in Europe and the United States.
Brian Binley, a member of the British Parliamentary Committee for Iran Freedom, hailed the decision to remove the MEK from the EU blacklist and said descriptions of the group as a cult were “completely untrue”.
“I am delighted the battle has been won,” Mr Binley, a Conservative member of parliament, said of the EU ruling. “This is a perfectly legitimate group that opposes the medieval theocracy of Iran.
“I have found them to be good people, to be democrats who want a free and democratic Iran.”
Mrs Khodabandeh first learnt about the MEK in the early 1980s through an Iranian boyfriend while studying at Manchester University.
An idealist “who wanted to change the world”, she began attending the group’s campus meetings and gradually became more involved with its fund-raising and awareness activities.
Before long she was a fully fledged member, espousing the group’s militant opposition to the theocratic regime in Iran and calling for its overthrow.
But the MEK’s demands on her grew and through such techniques as peer pressure and “psychological manipulation”, Mrs Khodabandeh said, she came ever more under control of the group.
By the age of 30 she had lost touch with most of her friends and family, given up her job as a computer programmer and handed over her house, car and savings.
She left her home in Leeds, Yorkshire, to live with other members at a number of “safe houses” belonging to the MEK, first in London and then in Sweden, and was put to work in the “diplomacy section”, monitoring the news and writing press releases for the group.
“We were like children. We took all our orders from the leaders – we wouldn’t so much as leave the building without their permission,” she said.
Since 1985 the MEK has been led by the husband and wife team of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi – the latter a leading figure in the recent campaign to have the MEK removed from the EU’s terrorist list – both of whom, according to Mrs Khodobandeh, embody all the traits of “cult leadership”. Their authority within the group is unquestionable, she said, and Massoud Rajavi is proficient in mind-control techniques.
A number of rights groups support Mrs Khodobandeh’s claims.
“We have documented serious human rights abuses that the MKO was inflicting on its own members in their camp in Iraq,” said Tom Porteous, the London director of Human Rights Watch. “The organisation … has shown that criticism of leadership is certainly not tolerated.”
It was in 1993, at the height of her devotion to the MEK – “I was willing to die for them,” she said – that Mrs Khodabandeh began to have doubts about the group.
The Rajavis and other leading members had begun introducing bizarre rules, including the banning of marriage and compulsory divorces so that members could dedicate themselves fully to the cause.
She walked out on the MEK, though it took her another three years to finally cut her mental and emotional ties to the group and return to normal life.
In 1996 she met Massoud Khodabandeh, another member who had doubts about the organisation and who left at the same time. They married soon after and moved to Mrs Khodabandeh’s native Yorkshire, where they have lived since.
As a former member and current director of a support group for former MEK members, Mrs Khodabandeh is concerned about the inhabitants of Camp Ashraf in Iraq who will be evicted when the camp is closed in the coming months.
The group has been used by the EU over the years, she said, for a number of purposes, including as a propaganda tool against Iran and as a bargaining chip in nuclear negotiations.
And now that the MEK has been removed from the blacklist, there is no barrier to giving them refuge in Europe.
“EU countries have benefited from their existence for years. If you use them, take responsibility for them,” Mrs Khodabandeh said.
Telephone calls and e-mails to the MEK for comment went unanswered.
Jonathan Spollen, Assistant Foreign Editor – February 03. 2009
jspollen@thenational.ae
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090203/

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February 3, 2009 0 comment