Iran
opposition group seeks US
legitimacy By Barbara Slavin
WASHINGTON - For years now, supporters of
the Iranian opposition group the Mujahideen-e
Khalq (MEK) have lobbied in vain to have the
organization taken off the United States State
Department's terrorism list.
That day may
now be approaching. A growing number of
high-profile defense and foreign policy big-wigs -
from former Central Command chief Anthony Zinni to
former congressman and think-tank head Lee
Hamilton - have given paid speeches either
endorsing delisting or questioning why the group
remains on the list when it has not committed a
known terrorist act for many years.
Last
July, a federal appeals court in Washington
ordered the
State Department to review the
designation. On Tuesday, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton told the House Foreign Affairs
Committee that the department would make a
decision "as soon as we can".
Ray Tanter,
a National Security Council staffer under former
president Ronald Reagan and founder of the Iran
Policy Committee, a group that has sought MEK
de-listing since 2005, said there have been six
recent panels of high-profile individuals dealing
with the topic: two in Paris, where the MEK's
political wing, the National Council of
Resistance, is headquartered; one in Brussels,
seat of the European parliament; and three in
Washington organized by a group called Executive
Action LLC.
Executive Action head Neil
Livingstone, a former member of the Iran Policy
Committee, said another panel might be organized
soon on Capitol Hill.
"Iran-American
cultural organizations" had approached him about
doing the logistics for the meetings, he said,
without giving specific names. He said he had not
been involved in recruiting speakers or arranging
payment for them but believed that it was time to
revoke the terrorist designation.
"The
list should have integrity," Livingstone said. "It
shouldn't be used for political reasons."
The group and its political wing were put
on the list in 1997 as a signal from the Bill
Clinton administration that it wanted to improve
relations with Iran, which had just elected
reformer Mohammad Khatami as president.
The Iranian government detests the MEK,
whose name in Farsi means People's Holy Warriors.
Responsible for numerous acts of violence in the
1970s, including the assassination of six US
citizens, the MEK broke with the regime after the
1979 revolution when it lost a struggle for power.
Its leader, Massoud Rajavi, fled first to Paris
and then to Iraq, where he and his followers were
embraced by Saddam Hussein.
Outside Iran,
particularly in Europe, the group has a
considerable number of sympathizers - many of them
relatives of MEK members summarily executed by the
Iranian regime in 1988. However, Iranians inside
Iran intensely dislike the organization because it
fought on the side of Saddam during the 1980-88
Iran-Iraq war, which killed a quarter of a million
Iranians.
After the war, the group mounted
a number of spectacular bombings and
assassinations in Iran, including the 1999 killing
of Ali Shirazi, the deputy commander of the
Iranian armed forces general staff and a former
commander of Iranian ground forces during the
Iran-Iraq war.
The group has not committed
any violent actions in recent years. Its main base
- at Camp Ashraf in Iraq - was captured by US
forces after the 2003 invasion. Its leaders insist
they have renounced violence and support a
democratic government for Iran that would renounce
weapons of mass destruction.
Supporters of
Iran's Green movement worry that delisting the MEK
now would hand a propaganda victory to the Iranian
government, which is seeking to crush popular
protests that began after disputed 2009
presidential elections.
"The government
has been trying to taint the Green movement as
connected to the mujahideen, knowing that they
have a bad reputation in Iran," said Ahmad Sadri,
an Iran scholar at Lake Forest College in
Illinois. Sadri added that the MEK was a
"personality cult" built around its leader, whose
whereabouts are unknown, and his wife, Maryam, who
is based outside Paris.
MEK members are
obliged to remain celibate and subjected to
intensive brainwashing, according to former
members this reporter has interviewed. Some have
alleged that they were kept at Camp Ashraf for
years against their will.
Roberto Toscano,
who served as Iranian ambassador to Tehran from
2003 to 2008 and who is now a public policy
scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars, said the group's ideology is "a
weird combination of Marxism and Islamic
fundamentalism".
"People know it's a cult;
people who get out have to be deprogrammed," he
said.
Zinni, who spoke before a Washington
audience on January 20 - along with a star-studded
bipartisan cast that included former national
security adviser Jim Jones, former Federal Bureau
of Investigation director Louis Freeh and former
New Mexico governor Bill Richardson - said in an
interview on Tuesday that he was unaware of the
group's cultist aspects but still felt it should
be taken off the State Department list if it
disavowed terrorism.
"Delisting ought to
be done much the way we handled the PLO
[Palestinian Liberation Organization] and the IRA
[Irish Republican Army]," Zinni said in an
interview.
He also said that the US was
responsible for the fate of more than 3,000 MEK
members still at Ashraf even though the camp is
now under Iraqi sovereignty.
Zinni, who
famously inveighed against the US invasion of Iraq
in 2003 and was a fierce opponent of Iraqi exile
Ahmad Chalabi, seemed to have no similar
compunctions about Iranian exiles. "The Iranian
community outside Iran has much more influence
inside than the Chalabis of the world that we
ended up supporting in Iraq," he said.
Zinni said he had been paid his "standard
fee" for speaking at the Iran event but would not
say how much that was. He said he was never told
what to say about the MEK, although he clearly
knew the views of those sponsoring the event.
Hamilton, a former chairman of the House
Foreign Relations Committee who headed the
prestigious Woodrow Wilson Center for 12 years
until last fall, told Inter Press Service that he
had also been paid "a substantial amount" to
appear on a panel February 19 at the Mayflower
Hotel in Washington.
Hamilton appeared
with Richardson, two former joint chiefs of staff,
former attorney general Michael Mukasey, former
under secretary of defense for policy Walter
Slocombe, former State Department
counter-terrorism coordinator Dell Dailey and
ex-senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey.
At the event, Hamilton praised the group
for providing information that led to the
disclosure of an uranium-enrichment facility at
Natanz, Iran in 2002. While Hamilton did not call
for removing the MEK from the list immediately, he
said he was "puzzled" by why the group remained so
designated.
In the subsequent interview,
Hamilton - who once had access to classified
information - said, "I haven't seen any reasons
that are current" for the MEK to be branded as
terrorist. He also conceded, however, that he was
not aware of the cult-like nature of the group.
"They presented me with a platform that
was thoroughly democratic," Hamilton said. "Were
they misleading me? You always can be misled."
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