Countdown for MKO Departure from Iraq

Calls for MKO expulsion from Iraq increased

On Satorday 18^th, 2009 a conference held in the holy city of Karbala to discuss the negative effects of the existence of the Terrorist organization of Mujahedin in Iraq.

The participants demanded the organization out of their homeland and closure of their Camp [Camp Ashraf].

The Iraqi lawyer Zia Al-Jaberi in an interview with Al-Alam news channel said:” The Iraqi government and the House of Representatives have taken many actions in order to expel this terrorist Organization out the Iraqi soil.”

Zia Al-Jaberi added that in several paragraphs of the country’s constitution it is stressed that the Iraqi territory should not be used as a platform for the use of operations which may be harmful to the neighboring countries.

Member of Iraqi Center for Development Information; Manhal Morshedi also emphasized that despite the fact that the Iraqis see Mujahedin Khalq terrorist Organization [MKO] as a source of concern to Iraq as well as its neighboring countries, US is trying to exert illegal pressure to keep this organization in Iraq. Adding that the MKO’s presence in Iraq is illegal and unjustified and the reason is primarily their terrorist acts against Iraqi people.

The conference held while Iraqi government is seriously determined to close MKO’s case and to expel them out of the Iraqi soil since the group’s presence is a flagrant violation of the constitution and the sovereignty of Iraq.

Alalam – 20090419

April 21, 2009 0 comments

Former members of the MEK

MKO begins Camp Ashraf departure

A number of Mujahedin Khalq Organization members reportedly leave Camp Ashraf after Baghdad started a countdown to remove the group from Iraq.

Some dissident MKO members aim to return to Iran as the terrorist organization has denied its members the right to choose an alternative place to stay.

The dissidents have held a press conference in Baghdad where they complained of their "tough situation" in Camp Ashraf

The dissidents have held a press conference in Baghdad where they complained of their "tough situation" in Camp Ashraf — the MKO’s military training headquarters in the Iraqi province of Diyala.

Baghdad has vowed to move MKO members to their country Iran or send them to a third country as it holds the anti-Iran group responsible for destabilizing Iraq.

Ali Kaki, one of the dissidents, told al-Alam that most of 3,500 members of the group residing in the camp suffer "lack of freedom of thought and operation".

Vali Khodabandeh, another dissident, also said that the leaders of the terrorist group have prevented the residents of the camp from leaving.

The anti-Iran MKO is blacklisted as a terrorist organization by many international entities and countries, including the US.

The group was exiled from Iran after the Islamic Revolution and settled in Iraq in 1986, where it enjoyed the support of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The MKO is responsible for numerous acts of violence against Iranian civilians and government officials as well as Iraqis.

Tehran has long called for the expulsion of MKO members from Iraq, saying that the members of the group who have not participated in terrorist activities can return home but others will need to stand trial.

April 18, 2009 0 comments

Iraq

Iraq Plans to Start Expulsion of MKO in Weeks

TEHRAN – Iraqi Minister of Displacement and Migration Abd al-Samad Sultan said Baghdad would most likely start practical measures for the expulsion of thousands of anti-Iranian terrorists from the country within the next few weeks.

The required coordination has been done for the expulsion of 3,000 members of the anti-Iran terrorist group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), from the Ashraf camp near Baghdad, but due to certain problems in Iraq, the issue has not been finalized yet, the visiting Iraqi minister added in a meeting with Iranian Interior Minister Sadeq Mahsouli here in Tehran on Monday.

The MKO, whose main stronghold has been in Iraq’s Diyala province since the 1980s, is blacklisted by much of the international community, including the United States.

Iraq originally announced that it would evict the camp and expel the MKO terrorists from the country in 2008.

Since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the group has been strongly backed by neo-conservatives in the United States, who also argue for the MKO to be taken off the US terror list.

Elsewhere in the meeting between the Iranian and Iraqi ministers, Sultan appreciated the Iranian nation’s hospitality to Iraqi immigrants, and said,”The Islamic Republic has provided extensive aids for the Iraqi nation in grounds of health and sanitation, education and service-providing.”

Referring to the repatriation of Iraqi emigrants who fled the country due to prevailing insecurities under and after Saddam’s rule over the nation, he announced that Iran and Iraq have formed a committee to prepare the required ground for their return.

Mahsouli, for his part, referred to the problems of the Iraqi immigrant and reiterated,”Many Iraqi people came to Iran after insecurities, war and Saddam’s dominance over the country and today more studies and surveys are needed to gradually resolve the problems of these immigrants.”

April 15, 2009 0 comments

MEK Camp Ashraf

Iranian group in Iraq part of high-stakes politics

BAGHDAD (AP) — The Iraqi government is stepping up efforts to pressure Iranian exiles into leaving the country, pushing an obscure group to the forefront of Baghdad’s relations with Washington and the Obama administration’s overtures to Iran.

At stake is whether Iraq can resolve the fate of 3,500 members of the People’s Mujahedeen Organization of Iran without damaging its ties to both the U.S. and Iran.

In recent weeks, leaders of the People’s Mujahedeen, known by its Farsi initials MEK, claim the Iraqis blockaded their Camp Ashraf north of Baghdad, allowing in only limited food and water shipments.

And earlier this month, they say, the Iraqi guards prevented Iraqi surgeons from entering the camp to treat critically ill patients — although the Iraqis ultimately relented.

To outsiders, the MEK may seem a strange cult-like group that bans sex and family life. But both the U.S. and Iran consider it a terrorist organization.

The Iraqi government makes no secret it wants the MEK out of the country in order to improve relations with Iran.

“Remaining in Iraq is not an option,”said national security adviser Mouwaffak al-Rubaie.”They have existed in Iraq solely to overthrow the government of a neighbor, Iran. That past permissiveness is over.”

Iran has pressed for years to close the camp, but the issue came to a head after Iraqi forces took over security for Camp Ashraf on Jan. 1, under the Iraq-U.S. security pact. The government gave the Americans assurances they would not force the exiles back to Iran, where some face prosecution.

U.S. officials in Baghdad have declined to comment publicly on the MEK issue.

But the U.S. has a stake in the issue because the U.S. military signed an agreement with the militia after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, promising members would be treated as”protected persons”under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Al-Rubaie says that with Iraqis in control, the MEK is no longer protected by national laws or international conventions and must leave.

He dismisses claims of maltreatment and says Camp Ashraf residents are extremists who have been”brainwashed”by about 15-20 of their most militant leaders. The U.S. has tried to defuse the tensions but without much success.

The MEK has a long history in Iraq.

Founded by Iranian leftists, it opposed Iran’s U.S.-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and took part in the 1979 Iranian revolution that brought the Islamic regime to power. Members were implicated in killings of Americans and the U.S. Embassy takeover in Tehran — reasons that put them on the U.S. terror list.

But their blend of Marxism and secular Islamism pitted them against the Ayatollahs and they eventually settled in Iraq, where they fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s forces during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

During Saddam’s time, MEK members staged military parades at Camp Ashraf, marching in uniforms and flaunting an impressive arsenal, and carried out deadly raids into Iran to attack their sworn enemy — Tehran’s regime.

They transformed Camp Ashraf from a barren desert stretch in the heart of the volatile Diyala province and only 50 miles from the Iranian border into an oasis of well-kept gardens, sprouting water fountains and palm trees along marked-out streets.

The fenced-off 30-square-mile compound houses 3,418 residents, including 900 women. Men and women obey a strict regimen, sleep in segregated, barrack-style quarters, and are said almost to deify their Paris-based leader, Maryam Rajavi. The camp has mostly been off limits and the government rarely allows media visits.

Al-Rubaie says hundreds of the residents hold documents linking them to a third country. There are five U.S. citizens, 11 Canadians and some European and Australian dual nationals.

Baghdad has tried to get those countries to accept them, and promises MEK members Iranian passports, a one-way ticket to a third country and $1,000 in pocket money, al-Rubaie said.

But Camp Ashraf residents refuse to go.

“It’s like somebody comes and tells you to leave the only home you’ve known for the past 20 years,”said Mohammad Mohaddessin, a senior official at MEK’s political wing in Paris.

The camp, he says, is a modern”city,”with a museum, a cemetery, and a bakery— even an”Ashraf Cola”factory. As for sex and family life, Ashraf residents”left this behind them voluntarily,”Mohaddessin said.

MEK is now turning to supporters in Europe, where the European Parliament in January removed the organization from its terror list after a British court backed the group’s claim to have renounced violence.

If all else fails, the MEK says it may take the Camp Ashraf case to an international tribunal at The Hague.

The Iraqi government says 261 residents were returned to Iran over the last two years and reported no persecution. Spokeswoman Dibeh Fakhr of Iraq’s office of the International Red Cross — which visited the camp four times last year — says the last returnee went back to Iran in April 2008.

Although the MEK is no longer a military threat,”symbolically, it’s very important for Iran that they are expelled,”said Iranian analyst Saeed Leilaz. Washington’s acquiescence would be an overture to Tehran and a”good start”for Iran and the U.S., he said.

For now, Iraq’s stranglehold of Camp Ashraf has created a shortage of some commodities, including toothpaste, chlorine for water purification and generator fuel, said camp physician Hamid Gazaeri.

The camp’s modest clinic is serviced by a few general practitioners, all Iranians living in Ashraf, and depends on regular visits by Iraqi specialists.

Cancer sufferer Fatemeh Alizadeh, one of five patients who waited for a week for surgery until Iraqi doctors were allowed back last Friday, can’t imagine the camp closing.

“It would be a catastrophe,”she said in a frail voice on the phone, speaking from her hospital bed.”I am not going anywhere.”

By KATARINA KRATOVAC

April 15, 2009 0 comments

MEK Camp Ashraf

An Anti-Iranian Enclave in Iraq Fights to Stay

The dozens of middle-aged Iranians standing in six neat, gender-segregated rows stare straight ahead from behind the chain-link fence close to the entrance of Camp Ashraf, some 40 miles north of Baghdad in Diyala near the Iranian border. "Ashraf is our home, Ashraf is our home," they robotically chant in Iranian-accented Arabic, as they jab their right fists into the air in unison.

Some of the women, who are all dressed in pantsuits with long jackets and colorful headscarves tied under the chin, carry placards in Persian. A bright yellow banner shimmers in the mid-morning sun. "Ashraf is the city of peace," it says in Arabic.

Most of the time there’s nobody outside Camp Ashraf to hear the members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a fiercely anti-Tehran group who have been based here for the past two decades. That is, unless you count the Iraqi security forces who took over control of the perimeter of the 19-sq.-mile camp in February from U.S troops. The Americans had protected it since the 2003 invasion. But the Iraqi soldiers, like their government in Baghdad, don’t appear keen to listen to the chanting. The MEK should "understand that their days in Iraq are numbered," National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said recently. "We are literally counting them."

Saddam Hussein’s regime — no friend of the ayatollahs of Iran — welcomed the MEK in the mid-’80s, inviting them to set up a military camp and supplying them with hundreds of armored vehicles and other forms of support. Although in recent months Camp Ashraf’s residents have swapped their once-mandatory olive green military fatigues for civilian garb, both Iraq and the U.S State Department consider the MEK a terrorist group. In 2003, the U.S military disarmed Ashraf. (After a legal battle, the European Union removed the organization from its terrorist list in January; the United Kingdom did so in 2008).

The camp, which is more like a sprawling village with flower-filled parks and tree-lined avenues dotted with old-fashioned white lampposts, is home to 3,418 people, about a 1,000 of whom are dual citizens with non-Iranian travel documents issued by Western governments including the U.S, Canada, Australia, and the European Union. It has become an irritant to Baghdad’s increasingly close ties to Tehran. Iraq wants to close it, on the grounds that its residents are "terrorists" and "illegal foreigners." Still, deadlines for doing so have come and gone (the most recent was in late March). The stalemate continues: The MEK refuses to leave, and the Iraqi government has said it will not force them out.

"They want to physically purge everybody here," says Hossein Madani, an MEK spokesman and liaison to the Iraqi government. "There is an Iranian agenda that wants Ashraf residents out of Iraq." That may be, but government officials say the camp’s closure is also in Iraq’s national interest. "We do not want any friction with our neighbors," Rubaie says. The days when Iraq was used as a base to launch attacks against its neighbors, whether by the MEK along the eastern border with Iran, or by the Kurdish separatist PKK along the northern border with Turkey, are over, he says.

While the Iraqi government has made it clear it’s withdrawing the welcome mat extended to the MEK by Saddam Hussein, it has stopped short of saying how it will get them to leave. Despite its assurances against forced repatriation, especially if individuals may be harmed in their home country, MEK members fear they will be deported to Iran, where they say they will face imprisonment or execution. MEK representatives talk loudly of a potential humanitarian catastrophe.

While the MEK may question the veracity of Baghdad’s concerns, in recent years the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has helped more than 250 members enter Iran from across the Iranian border with little fanfare. "We are there as witnesses to make sure everything goes well," says Dorothea Krimitsas, ICRC spokesperson for the Middle East, adding that if allegations of ill treatment arose, the ICRC, would take them up with the authorities. Krimitsas says the ICRC hasn’t received any new requests for voluntary repatriation. But that’s only one way to leave. There are reports that in recent months defections from the camp have increased, although Ashraf leaders deny that anyone has left since January.

In the increasingly acrimonious debate about the future of Camp Ashraf, especially between Rubaie and MEK leaders, the quest for straight answers sometimes seems like a fool’s errand. It’s made more so by each side’s well-oiled PR machines that are adept at periodically sliding slippery claims and counter-claims into the media. For example, the MEK claims that Iraqis are withholding food and medical supplies and preventing doctors from entering the camp. That’s "baseless, it’s a pack of lies," Rubaie says. Similarly, Rubaie insists that the MEK is a cult, whose "brainwashed" members need to be separated from the 25 or so leaders and "detoxified" so they can resume normal lives. "Sheer lies," says Madani, the MEK spokesman.

Nevertheless, former members claim that the MEK is a cult, one that isolates adherents from their families, seeks to control them by limiting access to outside information, and prevents them from having sex. Indeed, there are no children at Camp Ashraf. The youngest residents are in their 20s, something MEK legal advisor Behzad Saffari says is because "military camps are not places for family life."

Yet when pressed for reasons why they should remain in Ashraf, given that they are not Iraqis and the new regime doesn’t want them, Saffari, Madani and several other MEK leaders as well as a number of residents, all bring up fervent, personal feelings. "We are not talking about different regimes, we are talking about personal lives," says Madani. "We have made a home here." He goes further. "We are not trying to have any impact on the Iranian regime. What does the Iranian regime want from us?"

The misunderstandings don’t stop there. An inter-agency task force including the CIA, FBI and other U.S bodies screened the residents of Ashraf in 2004 to determine if any were prosecutable under U.S law for alleged terrorist activities. The MEK insists that its members were all cleared. "The U.S. does not officially consider Ashraf residents as terrorists," says Madani. "MEK is something else." However, a U.S. official says that the residents of Ashraf who are members of the MEK are considered part of a terrorist organization. The official adds that non-member residents may also be considered to have provided material support to the organization. An MEK spokesman says all of the camp’s 3,418 residents are members of the group.

The MEK also insist its members still have the "protected persons status" issued by the U.S after the 2003 invasion. Madani pulls a photo ID out of his wallet that indicates that he is a protected person. "This is a permanent card," he says. "It has no time of expiration." The obligation to treat the MEK as protected persons under the law of war ended when the Coalition Provisional Authority handed over responsibility for governing Iraq to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004 which ended the occupation of Iraq. "Protected person status is never a permanent status as it applies only during circumstances of armed conflict or occupation," a Western official says.

The claims and counterclaims will no doubt continue to ricochet between Baghdad, Tehran, Washington and of course, Camp Ashraf. As two journalists head out of the camp in the early evening, past the segregated, one-story barracks-style dormitories and canteens, along paved streets lined by eucalyptus and palm trees and dotted with orange and yellow daisies, the faint echo of chanting protesters gradually gets louder. The people with the placards are still standing near the entrance, still staring out beyond the camp, still chanting. And there’s still nobody there to listen.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890590,00.html

Rania Abouzeid / Camp Ashraf

April 13, 2009 0 comments

MEK Camp Ashraf

Iranian opposition members refuse to leave Iraq outpost

Invited by Saddam: Iranian opposition members refuse to leave Iraq outpost

(Marriage here is forbidden. There have been no children for years)

The isolated Camp Ashraf of MKO cult was visited by media workers after the Iraqi authorities took control of the Camp. Jane Arraf Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor reported her visit including interviews with some Ashraf Residents. In her report she describes the isolated brainwashed members of Rajavi’s cult who allegedly “have left family life behind”.

Texas-born Elham Kiamanesh seems thoroughly American, but in the last decade she’s spent working to overthrow the Iranian regime, this military camp with its tree-lined avenues and flower-filled parks north of Baghdad is the only home she’s known.

"You can call me Ellie, that’s my nickname," says Ms. Kiamanesh as she explains why she gave up normal life and her love of children to try to topple the government of a country she’s never visited.

Kiamanesh is one of some 3,400 residents, including several hundred Westerners, in the middle of one of the strangest episodes in the dramatic shift in relations between Iran, Iraq, and the United States.

In the 1980s, in the midst of Iraq’s bitter eight-year-war with Iran, Saddam Hussein invited the Iranian opposition to set up military operations here. When Saddam’s regime was toppled, US forces disarmed the group. In January, Camp Ashraf reverted to control by the Iraqi government, which plans to close the base as a sign of goodwill toward Iran.

Its residents – members of the People’s Mujahadeen (Mujahadeen e- Khalq, known by the Farsi acronyms MEK or MKO) – are either to return to Iran or to the third countries where they have citizenship. But to the Iraqi government’s consternation, they are not going willingly.

Militarily irrelevant, but still symbolic

Disarmed, Camp Ashraf has become militarily irrelevant. But as an embarrassment to both the Iranian and Iraqi governments, it still has considerable symbolic value.

In the first media visit granted by Iraqi authorities since they took control of the camp this year, residents told The Christian Science Monitor they would not voluntarily leave.

"I’ve decided to stay here until there’s a free Iran," says Hassan Mohammad. Mr. Mohammad lived in the camp with his mother until the age of eight and then was sent to Canada where the family had refugee status during the 1991 war over Kuwait. He returned here at the age of 17 and spent the next several years with a MEK tank unit in the south of Iraq.

Now, he spends his time here in computer classes and the evenings occasionally watching movies on the Iranian opposition’s television channel. "The last one was "Slum Dog Millionaire,’ " he says.

The sprawling camp, one of the biggest military bases in Iraq, has its own university classrooms and hospital. Men and women live in separate dormitories and for the most part study or work in segregated classes. The MEK’s philosophy is a mix of Marxism and Islam teaching with a dose of feminism and a very large element of control.

Marriage here is forbidden. There have been no children for years.

"We have left family life behind," says Hossein Madani, an urbane former aerospace instructor in Virginia and a senior official at Camp Ashraf.

Iraq: ‘The party is over’

Mr. Madani and other MEK officials invite guests into a cool, white reception room and serve tea and cake while producing a wide variety of documents and letters that do little to alleviate the ambiguity over the camp’s legal status.

Madani dismisses the issue of Iraqi law, which authorities say makes the MEK residents illegal foreigners in the country. Instead he cites the Geneva Conventions, under which the US military had recognized the MEK as noncombatants in the war and pledged to protect them.

"This is purely an agenda forced by the Iranian regime. Why do we have to give in to such a thing?" he says of the Iraqi government’s plan to shut down the camp and move residents to a more remote location in Iraq as a prelude to leaving the country.

Iraqi National Security Advisor Muwaffaq al-Rubaie has a simple answer for them.

"They have to understand that the party is over for them," Mr. Rubaie told journalists recently, after refuting allegations from the MEK that their members were being mistreated. "They need to understand that they have to leave. This is not [the era of] Saddam Hussein using them against Iran. We will never use them against Iran."

Describing the residents as "brainwashed cult members from a high- trained terrorist organization," Rubaie says Iraq does not intend to forcibly deport them but "if they resist and carry out this engineered crisis there will be some pain."

The Iraqi government is pressuring other countries to take back about one-third of the camp residents with either foreign passports or travel documents. The rest will be given the Iranian passports they are entitled to and a plane ticket home.

Plenty of places to go, but this is home

The residents include Americans, Canadians, Swedes, and Dutch. Rubaei says another 309 could legally return to France, where the MEK is based. While the US lists the group as a terrorist organization, the European Union has dropped that designation. As individuals, MEK members are also free to return to the US unless there are specific arrest warrants for them.

After 2003, the US military seized the MEK’s tanks and other weapons and confined its residents to the isolated base. All of the camp residents renounced violence and underwent background screening by US authorities.

MEK members argue that their cooperation entitles them to stay.

"We used our own money to build this, to plant every single tree and plant in this place," Madani says bitterly, driving past parks and streets punctuated with giant sculptures of tulips and birds. "This is their home. There are cemeteries, people who have died here, they are buried here, they have lived here.’

Outside the museum dedicated to Iranian atrocities, Kiamanesh sits with her friend, Gohar Mohajeri, on a walkway planted with flowers. Ms. Mohajeri was born in New York but grew up in Germany. She has never been to Iran.

"For outsiders, when they don’t know what our goal and aim is, obviously our life is abnormal for them," says Mohajeri. Kiamanesh translates for her from Farsi.

Neither seem to realize how isolated they are at the camp. "I do believe this is the greenest place in all of Iraq," says Kiamanesh, a former law student who without a headscarf would look like the girl next door. "Why would anyone ever want to leave this place

Jane Arraf Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

April 11, 2009 0 comments

MEK Camp Ashraf

Iranian dissidents in Iraq. Where will they all go?

Iranians in Iraq who fought against the Islamic Republic face a shaky future

“IT WAS one of the strangest places I’d ever seen,” says one of the few Farsi-speaking Westerners to have spent weeks in Camp Ashraf, 65km (40 miles) Members are completely cut off from contact with their families. When wavering group members was enabled to talk to their some of their parents refused to believe it was their children, for they had been told by the PMOI that they were dead north-east of Baghdad, where some 3,400 Iranian dissidents are hunkered down and are now threatened with expulsion from Iraq, perhaps even back to Iran. It was “like a spiffy midsized town in Iran”, with parks, offices and buildings—but no children. It was “sterile, soulless and sad”. Nearly two decades ago, families living in the camp were “dissolved”, couples were forcibly divorced, and their children sent away, many of them to live with supporters living in the West, to be brought up in the faith of a movement widely described by independent observers as a cult.

For the past six years, the Americans have protected the camp, whose raison d’être is generally opposed by the surrounding Iraqi communities and by most Iranians, whether or not they are for or against the clerical regime in Tehran. But as American troops prepare to go home, the Iraqi government, which wants cosy ties with Iran, now says the camp must be closed and its inhabitants dispersed, probably back to Iran, where they would face an uncertain future, to put it mildly.

The group is variously known as the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI) or the Mujahedeen-e Khalq Organisation (abbreviated as both MEK and MKO). Founded in 1965 as a youthful underground opposition to Iran’s Shah, it was usually described as “Islamic Marxist”. When the Shah fell it at first backed Ayatollah Khomeini but soon fell out with him, embarking on a campaign of violence and bombings which, on a single occasion, is reckoned to have killed 70 civilians, including several senior clerics; the withered arm of Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was a result of that bomb. The group’s political umbrella is called the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

The PMOI’s leader, Massoud Rajavi, fled to France in 1981 but he and his followers, many of them women, relocated in 1986 to Iraq, where Saddam Hussein gave them a big base at Camp Ashraf, which is thought to be around 20km in circumference. Saddam abundantly supplied the PMOI with Brazilian and British tanks (captured from Iran during the war of 1980-1988) and Russian armoured personnel carriers, among other arms. In return, the PMOI made attacks on Iran itself, which is why Iranians of all stripes tend to regard the group as traitors. It is also said to have spearheaded Saddam’s attacks on rebellious Iraqi Kurds and Shias in 1991, after the first Gulf war, a charge it strongly denies.

Follow my leader

No less controversially, the PMOI is widely reviled by human-rights groups for nurturing a messianic cult of personality around Mr Rajavi and his wife, Maryam, and for enforcing a totalitarian discipline on its adherents. Several defectors testify, in the words of one of them, to a “constant bombardment of indoctrination” and a requirement to submit utterly and unquestioningly to the cause. No sources of news are allowed without the PMOI’s say-so. According to one defector, around 50 members who rebelled were sent to Saddam’s prison in Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad.

Members are completely cut off from contact with their families. When the above-mentioned Farsi-speaking Westerner, who visited Ashraf in 2004, enabled wavering group members to talk to their families in Iran by satellite telephone, some of their parents refused to believe it was their children, for they had been told by the PMOI that they were dead.

No one is sure whether Mr Rajavi is alive but most think not; he has not been heard of since the American invasion of 2003. His wife, known as “the president-elect”, travels the world, soliciting support from a wide range of sympathisers, including some in the American Congress, the European Parliament and the British House of Lords. No one is sure who really controls the PMOI in Camp Ashraf. It is thought that nearly 400 residents have voluntarily returned to Iran, where they are said to have been treated adequately so far. But who can really tell? Several hundred more are seeking refugee status elsewhere. A few dozen have—or rather had—passports to Western countries, some of which have verified their bona fides.

In the past year, the European Parliament and Britain’s courts have removed the label of “terrorist” from the PMOI, mainly on the ground that the group says it has disavowed violence, is not known to have carried out any acts of terror since, at the latest, 2002, and surrendered its weapons (at any rate, its heavier ones) at Camp Ashraf after the American invasion. This has irritated several national governments, especially the British and French ones, which think the PMOI is a nasty nuisance and its presence on their soil bad for relations with both Iraq and Iran.

The outfit is still officially deemed a terrorist organisation in the United States but has a fierce lobby there too, backed by a mix of neoconservatives and leftists, that accepts at face value the group’s insistence that it is a secular and democratic movement with mass support in Iran and a real chance of eventually displacing the mullahs’ regime. Its lobby in Europe is much exercised by recent statements of Muwafaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security adviser, who makes it plain he wants the camp disbanded and its people sent abroad, mostly to Iran, whose rulers have become more vociferous in calling its fellow reigning Shias in Baghdad to send them back.

The PMOI has a sophisticated network of ardent supporters. Without a doubt, its voice of despairing outrage will rise to a squeal if the Americans give way to Iraqi and Iranian demands to cut the movement loose. But it may happen.

The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13447429

April 11, 2009 0 comments

Iraq

Countdown for MKO departure

Iraq has warned that the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) has outstayed its welcome in the country and is obliged to pack its bags.

Iraqi National Security Advisor Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said at a Friday news conference that the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) had to leave Iraq soon but did not give any time-frame for the relocation.

“The residents should understand … that their days in Iraq are numbered and we are literally counting down,”al-Rubaie told reporters.

He, however, said that the Iraqi government would not appeal to force if the group obides by the departure regulations in a non-forcible way.

“We will not use force … unless the residents use force against the Iraqi security forces. This whole process will be pain-free if they cooperate.”

Baghdad holds the anti-Iran MKO responsible for destabilizing Iraq through its terror attacks.

The Iraqi government took control of the group’s military training grounds in Camp Ashraf from the US in January.

The official on Friday did not identify where the group would be moved to but the al-Bayyina al-Jadida daily reported that Iraq was in talks with Australia to find an alternative place for the group.

Iraqi sources revealed in February that several countries were considering granting entry permission to certain members of the terrorist group.

Egypt, they said, had agreed with a request by MKO leaders to establish a camp in the country.

In a Saturday statement, the MKO members reacted angrily to plans by Baghdad for their resettlement and called the demand”absolutely illegal”.

The MKO, blacklisted as a terrorist organization by many international entities and countries, including the US, is responsible for numerous acts of violence against Iranian civilians and government officials as well as Iraqis during the rein of former dictator Saddam Hussein.

The group was exiled from Iran after the Islamic Revolution and settled in Iraq in 1986, where it enjoyed the support of Saddam.

Tehran has long called for the expulsion of MKO members from Iraq. Tehran says the members of the group who have not participated in terrorist activities can return home but others will need to stand trial.

Some MKO members have defected from the organization and have returned to Iran.

March 30, 2009 0 comments

Iraq

Iraq to Relocate Iran Opposition Group

U.S. Guarded Embattled Movement’s Camp

Iraq’s national security adviser said Friday that the government intends to move an Iranian opposition group from its sanctuary near the Iranian border to a location where leaders and”brainwashed cult members”will be separated and the latter”detoxified.”

Mowaffak al-Rubaie’s remarks about the future of the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or MEK, were his most detailed to date on how his government intends to deal with an issue that has been an irritant in relations between Iraq’s government, which has built close ties with Iran, and the U.S. government. The group received support from Saddam Hussein’s government and has been designated a terrorist organization by the State Department, but U.S. officials credit the MEK with providing information about Iran’s nuclear program.

The Iraqi government’s resolution of the conundrum is likely to shed light on how an increasingly sovereign Iraq will handle such vexing problems, and is likely to speak volumes about the extent to which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is influenced by Iran.

Members of the group”should understand that their days in Iraq are numbered,”Rubaie told Western journalists at a briefing in the Green Zone.”We are literally counting them.”

Iraqi officials, including Maliki, have in recent months publicly lambasted the group, generally during or after official visits to Iran.

The U.S. military has protected the group’s camp in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. It handed over nominal control of the outer perimeter to Iraqi security forces in February but said it is keeping a contingent there to ensure that group members are treated humanely.

At one point in his remarks, Rubaie said Iraq would not forcibly deport MEK members because”we are a civilized country.”But later, he said the Iraqi government would have a”thick skin”when it came to any negative press or international outcry generated by the eventual repatriation of members.

“The party is over for them. The party is over for coalition protection for them,”he said, referring to the U.S. military.

A spokesman for the group, Mohammad Mohaddessin, said in a statement that residents of Camp Ashraf, which is 40 miles north of Baghdad,”will never leave their home”and warned that Rubaie’s plan is”setting the stage for a human catastrophe.”

Rubaie did not indicate when or how the Iraqi government will expel the people at Ashraf. He said the government is considering facilities in western and southern Iraq to house the camp’s 3,418 residents while it studies its options.

Rubaie said the government hopes to wean”brainwashed cult members”from the sway of the 25 or so leaders at Ashraf before they are repatriated.

Rubaie, citing numbers he obtained from the U.S. military, said Camp Ashraf’s population includes 11 Canadians, five Americans, four Swedes, three Dutch and three Britons. Hundreds more have legal residency permits issued by France, Germany and other Western countries, he said. But ascertaining the identity and nationality of everyone there has and will probably continue to be challenging, he said, because the group’s leaders”are obstructing us.”

Rubaie said he recently met with ambassadors from several countries whose citizens or permanent residents are at Ashraf to urge them to take the group members back following a”meticulous vetting process.”If they do not, Rubaie warned,”we will provide them with Iranian passports,”and”they will wind up on a European street.”

The group includes 900 young women but no children because members are barred from having sex, he said.

Many members are the children of Iranian exiles recruited during the 1980s and ’90s. Hussein used the heavily armed and well-trained group during his decade-long war with Iran in the ’80s, and it also reportedly played a role in Hussein’s bloody suppression of Shiite and Kurdish uprisings after the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

MEK leaders say the prospect of being forcibly repatriated to Iran would expose them to torture and execution.

Rubaie said the Iraqi government has arrest warrants for three group members and that the United States has warrants for two others. He said that Iranian officials plan to prosecute more than 50 Ashraf residents and that they recently proposed that their prosecutions be carried out in Iraq.

By Ernesto Londoño – Washington Post Foreign Service

March 30, 2009 0 comments

Iraq

Iraq urges foreign states to accept Iranian rebels

Iraq has appealed to foreign countries to accept members of an Iranian opposition group, which has been based in Iraq for about two decades but which Baghdad sees as a terrorist group and a diplomatic liability.

Iraqi officials and the People’s Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI) have been at loggerheads for years. The PMOI has run a high-profile campaign alleging abuses by the Iraqi government, and Iraq has labelled its members terrorists and liars.

The PMOI began as a group of Islamist leftists opposed to Iran’s shah but fell out with Shi’ite clerics who took power after the 1979 revolution.

Allowed to operate in Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who waged war with Iran in the 1980s, the group has been less welcome under the new Shi’ite-led government, which has mostly warm ties with neighboring Shi’ite Iran.

"We do not wish to take responsibility for the sin of the presence of a terrorist organisation in Iraq, which causes us domestic problems and problems with countries of the region," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters.

"We ask the international community … to find another place for them other than Iraq," he added.

No country has yet come forward, Dabbagh said. The United States views the PMOI as a terrorist group, but the European Union agreed to take the group off its list of terrorist organisations following a protracted legal battle.

Human rights groups say forcing the 3,500 PMOI members out of their base at Camp Ashraf in northeastern Iraq would violate international law. The PMOI says Iraqi forces have beaten them, blocked aid and besieged their camp, charges Iraq denies.

There has been speculation that an unmanned Iranian aircraft that U.S. forces say they shot down over Iraq in February may have been monitoring PMOI activity.

Dabbagh did not confirm whether the downed aircraft was a drone or where it came from, but said Iraq placed high importance on maintaining good ties with Iran.

"With have joint concerns, problems, and want to develop our relationship and remove the fuse from any crisis that may happen," he said when questioned about the drone. (Additional reporting by Missy Ryan, Writing by Mohammed Abbas: Editing by Richard Balmforth)

March 26, 2009 0 comments

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