Mujahedin Khalq Organization as a terrorist group

Open Letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy To President Nicolas Sarkozy Dear Mr. President The Global war on terrorism calls for prompt action against terrorist moves wherever they might threaten people’s peace and tranquillity. For long a blacklisted terrorist group, Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO), has taken safe haven in your country. Recently, the EU has maintained MKO on its terror list, but simultaneously the group organized a rally in the vicinity of Paris as a show of objection to the decision and demanded to be removed from the list. It is so paradoxical that a banned terrorist group is at the liberty to gather a claimed number of 50,000 supporters at Park De Expositions Villepinte, north of Paris.  In spite of the fact that MKO continues to be on the EU list, its activities have neither been restricred nor barred. Such negligence is expected to be legally investigated in your government. Legally adopted countermeasures like that of freezing assets hardly seem to be productive against a terrorist cult that none of its financial sources is legal. Has the coalition forces’ control of MKO Camp Ashraf proved to have contributed to group’s ceasing suspicious terrorist moves and interfering in Iraq’s domestic affairs? In fact, MKO’s unpredictable and circumstantial solution findings to confront a crisis make it a hard task to counteract it by the means of conventional precautionary measures.  It is a typical tactic exploited by MKO to take advantage of the escalated political discordances between parties and factions in Western countries to advance its political ambitions. It takes position in the front of any party that it has an iota of hope to advocate the group’s stances whether it considers any political or ideological affinity with the party or not. An evident example can be traced during French presidential campaign when the group enthusiastically campaigned in the favour of the Socialist Party. But now the group has changed position seeing your rival’s defeat. Once more it takes a chance, being disappointed in the past, to provoke your government against Iran to take a hostile position, to halt the process of the June 17th dossier accusing it of terrorist allegations, to demand removal of its name from the French list of terror and consequently, and to unfreeze its assets in France. MKO has proved that it has the potentiality to take advantage of a variety of terrorist leverages and cult-like moves to accomplish its ends. A clear example of such moves is a wave of self-immolations committed by the group’s members in 17 June 2003 following the detention of Maryam Rajavi. Indeed, similar moves can challenge your government as in her 30 June speech Rajavi states that her group’s uses all “means and resources to force the Council to accept the Court ruling and remove the PMOI from the list”. Not paying the least respect for democracy and democratic approaches, MKO takes shelter behind the democratic potentialities practiced in your country as a granted strategy to move on. In fact, it is an organizationally adopted strategy to hypocritically adapt to the political, cultural and social milieu of the country the group chooses to situate a bastion. Once its leaders shook hands with the ousted Saddam and colluded with him against the Iraqi people but now it organizes shows of solidarity with those same victimized people utilized as tools to survive in Iraqi soil. It seems to be for the first time that a globally proscribed terrorist group defiantly challenges the world and impudently engages in political manoeuvres not only in the Western countries but in a country that is located in a region enflamed in turmoil for decades. It is hard to believe that the West can give any justification for the remiss and negligence that might be a result of disregarding to abide by internationally adopted resolutions to combat terrorism.  At the present, MKO insidiously attempts in three fronts of Iraq, Europe and America to muster advocates. In the US, in spite of being re-designated as a terrorist group, MKO is creeping into the inconsequential rifts between the Neocons, the Pentagon and the State Department, in the Europe, in spite of being maintained on the EU list of terror, is misleading a number of former political activists or opposition parliamentarians, and in Iraq, despite the Iraqi government decision to expel the group from the country, it colludes with dissident and insurgent groups and factions against the Iraqi legitimate government to intensify the tension in the region so as to secure its stay in Iraq.  To what extend MKO achieves success depends on the amount of the cost the West has to sustain. There are evidences that the world never consents to another terrorist phenomenon similar to al-Qaeda, but can the West’s double-dealing concerning MKO can in any way minimize the threat of emerging another al-Qaeda? The cost, for sure, would be much greater for the West to sustain. Currently, MKO’s strategy is aimed at a vast media and propaganda blitz in Iraq and the Europe to provoke the democratic capacities of these countries to show inevitable reactions that ensue from a loose of tolerating the group’s blasphemies. That can be defined as the zero-point where MKO can justifiably apply violent means to defend what it believes to be its democratic rights. The strategy is explicitly put into practice when Maryam Rajavie in her speech flagrantly uses a disrespectful tone whenever addressing the EU Council of Ministers calling them with many names, as it always does when referring to its opponents and critics, and accusing them that their just decision is the outcome of an attempt to appease the Iranian regime. Moreover, she blatantly makes a mockery of the EU’s decision when saying “Nevertheless, the mountains finally labored and they have given birth to a mouse”. Mr. President, It seems that at this juncture a close monitoring of MKO’s run media deem necessary to develop an exactly calculated judgment of MKO’s positions and its long-term objectives concerning your government. The daily publicized maladroitly political positions against Western countries in general, and your government in particular, bear between the lines the existential threats of the organization. Recurrently expressed in MKO leaders’ speech and messages, the group poses an “existential threat” to Iran. It can be considered as a warning posed to whoever sides in a front against MKO and, of course, nobody sides with terrorists. Consequently, a close watch of the group to counteract its terrorist threats before they are put into practice is the least counter-terrorist move your government can conduct to make sure that a prompt decision was made before it was too late Mojahedin.ws  – July 8, 2007