The release of an unclassified summary of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran last week has met with a tidal wave of disbelief in hawkish circles in Washington and Tel Aviv. The much-anticipated report’s critics agree with its admirers that it weakens the Bush Administration’s case against Iran, but draw an opposite lesson from the assessment. Trusting that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons is dangerous, warn the neoconservatives who prompted the invasion of Iraq in search of imaginary banned weapons. The new war they have worked so diligently to bring about before George Bush and Dick Cheney leave office is made a little less certain now after the NIE summary is made public. So the neocons are fighting back, with help from a desperate exile group that shares their dedication to violent regime change in Tehran.
The odd Iranian entity, based in France and Iraq (and welcome in neither), is joining the far-right chorus to cast doubt on the NIE report for reasons largely unfamiliar to Western public opinion. On December 11, wire services quoted allegations by the National Council of Resistance of Iran that, contrary to the NIE’s findings, Iran has an ongoing secret program to build atomic bombs. Alireza Jafarzadeh, NCRI’s registered U.S. lobbyist until it was banned here in 2003, went even farther in a Fox News interview and claimed that Iran’s nuclear program is managed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps scientists. As the most trusted branch of Iran’s armed forces, the IRGC was recently branded by the White House and some members of Congress as a sponsor of international terrorism.
NCRI’s scare campaign against Iran appears in part intended to overcome its own infamy. The "Council" is a front group based in Paris for the Mojahedin-e Khalgh Organization (known also as MEK, MKO, or PMOI), according to the U.S. State Department, which bans both as a single terrorist organization. Across the Atlantic, British prime minister Gordon Brown reiterated his government’s position as recently as December 13 that the group must remain "proscribed" in the U.K. despite a court ruling a week earlier. MEK’s pariah status makes it entirely dependent on the good will of the U.S. military, which has since the spring of 2003 sheltered the militia, after it disarmed, in northern Iraq.
Its struggle to deepen Western distrust of Iran is motivated primarily by the real possibility that its key figures will face prosecution if a U.S. accommodation with Iran ends its utility to U.S. strategists as a bargaining chip. The group has for a quarter-century topped the most wanted list of enemies in the Islamic Republic. The latest indication of MEK’s vulnerability emerged December 16 when, according to Reuters, Iran asked that the next round of U.S.-Iran negotiations in Baghdad address MEK’s status. At issue are Iran’s demands that (Iran’s allies in) the Iraqi government be allowed to take custody of and prosecute the militia.
Founded in 1965 as a popular and progressive Muslim urban guerrilla group to help overthrow Iran’s U.S.-backed monarchy, MEK took part in the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79. But soon after the fall of the Shah, the expanding group was pushed to the margins in the power struggle that led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic. After it led a campaign of terror against the new government, it was violently suppressed.
Eventually, in the mid-1980s several thousand MEK fighters fled to neighboring Iraq and helped Saddam Hussein (as did Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Reagan Administration) in his eight year war with Iran. They remain there today in their remote military enclave, Camp Ashraf, close to the Iranian border. MEK’s unofficial spokespersons in Washington and European capitals, whose alarmist press conference on the NIE repeated familiar refrains, are graduates of Ashraf drills, according to their former allies that operate the website www.iran-interlink.org. In the eyes of other Iranian opposition groups, all of whom shun MEK, the militia’s anti-NIE campaign and other scare tactics represent a continuous "treasonous" streak that began with the militia’s alliance with Saddam.
NCRI often takes credit for alerting the West in 2002 to the existence of undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran. It was in the news also a month ago, when it prompted claims by Iraqi "tribal leaders" that thirty thousand Shi’i Iraqis had signed a petition against Iranian interference in their country. The group speaks in the Cold War language that the neocons use to warn against "appeasing the fascist mullahs" and such. This should not come as a surprise, because NCRI has received overt support from such powerful U.S. extremists as John Ashcroft, Dick Armey, Richard Perle, and members of Congress Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Tom Tancredo.
Among Iranian opposition groups, at least a dozen – ranging from communists to monarchists – are openly dedicated to the overthrow of the government of Iran. All labor to one degree or another to derail any possibility of détente between Tehran and Washington. Other factions that see little hope of influencing Iran’s politics by electoral means also refuse to support U.S. – Iranian dialog, because they fear their interests would not be included in a peace deal. But no Iranian opposition group besides MEK has challenged the new American intelligence report, the NIE, which concludes Iran is not diverting nuclear technology or fuel to a weapons program at this time.
MEK occupies a unique niche in the whole opposition constellation in that it is a tightly regimented military cult that conceals its real identity, according to former members interviewed by Human Rights Watch. It is also the only Iranian opposition group that has killed U.S. military personnel (in pre-revolutionary Iran), fought Iran’s Revolutionary Guards with tanks and artillery, fired rockets at and assassinated government targets in the country, or attacked Iranian embassies.
In the United States, too, MEK is in a class all its own. It alone among officially designated foreign terrorist organizations can obtain street demonstration permits through its thinly disguised front operations, thanks to its powerful friends that portray it as the anti-fundamentalist alternative to the Islamic Republic. Poster-size portraits of a husband and wife team revered by MEK rank and file are in abundance at such street rallies, including one held on the grounds of the U.S. Congress in 2004 .
The whereabouts of MEK’s military leader, Massoud Rajavi, are not known lately, but there are persistent rumors since last year that the US military or intelligence agencies have recruited select members of the militia in Iraq for clandestine operations inside Iran. Rajavi’s wife, Maryam is the self-appointed president of MEK’s government-in-waiting in Paris. The group has enough resources to operate numerous websites and a polished commercial-free satellite television broadcast (from an undisclosed location), publish a monthly newspaper in a half-dozen Western countries, and support a few thousand members at Camp Ashraf.
The militia has been in limbo in occupied Iraq, at the mercy of the United States (in "protective custody," under the Geneva Conventions) since 2003, fearing abandonment or worse if peace breaks out between Tehran and Washington. MEK’s leadership and core cadres are wanted as criminals in post-Saddam Iraq for their alleged participation in the dictator’s atrocities against the Kurdish and Shi’a factions that now rule the country. Relocating to other Arab countries is not an option, due to the same history. Returning to Iran, where a traitor’s treatment awaits MEK’s key figures, is equally out of the question, as is a new life in the European Union, Canada, or the U.S., where the militia is officially banned as a terrorist group. And few other countries would risk provoking Iran by taking the militia’s inner circle as refugees.
The dead-enders are so desperate that no fewer than nine MEK diehards set themselves ablaze across Europe in 2003, and at least one died of burn wounds, when Maryam Rajavi was detained with a few dozen aides in Paris on terrorism charges. With regime change in Iran unlikely with or without U.S. military intervention, the surest way for MEK’s core cadres to remain unaccountable for their past appears to be just the path they are following. They need to make themselves indispensable by helping subvert a possible U.S. accommodation with Iran.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Rostam Pourzal is a writer and human rights activist in Washington, DC. He travels to Iran regularly and has served on the boards of several Iranian American organizations. Currently, he heads the U.S. branch of the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention in Iran, an independent international network that advocates reconciliation between the United States and Iran.
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