Official: Baghdad soon to close MKO file
Iraqi National Security Advisor Muvafaq al-Rubai said here Friday that Iraqi government will in next few months close dossier of the terrorist Mujahideen Khalq Organization (MKO).
“The MKO is a terrorist group and a cancerous tumor in Iraq; The crimes and sins the group has committed are evident and well-documented. Several thousand Iraqi citizens have fallen victims of the terrorist organization and we have provable evidence, that we will submit them to Iraqi courts,” said al-Rubai in an exclusive interview with IRNA.
He said the MKO was stationed in Iraq by former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein and contrary to then regulations in Iraq, getting involved in suppression of Iraqi people’s Intifadha in 1991 and massacre of Kurds and Shiites.
He added that after formation of popular government of Iraq, the MKO has taken provocative moves against legal government of the country over recent years.
He went on to say that Iraqi courts have issued arrest warrants for 14 MKO members.
On removal of the MKO from Europe’s list of terrorist organizations, he said the MKO case is complicated and the European courts have thus far removed the outfit from the terrorism list and re-entered them into the list three times.
He said that the MKO will soon be put in the EU terrorist list.
“We have asked the EU to contribute to settlement of problem with the MKO and their exit from Iraq; we have recently discussed the issue with ambassadors of the countries and they have vowed to cooperate.”
Iran: EU countries responsible for the outcome
Iran summons ambassadors of the EU countries to protest against their decision to remove the MKO from the list of terrorist organizations.
Earlier in January, the foreign ministers of the European Union countries approved a decision to remove the Mujahedeen Khalq Organization (MKO) from the blacklist.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the move, saying, “It came despite the fact that the organization has not altered its trigger-happy ideology.”
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 US State Department has said that the MKO assassinated at least six US citizens in Iran, prior to the victory of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The US government has designated the MKO a “terrorist” organization.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mehdi Safari told the summoned EU ambassadors on Wednesday that the removal of the MKO from the list of banned terrorist groups was “a political and unacceptable move.”
The ruling by the 27-nation EU against the MKO’s seven-year inclusion in the blacklist results from recent legal developments combined with intense lobbying by the terrorist group. Safari went on to warn about the consequences of giving in to the terrorist group’s demands, adding that the EU countries involved in making this decision would be responsible for its outcome.
Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for European Affairs Mahdi Safari has lamented the European Union’s “double-standard and hypocritical” approach toward terrorism and warned about dire consequences of compromise with terrorists.
The comments by Safari came as foreign ministers of the 27-nation EU removed the name of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) from its terror list on January 26.
The behavior of certain European countries toward terrorism is “politically motivated”, Safari said as he summoned EU ambassadors to protest against the decision on Wednesday.
Pointing to the EU’s international and domestic commitments to combating terrorism, he called the decision “political and unacceptable”.
Safari bewailed the fact that some European countries are interacting with terrorists to achieve their “illegitimate and temporary purposes”.
The MKO was given “carte blanche” after the EU removed its name from terror list, he said, adding that the EU itself will be responsible for the consequences of its decision.
Pointing to the sensitive situation in the region, he pointed out that terrorists are trying to destabilize the region.
Any cooperation with these groups will help intensify their destructive activities and give rise to regional insecurity, he explained.
The Czech diplomat whose country chairs the EU rotating presidency vowed to notify the block of Iran’s views as soon as possible.
The official also underscored the importance of campaign against terrorism and expressed hope that Iran-EU cooperation will continue in this regard and produce positive results.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/index_View.asp?code=188584
The People’s Mujahideen of Iran (PMOI alias, aka MKO, alias or NRCI) have been removed from the list of organizations considered terrorist by the
European Union. Just when the U.S. confirmed on their own … who can understand.
It is true that the decision to withdraw from the European list is motivated solely on technical issues and form such aspects of rights of defense.
But now, France has appealed this decision and the Belgian Minister of Foreign Affairs reiterated that for it, PMOI did have its place on this list.
Moreover, the text that was adopted makes it clear that several countries among the 27 "are not convinced that the Mujahedin were away from terrorism". It will be recalled that the process of withdrawal, the Swiss and the French had launched new accusations against PMOI.
It is therefore likely that PMOI will return to this famous list in July. Unfortunately, in the meantime, it has had time to recover the many assets it owns and those it had received from Saddam Hussein as a salary for being executive of his dirty works …
The modern definition of a mind control cult is any group which employs mind control and deceptive recruiting techniques. In other words how cults trick
people into joining and coerce them into staying. This is the definition that most people would agree with. Except the cults themselves of course!
According to howcultswork, cults use coercive manipulation techniques to keep their members in. All former members of MKO affirm the indoctrination practices in the cult of Rajavi.
Ibrahim Khodabande, a former member of the cult, writes:’’ the cult like activities and creation of gods, and the creation of a relationship of total submission and the use of mind control tactics which eventually results in insane and unbelievable actions like self immolations”
Cults include various types such as religious, commercial, political ….
Religious
Cults that use a belief system as their base are very common. Their belief system could be standard Christianity, Hinduism, Islam or any other of the world religions, or they may have invented their own belief system. What makes them a cult is the fact that they use mind control, not what they believe.
Commercial
Cults that use commercial gain as their base are called "cults of greed". They will promise you that if you join them and follow their special programme for success then you will become very rich. Often they will hold up their leader as an example and explain that if you do what he or she says then you will be successful too. Commercial cults use mind control to get you working for them for free, and to make you pay for an endless stream of motivational tapes, videos, books and seminars all of which are supposedly designed to help you succeed, but in reality are designed to enhance the cult’s mind control environment and keep you believing in their almost impossible dream of success. Of course they never mention that the primary way the leaders make money are by selling these motivation materials to their group! For more information see below under the section, "Pressure Selling".
Self Help & Counseling
Cults that use "self help" or counseling or self improvement as their base often target business people and corporations. By doing their courses and seminars they claim you and your staff will become more successful. Business people locked away in hotel rooms are subjected to quasi-religious indoctrination as they play strange games, join in group activities, and share their innermost thoughts with the group. Once you have completed one course you are told you need to do the more advanced course, which naturally costs more than the last. These cults will sometimes request that you do volunteer work and that you help recruit your friends, family and work mates. These groups specialize in creating powerful emotional experiences which are then used to validate your involvement in the cult. The religious overtones are couched in terms which don’t sound religious. They usually come to the surface as you near the end of a seminar. Many people have been bankrupted by involvement with these cults.
Political
Cults that use political ideals as their base are well known throughout history. Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Communist USSR were classic examples of mind control on a very large scale. On smaller scales white and black supremacists, terrorists, and rebel groups commonly use forms of mind control to recruit and dominate their members.
Mujahedin-e-Khalq is considered as a religious political cult for they advocate their own version of Shiite Islam mixed with Marxism ideology.
Therefore they have invented their own belief system.
Besides, they have their deceptive ways to earn money including charity foundations of which some have been outlawed in Europe, so they can be called commercial too since all the members are exploited to work for free. The terrorist cult of MKO has long been dominating its members (victims) with an illusion of a political achievement in Iran. And this is only a mirage that they have convinced the members to see for years.
Reference: HowCultsWork
By Mazdak Parsi
Also Read:
Dr. Bernard Kouchner Minister of Affairs of the Republic France 
During the time since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the forced disarmament of the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation by the American army, the Mojahedin have been trying to put a mask on their violent, terrorist faces in Europe and America in a bid to remove the organisation from the list of terrorist entities in US, EU and Canada and ….
Unfortunately On last Monday EU ministers removed the MKO from their list of terror organizations, following a European court ruling in favor of the group, which has accepted responsibility for many deadly attacks against Iranian and Iraqi civilians and cooperated actively with the regime of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Unfortunately, the EU’s act of removing this group from its list of terrorist entities has not been based on any credible investigative work.
When PMOI whispers statements denouncing terrorism, it is not referring to its own acts. Rather it means the acts of others that fall within the group’s own definition of terrorism. This is a trickery by which PMOI continues to deceive your politicians.
In your opinion, does a terrorist group which has been disarmed after the fall of Saddam Hussein by the US army and exists in quarantine within a limited geographic boundary inside Iraq, have any opportunity to perform terrorist activities?
Surely your answer must be ‘no’, as they have had no access to arms. Therefore the reasoning that “they have not performed any terrorist act” in the short time mentioned could not in any way be considered as a professional, specialist’s argument for the leaders of European Union. Or could it?
If the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation had access to arms and had refrained from carrying out further terror acts, then in that case perhaps the group would have had to announce this in a clear public statement signed by the leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, then this might have been proper grounds to consider the situation and perhaps investigate the organisation’s intentions deeper. But that was not the case now.
But fortunately, your good self, as the highest authority in the French government have announced that you consider the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation a terrorist organisation and Figaro newspaper has quoted from you:
“France, as do Belgium and Germany, continues to consider this group (Mojahedin Khalq Organisation) as a terrorist organisation”.
I have enclosed a small sample of the evidence which has already been made public concerning the MKO. The charges against the MKO and in particular its leaders include but are not limited to: crimes against humanity and war crimes inside and outside Iran; deliberately targeting civilians in acts of terror; close co-operation with the secret services of Saddam Hussein against Iranians during an 8 years war in which chemical weapons were used against Iranian people; close co-operation with other hostile spying services and spying programs against the best interests of the people of Iran and Iraq; suppression and massacre of Kurds and Shiites in Iraq on the order of Saddam Hussein; criminal misuse of the democratic institutions of a majority of European countries and the US through fraud and deception.
Sincerly
Mohammad Hossein Sobhani
Postfach 90 06 63
51116 Köln – Deutschland
Telefon: +49 (0) 1774829905
Email: sobhani_m_h@hotmail.com
Cc:
Ministers of Affairs of the EU
Mohammad Hossein Sobhani , Iran Pen Association, Germany, February 02, 2009
http://www.iran-ghalam.de/2Haupt/3499-Sobhani-name%20be%20kouchner%20i01.02.09.HTM
sobhani_m_h@hotmail.com
A former member of the Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation (MKO), who abandoned the outlawed group in protest at its terrorist operations, said the
European Union should take responsibility of supporting the MKO in its terrorist acts.
Masoud Khodabandeh said deproscribing the MKO by the EU is a politically-motivated move which leads to support for the terrorism spread by the MKO.
He told the Islamic republic news agency that Europeans should take the responsibility of future measures by MKO terrorists who are going to be allowed to enter Europian countries.
"You [the Europeans] cannot defend terrorists [by deproscribing the MKO] and at the same time claim you are countering terrorism," he said.
Khodabandeh, who is now the spokesman of a non-governmental organisation dedicated to help members abandoning the MKO, said European leaders have adopted a double-standard policy towards the issue of terrorism.
"The MKO case proves that the European Union behaves in a discriminatory manner," he said, adding that Europeans are well-aware that MKO members have conducted many terrorist operations in the past three decades.
He said the MKO bears "no significance" in international developments as "it has now expired".
Khodabandeh added that MKO members, if released from the Ashraf Camp in Iraq and admitted to European countries, would spread insecurity and terrorism across Europe.
He said the terrorist nature of the MKO has never changed as its members are wearing uniforms and taking military drills in the Ashraf Camp.
He added that Mojahedin-e Khalq Organisation has not only slaughtered many Iranians but also "has been directly engaged in killing Iraqi Shiites and Kurds and suppressing even its own members".
Out of around 3,000 MKO members, he suggested, some 2,000 are in critical health conditions "and are willing to leave the Ashraf Camp."
Khodabandeh said if Europeans do really want to extend their help to these people trapped by the MKO, they should welcome them to Europe–a move he said his organisation will favour.
EU turning blind eye on MKO terrorism, says Iranian Embassy
London – Iran’s Embassy in Norway announced on Thursday that the European Union has turned a blind eye on terrorist activities of Mojahedin Khalq Organisation by deproscribing it from its terror list. In a statement, the embassy said the MKO has conducted many assassination and terror operations inside Iran and Iraq, claiming thousands of innocent lives.
“The EU’s move to take MKO out of its terror list is in contradiction with its decision several years ago to announce the grouplet a terrorist organisation,” the statement reads.
The embassy also said there is enough evidence that the MKO is a terrorist organisation and its leaders collaborated with Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran and suppression of his own nation.
“Based on verifiable documents and footages from Saddam’s intelligence unit, MKO leaders had met him and other Iraqi officials and briefed them on their involvement in the massacre of Iraqi people, especially the Kurds.”
The Iranian Embassy in Norway further expressed regret that the EU has isolated itself from the global community in its campaign against terrorism.
“The EU instead extended a hand for friendship and cooperation with MKO terrorists,” it said, adding that the EU’s move is in contradiction with the international laws and rights, as well as its commitments towards international anti-terrorism treaties.
zawya.com
Reported by Al-Sharq , Egyptian diplomatic sources said Egypt has ignored a request by the delegation of the People’s Mojahedin Organization (MKO) that visited recently to demand the support of Egypt for the MKO in the face of growing Iranian influence in Iraq. The source noted that in regard to the strained relations between Cairo and Tehran, which asserts that it can tolerate no more tension, the existence of disparities and problems in the relations in the recent period does not mean interference of Egypt in Iran’s internal affairs.
The sources said that Cairo did not take the request of the group seriously, although it had assented to its visit and to listen to their point of view about the regional issues including the Iranian-Egyptian relations.
Earlier, reported by Al-Masry-Al-Youm , a delegation of MKO had a visit to Cairo last week to discuss their cause with some Egyptian bodies and human rights organizations. It notes that some sources linked the Iranian opponents’ arrival in Cairo to the recently tense relations between Egypt and Iran on the backdrop of Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip.
MKO looked like it was on the ropes when Iraqi Prime Minister announced he wanted the group’s military base, Camp Ashraf, near the Iranian border closed within two months. Being a globally designated terrorist group, MKO hopes that the EU’s Jan. 26 decision will unlock untold millions of dollars frozen in European banks allowing it to freely move to any country it wills. But even those countries having a tense relation with Iranian regime are cautious not to aggravate it by letting the opponent terrorists settled in their country regardless of their responsibility towards their nation to protect them against the threat of terrorism.
many years, the roughly 3,500 members of the Iranian dissident group Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) living quietly in Iraq drew little attention. But now the
relatively obscure group is at the center of an increasingly contentious argument among leaders in Baghdad, Tehran and Washington, where decisions the new White House makes about the rebels will probably set the tone for U.S. relations with Iran in the near term.
The simmering issue of the MEK’s fate flashed into the open earlier this month when Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki unexpectedly declared that the group would no longer be allowed to remain in Iraq. Shortly after that, Maliki’s national security adviser, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, said the MEK’s camp roughly 40 miles north of Baghdad would be disbanded within two months, declaring during an appearance in Tehran that Iraq would not play host to threats toward its neighbor.
The issue grew more complicated on Jan. 26, when the European Union removed the MEK from its list of terrorist organizations, a roster that includes organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The E.U. move, which came after a long lobbying campaign by the MEK’s supporters in Europe, sparked an outcry in Tehran. About 300 people were gathered around noon on Wednesday in front of the British Embassy in Tehran to protest the E.U. decision. Some in the crowd threw stones at the embassy, while others held up shoes on sticks in a show of deep disrespect in the Middle East.
"What people side with the enemy and kill their own people in a war?" said demonstrator Sina Zamanian, 17, referring to the MEK’s alliance with Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, which led them to settle in Iraq. "They are the worst kind of opportunistic terrorists and should be forever marked as such."
Nevertheless, some in Baghdad are calling for the group to be allowed to remain in Iraq, or at least to not be turned over to Iran, for political reasons. "We have to deal with this issue very delicately," says Ayad Jamal al-Deen, an Iraqi parliamentarian aligned with Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. "I’m not here to defend this organization. I have no interest in them. But I am looking out for the Iraqi national interest." Al-Deen and other Iraqi political figures see the group essentially as a bargaining chip with Iran, one of the few Iraq holds against its powerful neighbor. They argue that simply shuttering the MEK camp as Iran demands squanders what precious little leverage Iraq has against Iran. Al-Deen adds, "In my opinion, Iraq has only this card, MEK, to pressure Iran."
At the moment, however, the MEK’s ability to remain in Iraq depends on the will of the Americans. The Bush White House continued to use the military to protect the MEK at Camp Ashraf despite its current status as a terrorist organization on the U.S. list and periodic complaints by the emerging Iraqi government and Tehran, which says the group is still involved in subversive activity inside Iran. Outwardly, U.S. officials have said disbanding the camp would be in contravention of international humanitarian law because the group’s members are likely to face persecution in Iran or Iraq. But many Iraqis and Iranians suspect that the U.S. keeps the camp open for intelligence purposes, since the MEK’s spy network played a key role in uncovering Iran’s secret uranium-enrichment program in 2002.
Maliki appears intent on pressing the issue anew with the Obama Administration, which will have to decide soon whether to keep offering U.S. protection to the group or to yield to Iraqi demands to close Camp Ashraf. If the White House allows the Iraqi government to close the camp, the Iranian leadership is likely to see the move as a sign that the new Administration is eager to ease tensions between Washington and Tehran. A continuation of the status quo, however, could chill Obama’s early outreach efforts.
At Camp Ashraf, MEK members simply wait for word on what may happen to them as discussions continue in Baghdad, Tehran and Washington. Shahriar Kia, a spokesman for the group, says a closure of the camp would be a disaster for those living in what amounts to a protective quarantine for roughly the past seven years. "Closing down Camp Ashraf and the displacement of its residents, who are protected by the Geneva Conventions, against their will is a war crime," says Kia. "This will cause a humanitarian catastrophe."
— With reporting by Tariq Anmar in Baghdad
By Mark Kukis / Baghdad
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1875917,00.html