TEHRAN – According to Iraqi sources, MKO leaders have won the consent of
Egyptian officials to set up a camp in Egypt for its members as Iraq is determined to expel the terrorist group, Iraq’s Brasa news agency reported.
The sources claimed the decision came as Iran severely criticized Egypt for its stance on Israel’s brutal war against Palestinians last month.
Zebari: Mojahedin Khalq expulsion from Iraq will be strictly monitored by a special committee
BAGHDAD – Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has stated that Baghdad intends to host talks between Iran and United States over the security situation in Iraq and called for maintaining “Iraq-Iraq-U.S. triangle”.
In an exclusive interview with the Mehr News Agency, Zebari said the Iraqi government, given the current situation in the country, views hosting such talks as a priority.
He pointed out that Iran is “one of Iraq’s most important neighbors” that is seeking “special relations with Baghdad with goodwill” and that Baghdad’s relations with Tehran are of “great significance”.
He added the U.S. influence in Iraq is also “undeniable”.
Iran’s foreign minister has ruled out holding new security talks with the United States over Iraq, saying improved security situation has made such talks unnecessary.
However, Zebari said there are issues that Iran and the United States should “settle between themselves”, and in the run-up to “new Iraq” Baghdad favors cooperation between the three parties by maintaining “Iran-Iraq-U.S. triangle.”
The foreign minister also dismissed reports that Iraq is showing leniency in expelling Mojahedin Khalgh Organization (MKO), saying the Iraqi government has taken its decision on the group and the expulsion will be strictly monitored by a “special committee”.
The MKO has claimed responsibility for carrying out numerous terror attacks against Iranian nationals and officials, and has also been accused of assisting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.
The MKO established a camp for about 3,500 members in Iraq, which its forces used to launch cross-border attacks into Iran. It fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s forces during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Many senior Iraqi officials have assured Iran that the MKO members will soon have to leave Iraq.
Zebari also stated that Baghdad understands Tehran’s concerns about the Iranian diplomats detained by U.S forces and expressed hope that Iraq’s negotiations with the U.S. will lead to the release of the diplomats.
The U.S. military detained five Iranian diplomats in the city of Arbil, 310 km (190 miles) north of Baghdad, in January 2007. In November that year, U.S. officials said they would release two of the five diplomats.
http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=835267
Iran has condemned the removal of the MKO terrorist group from the European Union’s terror list.
Earlier today, Iran’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan Naser Hamidi Zare’ said that exclusion of the group from the list was a new Western trap for the Islamic state, accusing the West of operating a policy of double-standards in dealing with terrorist groups.
The Ambassador claimed that EU politicians made the decision to leave the group, the Mujahedin Khalq Organization, off the list was because of intense lobbying from the ‘Zionist’ lobby.
The decision to leave the group off the list is a sensitive for Iran, because the MKO has been blamed for the mass killings of Iranians over the last 30 years.
Tehran has now complained at the EU decision to the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon.
Zare’ said that the removal of the terrorist organization from the EU terror list had happened after the Iraqi government decided to expel members of the criminal cult who were stationed in Iraq by former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi government announced in early February that Baghdad would soon close the file of the terrorist organization and expel them from the country.
According to Zare’, the EU made the move when Baghdad had confirmed its decision to expel MKO members from Iraq.
Religious Intelligence By Nick Mackenzie
IRNA, Moscow- A Russian scholar said the European Union (EU) manipulated such issues as terrorism and human rights for its own political purposes.
Talking to IRNA here on Saturday, Ludmila Kulagina, as a top researcher in the Russian Institute of Oriental Studies, criticized the recent EU move in removing the terrorist Mojahedeen Khalq Organization (MKO) form its terrorism list.
She said the move was a clear example of the double-standard policy adopted by the west on the issue of terrorism and frankly undermined the EU claim of fighting terrorism.
She believed the west treated such issues as terrorism and human rights in a biased and fanatical manner based on the double-standard policies inspired by its political interests.
Saying that certain western countries labeled organizations as terrorists according to their own whims and wishes, she said such a policy was clearly manifested in their behavior towards Hamas which was rejected by the west as a terrorist movement despite the fact that it assumed power in Palestine following a democratic election.
Referring to countless terrorist operations carried out by the terrorist MKO in both Iran and Iraq during the past three decades that claimed numerous lives, she stressed the EU’s delisting of the terrorist MKO lacked any legal or rational justifications.
Kulagina noted that the EU’s move, who delisted the terrorist organization instead of punishing it for the crimes it has committed, served the merely political purpose of fueling the tension between Iran and the US and some European countries by strengthening Iran’s opponents.
She said such a decision by the EU would negatively affect Iran-Europe ties.
Envoy says Mojahedin Khalq leaders must be extradited to Iran
Baghdad,Those Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) leaders who masterminded terror operations inside Iran must be extradited to the country to stand trial, Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad Hassan Kazemi Qomi has said.
Iran has presented Iraqi officials a list of the MKO leaders who must be handed over to the country, he told the Mehr News Agency.
MKO members immigrated to Iraq in the 1980s and fought alongside Iraqi forces against Iran in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
The ambassador also said, “The Iraqi government has been serious about expelling the terrorist organization members.”
Kazemi Qomi noted that Baghdad has officially informed the MKO members that they “can not choose” between staying or leaving the country, warning that they will be expelled from Iraq.
There are reports that 1,031 MKO members have so far decided to leave Iraq either by acquiring citizenship or by obtaining passport and so they will leave the country or those countries that have granted them citizenship will have to take them out of the Iraqi soil, he pointed out.
The MKO has claimed responsibility for carrying out numerous terror attacks against Iranian nationals and officials, and has also been accused of assisting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.
http://www.mehrnews.com/en/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsID=834384
Leaders of a group of Iranian exiles in Iraq, who are resisting attempts to make them leave the country, traded accusations with the Iraqi government yesterday after relatives were prevented from visiting them. 
Leaders of the Iranian opposition group, which has been based at Camp Ashraf north of Baghdad for around two decades, said Iraqi security forces had stopped relatives from entering the camp to see family members.
“Iraqi forces stationed at the gates of Camp Ashraf on February 3 and during the past two days on February 9 and 10 prevented the entry of 15 relatives who were trying to see their loved ones in Ashraf,” the People’s Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI) said.
“(The Iraqi government) should not allow this inhumane treatment, which is desired by the Iranian regime, to take place in the name of the Iraqi government,” the group added, calling the actions of Iraqi security forces a breach of human rights.
Iraqi officials, who took over security at the camp from US forces this year, laid the blame on the PMOI.
“The Iraqi government received the families and facilitated their arrival and they were taken to the reception halls but the leaders at the camp refused to let the relatives see their families,” National security adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie said.
“(They) insisted that they should attend the meeting, without giving these families the freedom to privately see their relatives,” Rubaie added, also calling in his statement for international condemnation.
The statements from the opposite sides were impossible to reconcile.
The fate of Camp Ashraf’s 3,500 residents has been in the air since Iraq took it over from US forces this year.
Iraq’s Shia leaders are friendly with Tehran, and want it closed, but they say it will not be shut down by force.
Human rights groups say closing Ashraf and driving residents out against their will would violate international human rights law. They see it as a test of whether Iraq can meet its legal obligations as a member of the international community.
The government views the PMOI as terrorists, as do the US and Iran. But the group won an important victory last month when the European Union agreed to take it off its list of terrorist organisations.
Iraq Updates, February 14, 2009
http://www.iraqupdates.com/p_articles.php/article/45168/refid/RSS-latest-13-02-2009
David Lidington (Shadow Minister, Foreign Affairs; Aylesbury, Conservative) To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what the Government’s policy towards the People’s Mojahedin of Iran is in the light of 
the recent judgment by the European Court of First Instance.
Bill Rammell (Minister of State, Foreign & Commonwealth Office; Harlow, Labour) | Hansard source
On 26 January 2009, taking account of the judgment by the Court of First Instance on 4 December 2008, the General Affairs and External Relations Council adopted a list which did not include the MeK (Mojahedin-e-Khalq, also known as the People’s Mojaheddin of Iran).
However, we remain mindful of the MeK’s history as an organisation responsible for a number of serious terrorist attacks—it claimed responsibility for large numbers of violent attacks inside Iran for a number of years, including 96 in a three-month period in early 2001. We do not agree with its claim that it represents a credible democratic opposition in exile.
10 Feb 2009 : Column 1846W
Written answers | Hansard source
Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
On Wednesday 11th of Feb 2009, a group of separated veteran members of the PMOI had a meeting with the authorities of Doctors Without
Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in PARIS and they submitted a letter regarding their concerns about psychological pressures and an imposed unlimited hunger strike upon the residents of ASHRAF garrison by PMOI leaders and operatives.
——
HONORABLE Doctors Without Borders
We, the signatories of this important letter, would like to notify you of a humane crisis which will likely happen in ASHRAF GARRISON in the near future. We are all victims of RAJAVI’s cult and recently were able to escape Iraq and come to the free world in European countries. As you know the PMOI has participated and co-operated in killing Iraqi people during the reign of SADDAM HUSSEIN, and as a result of that they have to leave Iraq in the coming two months. The PMOI’s leader MASSOUD RAJAVI in his recent speech has ordered the residents of ASHRAF garrison to be ready to go on an unlimited hunger strike to the point of death. MASSOUD RAJAVI’s intention in issuing such a brutal and violent order is to keep those desperate and hopeless residents of ASHRAF garrison trapped in ASHRAF for the rest of their lives and not to allow them to choose the free life of which they have been deprived for decades.
This unlimited hunger strike will lead to disaster for these people. The PMOI’s leaders and operatives will exert a great deal of psychological pressure upon the desperate residents and push them to go on unlimited hunger strike to death. We would like all humanitarian organizations to intervene to stop the PMOI’s leaders and operatives from imposing such a disaster and calamity upon the residents of ASHRAF garrison.
BEST REGARDS
PARIS – 11 FEB 2009
SIGNATORIES
1.MR. HASSAN PIRANSAR
2. MR. HAMID SIAHMANSOURI
3. MR. HAMED SARAFPOUR
4. MR. NADER NADERI
5. MR. MOHAMMAD BAZIARPOUR
6. MR. MOHAMMAD RAZAGHI
7. MR. MANSOUR NAZARI
Iranian Intelligence Minister: MKO too weak to create problems for Iran
Intelligence Minister underlining his affiliated ministry’s capability to monitor Mojaheddin Khalq Organization (MKO) activities inside or outside Iran, said that MKO is too weak to create any problem for the country.
In a ceremony here Monday evening, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejeie told IRNA that both the intelligence and the foreign affairs ministries are monitoring MKO’s moves inside and outside of Iran’s international borders.
Regarding providing security for the presidential election period, the minister noted, "we are closely monitoring all events in a bid to prevent any move against country’s security.
Replying to a question about the latest situation of espionage and groups seeking to overthrow the Islamic system, the intelligence minister said that their dossiers are under survey at courts of justice.
ISRIA
Rabbani: Rajavi gang is begging foreign forces to save them
Iranian envoy to Qatar interviewed on ties, relations with US, Hamas
Doha Al-Sharq Online in Arabic on 10 February carries an interview with Iranian Ambassador to Qatar Muhammad Tahir Rabbani entitled: "Gas Forum is a Clear Example of the Qatari-Iranian Cooperation to Regulate the Energy Market in the World," conducted by Taha Husayn. The interview discusses several issues related to the economy of Iran, Iranian-US relations, and bilateral relations with Qatar
..Concerning the question on ignoring the role of the powers that participated in the revolution such as Mujahedin-e-Khalq , Rabbani says that the political struggle against the former regime was coloured by cultural and peaceful characteristics which differ from the other political trends which resolved to weapons, killing innocents, and assassinating the figures of the Islamic regime. Rabbani notes that "the terrorist hypocritical gang [REFERENCE to Mujahedin-e-Khalq] did not once, neither by words or deeds, show faith in the principles of the revolution. They never yielded to the will of the Iranian people." He adds that this "terrorist gang" participated with Saddam in his war against its own people and in the war against the Sunnah and Shi’i in Kurdistan and the southern Iraqi cities. He goes on to say that "this gang is now begging the foreign forces to save them and keep them alive." ..
Source: Al-Sharq website, Doha, in Arabic 10 Feb 09 – Translated by:BBC Monitoring Middle East
http://al-sharq.com
