Twenty-eight years from today, the US Department of State designated the MEK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
On October 8, 1997, the US Department of State designated the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), also known by the aliases Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) and National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
At the time, the US government stated that the designation was part of a broader US government effort to combat terrorism by restricting support for violent activities and pressuring violent groups to cease their involvement in terrorism.
In response, the MEK claims that the Bill Clinton administration’s designation of the group as a an FTO was influenced by a desire to improve relations with Tehran during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami. However, American reports have emphasized that the group has a history of violent acts, including the murder of American citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attempt to attack Iran’s mission to the United Nations in 1992.
Despite the MEK’s terrorist record of killing Iranian citizens and officials in the 1960s, the April 1992 attacks on 13 Iranian embassies and missions, including the Iranian mission in New York, were perhaps the closest in time and space to violate American laws on their territory. In these simultaneous attacks on Iranian government embassies and missions in ten different countries, MEK operatives used a variety of weapons, took hostages, and beat ambassadors and embassy staff, leading to the arrest of a number of MEK members.
The MEK was later delisted in September 2012. The official reason given for the delisting was a change in circumstances, including the group’s renunciation of violence and its cooperation in transferring its members from Iraq to Albania.
However, the extensive, multimillion-dollar lobbying efforts of the MEK and its supporters have been specifically documented in documents and reports as leverage to delist the MEK. The U.S. government stated at the time that the official justification for delisting the MEK focused on the group’s “behavior change” and “strategic considerations,” but concerns about the group’s cult-like nature and human rights abuses against its internal members, both before and after delisting, have been widely documented by various organizations and government reports.
The RAND Corporation, which published a document on the MEK specifically for the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Library of Congress have highlighted concerns about the MEK’s authoritarian leadership, the isolation of its members, and their psychological manipulation in separate reports.
The “strategic considerations” of the United States and its other Western partners may imbrace the famous proverb: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But the historical record of the crimes of the MEK over the years since the 1960s is undeniable.
To verify the “change in behavior” of the MEK, the message attributed to the MEK’s leader Massoud Rajavi that was published by the group’s website, on December 24, 2024, is clear enough. Expressing his joy after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, he made the following request to the United States: “We do not ask for help from America. It is enough for it to return the weapons of the Liberation Army that it took from us.”
It is obvious that, Rajavi, following Golani’s path, is determined to continue using violence to achieve power in Iran. Historically, he has not refrained from any violent act against his fellow countrymen every time he has had access to arms and the borders of Iran. Whether or not the name of the MEK is on the list of terrorist groups, based on alleged strategic considerations and behavior change, the substantive truth of the MEK cannot be concealed.
By Mazda Parsi