Escape from a guerrilla-cult organisation blocked
In Europe, the Iranian Mojahedin presents itself as a democratic alternative to 
the mullahs in Tehran. But the camp, which the organization established in Saddam’s Iraq, is beset by reports of dissidents escaping the gulag. The Iraqi government wants to get rid of the former fighters, but find this avenue blocked. IRO. Baghdad, in early March Hoshiar Esmail says the biggest mistake of his life was to leave his safe exile in Switzerland and to return to the Mojahedin-e Khalgh (Volksmujahedin). In 1998, he went to Iraq, where the armed Iranian opposition group, equipped with weapons and money from the former Iraqi regime, led the struggle against the mullahs’ regime. But since then the political situation in Iraq has changed fundamentally. The Shiite and Kurdish-dominated government is pursuing a course of rapprochement with the former enemy Iran, which culminated in the recent visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian opposition members are regarded as terrorists who threaten Baghdad. Locked borders
Hoshiar separated from those [loyalists] interned in the Mojahedin-e Khalq camp. But the Iraqis make no difference between those who are loyal to the organization, and those who have separated. Equipped with Iraqi travel documents, he wanted to leave Iraq as soon as possible. In mid-December [2007], together with two other former Mojahedin-e Khalq fighters he made his way to the Turkish border. The journey, and with it the hope of a new beginning floundered at a checkpoint of the Kurdish state in northern Iraq. The Kurdish security forces monitor its border with the rest of Iraq, as if it were a state border. They took the three Iranians, and they were stuck in prison for nearly three weeks. Finally, the three were left stranded in Erbil. Hoshiar found temporary shelter in an inconspicuous building in a secluded quarter in Erbil. On the floor of his bare room is a carpet, in the corner a mattress, the curtains are also drawn in the bright daylight to fend off the curious glances of outsiders. Hoshiar crouches next to the stove. In the year 1979 – Iran had just won the Islamic revolution – he joined the Mojahedin-e Khalq. Fighting alongside the Ayatollah Khomeini against the Shah’s regime, and inspired by the revolutionary zeal of the time, these young Iranians believed in the Islamism and Marxism … doctrine of salvation that Massoud Rajavi, the leader of the group, preached. But early on in the revolution dissident voices were stifled as mercilessly as before under the Shah by the regime which came to power. The Mojahedin-e Khalq was again pushed back, thousands of its members were jailed or executed. Aged 17 years, Hoshiar landed in the Evin prison in Tehran, was later freed and was arrested again. After his release in 1984, he fled to Pakistan, from where he found his path led to Switzerland, which granted him political asylum. "The years in Switzerland were the best of my life," says Hoshiar in retrospect. But like so many exiles he felt torn between the comfort of his country and loyalty to the cause. And the propagandists of the beleaguered Mojahedin-e Khalq told him: If he really wants to change the political situation in Iran, he should go to Iraq. In the Mojahedin-e Khalq gulag
Meanwhile, the Iranian regime’s opponents struck a diabolical pact with Saddam Hussein, who supported it [Mojahedin] generously with weapons and money. In five bases the group planned and rehearsed the storming of Tehran. In Europe Massoud Rajavi’s charismatic wife Maryam acted the part of Jeanne d’Arc of Islam. In 1998, Hoshiar… went to Iraq where he was placed in Camp Ashraf in Baquba, the largest camp of the Mojahedin-e Khalq. Soon, he realized that their talk of an Islamic state with a democratic face was just hollow rhetoric.
The group was acting as a sect, Hoshiar reported. "All we got to hear and see was Rajavi this, Rajavi that," he recalls. But that was not enough. Couples were separated and … in rituals of self-criticism the fighters had to reveal intimate details about themselves before the camp leadership. In this way every individual has been made compliant. Whoever has not complied has felt humiliation. "One veteran fighter wanted to get out. He was with 400 of us in a locked room. We had to swear at and insult him,” Hoshiar reported. Another former fighter who does not want to be named, said: "It was like a Stalinist gulag." Leaving was out of the question. In the autumn of 2002 after the American attack on Iraq Hoshiar finally said he wanted to separate from the Mojahedin. "They promised me that I would go to Europe," he says, "but instead they threw me in a secret prison in the camp." He spent eleven months in solitary confinement… Twice the now 44-year-old tried to take his own life.
The arrest has left serious effects since he now suffers from chronic headaches and tinnitus. In June 2004, Hoshiar, together with several hundred fighters, had left [the group]… Rather than leave Iraq he was admitted again into a camp, this time run by the Americans. The Iraqi government says the Mojahedin-e Khalq are mercenaries of Saddam’s regime and accused it, along with Saddam’s elite units of suppressing the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings in 1991. The Iraqis say they are terrorists, and Baghdad wants them sent back to Iran. But the leadership ranks of the Mojahedin-e Khalq handed their weapons to the Americans and offered them their services. [In 2003] The Americans interned the remaining Mojahedin-e Khalq in Camp Ashraf and put them under their protection.
Endless Odyssey?
Two years later, about 200 ex-fighters applied to become UN Refugees (UNHCR). Walpurga Engelbrecht of the UNHCR in Baghdad said, with the recognition of political persecution the ex-fighters were given refugee status. But no country was prepared to take the refugees. In European diplomatic circles in Baghdad, it is assumed that the Americans’ Camp Ashraf [TIPF and FOB Grizzly] will soon close and that they want to get rid of the separated Mojahedin-e Khalq fighters as quickly as possible. Now Hoshiar and several dozen former Mojahedin-e Khalq have travel documents. Some 50 of them are stranded in Kurdistan. One of them, Mohammed Rostam, has twice tried to get to Turkey but each time he was re-arrested and deported to Iraq where the Kurds also briefly put him into jail. His attempt to get to Baghdad also ended in prison. The security chief of Erbil, Ismet Ergushi, confirmed the arrests and gave assurance that the Government is trying to achieve a lasting solution.
Like many of their former comrades, Mohammed and Hoshiar fear not only the Kurdish authorities, but also the long arm Tehran… "We live in constant fear," says Hoshiar. While Maryam Rajavi poses in Europe as a democratic alternative to the present regime in Tehran, Hoshiar is looking for a new hiding place. The end of his temporary odyssey is not yet in sight.
NZZ online March 31, 2008 (Translated by Iran-Interlink)
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/international /ehemalige_iranische_volksmujahedin_im_irak_ohne_ausweg_1.694952.html
for censure, persuasion, distortion, brainwashing and mind-control activities against their insiders and sympathizers. Cults show diverse and double reactions in their dealing with the media that draw substantial public attention to accomplish a variety of objectives. Besides, the media in any form play a key role in the formation of public opinion and thought, life-style, and even the depiction of a nation’s destiny. For sure so important, versatile phenomena of the modernity never escape the attention of the cults. In the same way that the media can give warning against the threat and the evil nature of the cults, they can also be at their service, depending on the amount of revenue and how influentially they can master them, to instil noxious ideas into a society. However, since the media can hardly be an exclusive medium for the cults and in many occasions it is too expensive a means for propagation with the least expected outcome, and sometimes inflicts irreparable damages, the cults prefer not to invest much trust in the media. The case is sometimes different with the political cults. If we consider deliberate isolation tactic as one of the cults’ most common mechanisms of control and enforced dependency, then the social persuasion is the identical definition of the mechanism. The recruits are encouraged to disrupt their common lifestyle and leave whatever they are attached to behind to adapt themselves to the cult’s milieu in isolation. In this process, what is considered to be a threat in neutralizing the effects of the social persuasion will be the media which the cults favour to avoid. That is mostly because cults’ prompt of black-and-white thinking fails to be functional and productive in the media which has to be repelled. However, cults are not so powerful as the governments that can have total control over the media for social persuasion and people’s mind-control if they will. Quoting Orwell reasoning the effectiveness of the media coming under the complete control of the governments, Singer states: Orwell reasoned that if a government could control all media and interpersonal communication while simultaneously forcing citizens to speak in a politically controlled jargon, it could blunt independent thinking. If thought could be controlled, then rebellious actions against a regime could be pre- vented. 1 Milieu control, that is total control of members’ communication in the cults, is a mechanism to keep members from communicating anything other than what the cults approve and often involves discouraging members from contacting relatives or friends outside the cult and from reading, watching and listening to anything unapproved by the cult or the organization. Consequently, the effectiveness of the media in illuminating facts about the cults and active organizations is actually neutralized and the insiders are told not to believe and trust in anything they see or hear reported by the media that has to be accounted as an agent in the enemy’s front. In this way, the cults’ leaders blindfold members about historical facts: Milieu control also often involves discouraging members from contacting relatives or friends outside the group and from reading anything not approved by the organization. They are sometimes told not to believe anything they see or hear reported by the media. One left-wing political cult, for example, maintains that the Berlin Wall is still standing and that the "bourgeois capitalist" press war people to think otherwise in order to discredit communism. 2 As a result, cults’ hostile position against the media decreases the influence of the media on the members to a zero degree. Furthermore, cults exploit a variety of approaches and legal levers in the war against the media. Sometimes they use violent tactics such as threatening, intimidation and harassment to frighten away the critics, reporters, journalists and authors and to compel them cease anti-cult productions and programs: A metropolitan newspaper’s desk editor was harassed after he ran a piece critical of a local cult. He and his family had to move out of their home after receiving seventy-two hours of continuous phone calls from cult members. 3 As mentioned earlier, if possible, cults will set up complex networks of public relations and radio-TV stations to make a direct channel of communication and contact with the sympathizers rather than letting them refer to public media for information. Such a biased medium works as sufficient to hold the followers hooked onto the cult. As Singer explains: Cults have found many ways to restrict and control public information about them. Some groups have brochures, handouts for the press, and written overviews and endorsements of the group, often prepared by sophisticated public relations firms. In essence, these materials imply that "you need go no further. Here is who we are. Here is all you need to know to understand us perfectly. Take this material and use it. Everything is fine." The implication is that the material is objectively represented and relatively comprehensive. 4 As a leftist cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) has adopted various tactics to muzzle and beat the media. It will be discussed in the following article. References: 1. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, introduction. 2. Ibid, p. 70. 3. Ibid, p. 224. 4. Ibid, p. 226.
As part of the intense influence and change process in many cults, people take on a new social identity, which may or may not be obvious to an outsider. When groups refer to this new identity, they speak of members who are transformed, reborn, enlightened, empowered, rebirthed, or cleared. The group’ approved behavior is reinforced and reinterpreted as demonstrating the emergence of "the new person." Members are expected to display this new identity. 1 The new personality totally split from the outside world is manipulated for a variety of group tasks based on the objectives of the group and cult that consider the outsiders as the enemies who have to be confronted: The conflicts a mass movement seek and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium. 2 As Hoffer asserts, a cultist personality is formed to be submissive to the inner-cultic relations that have priority to outwardly demonstrated ambitions and goals. The members undergoing overall identity change easily consent to any means of changing behaviour and conduct. Thus, cults can successfully accomplish their goal of binding new members to the group. Considering the stages people will go through as their attitudes are changed by the group environment and the thought reform processes, Singer points to psychologist Edgar Schein’s second stages of three: During this second stage, you sense that the solutions offered by the group provide a path to follow. You feel that anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt can be reduced by adopting the concepts put forth by the group or leader. Additionally, you observe the behavior of the longer, term members, and you begin to emulate their ways. As social psychology experiments and observations have found for decades, once a person makes an open commitment before others to an idea, his or her subsequent behavior generally supports and reinforces the stated commitment. That is, if you say in front of others that you are making a commitment to be "pure," then you will feel pressured to follow what others define as the path of purity. 3 There are also the eight psychological themes that psychiatrist Robert Lifton has identified as central to totalistic environments and cults invoke these themes for the purpose of promoting behavioral and attitudinal changes in the members. The third theme, demand for purity, depicts two opposite world of black and white; the cult being an absolutely white and clean world versus the black and evil world of outside. Of course, the members with a new personality have no other choice but to think and act according to cult’s ideology and drawn strategy: An us-versus-them orientation is promoted by the all-or-nothing belief system of the group: we are right; they (outsiders, nonmembers) are wrong, evil, unenlightened, and so forth. Each idea or act is good or bad, pure or evil. Recruits gradually take in, or internalize, the critical, shaming essence of the cult environment, which builds up lots of guilt and shame. Most groups put forth that there is only one way to think, respond, or act in any given situation. There is no in between, and members are expected to judge themselves and others by this all-or-nothing standard. 4 The process of producing identity within MKO follows the same mechanism in the cults and its orientation began with the start of the internal ideological revolution. All the members undergoing the revolution process admitted their identity change, that there does exist a long distance between their organizational and personal identities. It was instilled into them that their identity would be prompted based on the extent of adherence to the ideological system of the group and denial of any personal identity. In a text written by a member of MKO in self-denial we read: Personality, egocentrism, self-reliance and individualism are all souvenirs of the bourgeoisie’s worthless humanism that distanced me from the organization as far as its degree of its impact on me. It was like a chaff that barred me to drink the pure, life-giving instructions of the organization and was leaving me alone in a desolate waste-land with no way out. I was enslaved by dominant ambiguities within me. When I failed to overcome the ongoing struggle inside me, I was even more vulnerable to the outside misfortunes and could not even face them. 5 The member’s confession well depicts his identity destabilization and what psychologists call an identity crisis. He looks back at his own world and values to find out that he has been wrong in the past. This process makes him uncertain about what is right, what to do, and which choices to make and of course, as he admits, only the cult-like instructions of the organization can lead him to what is inspired to be the right path. Consequently, he takes on a new organizational identity which he considers a change for the better. In the process, he, as the member of a cult, detaches from his most dear ideas and attachments which he discovers to have been nothing beyond a barren waste-land for the identity reborn, a utopia in the horizon he fails to dismiss easily. Masoud Banisadr, another separated member of MKO, in his memoir relates of the time when sat tearing whatever attached him to the past under the commands of the organization: This time I attacked my old photographs from my own childhood till marriage and up to then, my parents photographs as I wanted to deny all of them, my father who was perhaps responsible for my bourgeois tendencies and my mother who was responsible of my own ‘mild’ and ‘gentle’ behaviour known as liberal ones. Anna seeing me taking all those photographs and albums, with anger, was quietly crying, then when I attacked our marriage Album she start crying louder, and asked me to stop it. She said those are not just yours . . . but I was not listening to her and took everything and put them in a rubbish bag. 6 Quoting Lifton’s forth theme, through a cult’s instructions, members are told whatever connects them to their former lives is wrong and has to be avoided, a fact well affirmed by MKO’s ex-members: Through the confession process and by instruction in the group’s teachings, members learn that everything about their former lives, including friends, family, and nonmembers, is wrong and to be avoided. Outsiders will put you at risk of not attaining the purported goal: they will lessen your psychological awareness, hinder the group’s political advancement, obstruct your path toward ultimate knowledge, or allow you to become stuck in your past life and incorrect thinking. 7 That is why MKO refer to members’ solubility in the organizational identity as a “reborn” or “identity salvation”. The organization, being transformed into a cult, pursues the same cult mechanism of altering the members’ personal identity to produce a new identity. References: 1. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 78. 2. Eric Hoffer; The true believer, Harper &. Row, Publishers, New York, 1966, p. 112. 3. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 76. 4. Ibid, 71. 5. Mojahed, no. 252; Abdol-ali Maasoumi’s letter to the ideological revolution. 6. Masoud Banisadr; Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel. 7. Margaret Thaler Singer; Cults in Our Midst, JOSSEY-BASS, 2003, p. 72.
Organization (MKO) or the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorist groups turn Iraq into a base against friendly countries in the region. That is what Iraq needs to end a phase of anarchy following the fall of the dictator who acted as the god-father of terrorism and groups like MKO that is notoriously known to have acted as Saddam’s mercenaries and private army. Ahmadinejad’s landmark visit to Baghdad is referred to as a "hero’s welcome" and "extremely helpful" even by the critics of the Iranian regime and slogans on the walls of houses and public markets in Baghdad’s Sadr City are reported to be all welcoming Ahmadinejad and hailing him as a hero. Of course, none of the active insurgent and terrorist groups can tolerate any move taken to uproot terrorism in Iraq and smash their fortified safe-havens in a variety of provinces. In a widespread propaganda blitz, for instance, MKO is trying to overstress protests against Ahmadinejad’s presence in Iraq and it is not wrong to say that the organization is the main instigator of a trifle of public demonstration. Once one of Saddam’s chief internal accomplices in his crimes against Iraqi people, MKO now plays a key role in masterminding organized protests against the decisions adopted by Iraq’s legal government. Following a given report of protests in some parts of Iraq, MKO adds: Last November more than 300,000 Iraqis including hundreds of Shiite tribal leaders from Southern provinces signed a petition condemning Iranian regime’s meddling in Iraq and supported the presence of the main Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) in that country. The petition was viewed as a turning point in Iraq. For the first time there was a public and organized display of opposition toward Iranian regime’s meddling by tribal leaders in the predominantly Shiite south. National solidarity and a united front to uproot terrorism will put an end to Iraq’s chaotic social disorder. Unfortunately, terrorists and insurgents meddling has disheartened efforts toward the accomplishment of a comprehensive social peace. 
Corbett? This group is not without influence. Indeed, they have many friends in the United States Congress. They are cunning and skillful in the art of deception. They have also had the world believe that the minority religious in Iran are being persecuted setting Iran in the ‘Orientalist’ perspective of the Muslim ‘otherness’ denoting barbarism. This will give the neocons who believe in a combination of force, ideas, and morality the ammunition to attack Iran. However, nothing is further from the truth. The minorities themselves have spoken to this fact:”Christians and Zoroastrians leave because of unemployment, the bad economy, but these problems affect all Iranians,”said Yonathan Betkolia, an Assyrian Christian leader and member of Iran’s parliament who holds the United States responsible for his community’s decline.”They give all those green cards to our people. Their only goal is to propagate the idea that Iran is mistreating its minorities.” Who is providing this group with such logistical support? Heilbrunn, a former neoconservative who is now senior editor at the Nixon Center’s journal,”The National Interest”, asserts that neoconservatism”is in a decisive respect a Jewish phenomenon,”even if many adherents — albeit a minority — are not Jewish. Moreover, neoconservatives, both Jew and gentile, are bound by a”shared commitment to the largest, most important Jewish cause: the survival of Israel.”Let us hope, for the sake of the British people, and others, that the good Lord Corbett of Castle Vale will not be so easily misguided by unsavory groups in the future. Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an Iranian-American who was educated in Iran, England and France. She is a member of World Association of International Studies – Stanford. Her research focus is US Foreign Policy towards Iran and Iran’s nuclear program, and the role of lobby groups in influencing US foreign policy. She is a peace activist, essayist and public speaker.
