Authors: Struan Stevenson
Over the past three decades, 120,000 of its members and supporters have been executed. Dozens more have been assassinated outside of Iran. The execution, imprisonment and torture of PMOI members, supporters and their families continue unabated to this day. As I write, several members and supporters of the organisation are currently on death row in Iran, their only crime being membership and support of the PMOI. In June 2014, Gholamreza Khosravi was executed for making donations to a satellite opposition TV affiliated to the PMOI. After I complained bitterly about his execution to Baroness Ashton, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, she wrote to me on 14 July 2014 stating: ‘As you well know, the EU holds a strong and principled position against the death penalty and continues to call on Iran to halt all pending executions and to introduce a moratorium on the death penalty. This also applies to the situation of Mr Gholamreza Khosravi, who should not have been executed. I had issued a public statement to this end in 2012 – to which you make reference in your letter – calling upon Iran to commute his death sentence. It is indeed very sad that Iran in the end did not do so.’ The fact that Iran simply chose to ignore Baroness Ashton’s entreaties was symptomatic of all of their future dealings with the EU.
In the summer of 1988 alone, some 30,000 PMOI political prisoners were executed in prisons throughout Iran. They were led to the gallows in their thousands and buried in mass graves in secret locations. In a final act of barbarity, the Iranian regime has for the past 26 years deprived the families of the victims with the knowledge of the final resting place of their loved ones. To this day, families meet in secret throughout Iran, in search of the remains of their loved ones.
Members and supporters of the PMOI who were not executed or imprisoned in Iran, were forced into exile, moving to Paris and other European and North American cities. Despite their political differences with Khomeini, the PMOI did everything to avoid confrontation with him and his regime. Instead it sought change through peaceful means. But when the PMOI had exhausted all possible paths to political participation, as a measure of last resort the organisation took up arms against the Iranian regime. Massoud Rajavi has said: ‘The Islam that we profess does not condone bloodshed. We have never sought, nor do we welcome, confrontation and violence. If Khomeini is prepared to hold truly free elections, I will return to my homeland immediately. The Mojahedin will lay down their arms to participate in such elections. We do not fear election results, whatever they may be. Before the start of the armed struggle, we tried to utilise all legal means of political activity, but suppression compelled us to take up arms. If Khomeini had allowed half or even a quarter of freedoms presently enjoyed in France, we would certainly have achieved a democratic victory.’
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In my view, the PMOI during this period is best described as an armed resistance movement, fighting tyranny and oppression in their homeland. What the PMOI has never been in its history (past or present) is a terrorist organisation. The PMOI has never sought to achieve its goals using terror. It has never targeted civilians, nor have civilians ever been injured or killed as a result of PMOI campaigns against the Iranian regime. My belief in the unjust, illegal and immoral terrorist designation of the PMOI was why I, and other politicians from around the world, agreed to challenge the designation in successive courts of law. We were vindicated when the verdicts of courts in the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union ruled that the PMOI was not a terrorist organisation.
Forced into exile, Massoud Rajavi moved to Paris in 1981. He, along with the PMOI leadership, members and supporters of the organisation, continued their opposition to Khomeini and his tyrannical rule from exile, while the movement’s underground network was operating in Iran. However in 1986 the PMOI relocated to Iraq, after they came under increasing pressure from the government of Jacques
Chirac to leave France. Attempting to secure the release of French hostages held by agents of the Iranian regime in Lebanon, the French Government was engaged in negotiations with the Iranian regime, a concession being the expulsion of the PMOI from French soil.
Much has been made of this relocation to Iraq by the organisation’s critics, who question the wisdom of the decision at a time when Iran was at war with Iraq. Mohammad Mohaddessin, Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the NCRI has said of this move:
Although the French Government’s pressures on the Iranian Resistance to leave France had been going on for over a year, Rajavi decided to move to Iraq only when he was assured of the Resistance’s independence in Iraq and the non-interference of the Iraqi Government in its affairs. In return, the Resistance would not intervene in Iraq’s internal affairs under any circumstances . . .
The Resistance’s move to Iraq in 1986 was taking place at a time when regional alignments were vastly different from the situation after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War. At the time, all European countries and the United States had warm relations with the Iraqi Government . . . With the very real spectre of the Iranian regime militarily defeating Iraq and occupying that country, Arab countries in the region and Western powers were doing their utmost to prevent such a disastrous outcome to the war, which clearly would have led to the rapid rise of Islamic fundamentalism and extremism across the Middle East and North Africa.
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I have often heard it argued that the PMOI somehow lost its legitimacy or popular support because of its relocation to Iraq. My own view is vastly different. I believe the move, while the result of circumstances beyond the organisation’s control, showed great courage and political foresight. When Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, the PMOI fought alongside their countrymen against Iraq. There can be no question of the organisation’s loyalty to the Iranian people or to their country.
Senator Robert Torricelli has said, ‘I think that simply because the People’s Mojahedin has forces located in Iraq does not make it less legitimate or effective. The People’s Mojahedin is based in Iraq because there is no place else for it to go and it needs to be in the proximity of Iran . . . It is a simple reflection of geographic and political realities.’
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The PMOI, while fighting against Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, was also very critical of Khomeini’s attempts to create a satellite ‘Islamic Republic’ in Iraq and the export of Islamic fundamentalism to Iraq and the wider Middle East. After Iraq had withdrawn from Iranian territory and stated its intention to compensate Iran for the war, the PMOI advocated peace with Iraq and an end to the war. The war could and should have ended in 1982, but instead it continued for a further six years until August 1988. Most of the casualties on the Iranian side occurred during this period, deaths which could have been avoided had Khomeini accepted Iraq’s offer of peace in 1982. Instead, Khomeini proclaimed that he would not stop until an Islamic Republic, at the cost of over a million dead Iranians and Iraqis, replaced the government of Iraq. Khomeini’s slogan at the time, which summed up his ambition, was to ‘liberate Jerusalem via Karbala’. According to this plan, Iran should have first captured and liberated the holy Shiite city of Karbala in Iraq and then moved towards Jerusalem.
The PMOI was faced with a difficult dilemma. On one hand the war still continued and the PMOI leadership was fully aware that its call for peace could be misinterpreted by Khomeini to make propaganda, claiming the organisation was working with the enemy. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of lives of Iranians were at stake. Schoolchildren were being sent to clear mines. The PMOI had to make a choice: either to be silent and let Khomeini send hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths, or to raise the flag of peace. Finally, it was the PMOI nationwide peace campaign, and its presence in Iraq, which broke the back of Khomeini’s war-mongering policy. As far as I am concerned, the PMOI position and conduct during the Iran-Iraq war was the most patriotic act imaginable by a political organisation. As a politician I can barely contemplate the
difficulty and the political price involved. However, years later, the PMOI has been vindicated.
The PMOI is one of five member organisations of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition of democratic Iranian opposition groups and prominent individuals, established by Massoud Rajavi in 1981 while he was in Tehran, to oppose the theocratic regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. Now in exile and headquartered in Paris, it is a political coalition made up of approximately 500 members representing all religious and ethnic minorities in Iran, including Kurds, Baluchis, Armenians, Jews and Zoroastrians.
The NCRI is comprised of 25 committees that act as shadow ministries, and are responsible for expert research and planning for a future Iran.
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Fifty per cent of the NCRI’s members are women, and as we have seen, a woman leads the entire coalition. Maryam Rajavi is the President-elect of the NCRI for the six-month provisional period following the fall of the Mullahs, when there would be an orderly transfer of power to the people. Her Presidential term would end following the election of a new President for Iran and the ratification of a new constitution in the Constitutional Assembly.
When I first met PMOI representatives I was also very keen to meet this coalition of organisations that they belonged to. Often referred to as a ‘Parliament in exile’, the NCRI have representative offices throughout the world and function exactly as one might expect. They have country representatives and staff in each country, dedicated to informing politicians and the public on issues pertaining to Iran and the Middle East. As the organisation is comprised of experts in numerous fields, NCRI members and officials are often invited to provide comment on Iran, as their information and evidence is second to none. For example, it was the NCRI who first exposed the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons programme by announcing the existence of a uranium enrichment facility in Natanz in 2002. These revelations were based on information provided to the NCRI by the PMOI’s network inside Iran.
The American government, who had no love for the PMOI, confirmed the role of the PMOI in this, although they were careful not to mention the organisation by name: ‘Iran admitted the existence of
these facilities only after it had no choice, only because they had been made public by an Iranian opposition group.’ (White House briefing, White House spokesman, 10 March 2003.)
‘Iran has concealed its nuclear program. That became discovered, not because of their compliance with the IAEA or NPT, but because a dissident group pointed it out to the world, which raised suspicions about the intentions of the program.’ (White House Press Conference, 16 March 2005.)
‘An Iranian opposition group said today that it had evidence of two previously undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities west of Tehran. The group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella for Iranian opposition organizations, said the facilities were discovered by the People`s Mujahedeen, a resistance group that brought the Natanz plant to the attention of international weapons inspectors. “This organization has been extremely on the mark in the past,” said a senior United Nations official who is familiar with the situation in Iran, adding, “They are a group that seems to be privy to very solid and insider information.”’ (
New York Times
, 27 May 2003.)
The NCRI organise symposiums, press conferences and exhibitions and are responsible for excellent and well-informed publications. The organisation’s members and officials can be seen rushing to and from meetings in parliaments around the world. I have met many of them and have visited their offices in London, Paris, Brussels, Washington DC and elsewhere. What I always find remarkable in all my dealings with this group and their supporters is their dedication and self-sacrifice. They work tirelessly to assist the Iranian people to realise their inalienable rights to freedom, democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Their offices are also interestingly one of the first ports of call for Iranians who manage to escape the clutches of the Ayatollahs in Iran. They view the organisation as the embodiment of their hopes and desires for a free, democratic and secular Iran.
To my mind, one of the most striking features of the PMOI is the role of women within the organisation. This is in stark contrast to the Iranian regime’s three-decade war on women and the rights of women. There is a deep belief in gender equality, but more
importantly, in observing equality in practice and not just paying lip service to the word. I have witnessed the organisation’s democratic and gender equal ethos in practice.
Encouraged, influenced and guided by the example set by Maryam Rajavi, the women within the PMOI are immensely capable. In the internal elections usually held every two years, PMOI members have repeatedly elected women to be their Secretary General in the past 20 years. Having been held back for decades by a misogynist regime that despises women, the women within the PMOI are a hugely influential and powerful force. I believe they are our greatest asset against the Ayatollahs as they represent the source of inspiration and empowerment to the millions of women in Iran. It is this fact that petrifies the Iranian regime and the reason why they have such utter contempt for the organisation and in particular for the women within the organisation.
One of the most horrifying consequences of the inception of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 has been the export of terror and the aggressive export of Islamic fundamentalism. The PMOI, as the oldest and largest anti-fundamentalist Muslim group in the Middle East,
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has been invaluable to the international community in the fight against Islamic fundamentalism, now a real global threat to peace and security.
Because they advocate a democratic and tolerant Islam, many Middle East experts and political figures in Europe and North America see the organisation as the antithesis to Islamic fundamentalism. The PMOI’s modern and progressive interpretation of Islam is the polar opposite to what fundamentalist Islam represents. The PMOI stands for a secular system of government with complete separation of religion and state. In fact, for nearly 50 years, they have sought free and fair elections. The PMOI has always maintained that the ballot box is the only legitimate basis for government, in contrast to the fundamentalists, who believe they are ordained by God.