Authors: Struan Stevenson
What is particularly dangerous about the Iranian regime is their policy of expansionist ideology. Not content with inflicting indescribable misery on the Iranian people, they have exported their Islamic fundamentalism to Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and beyond.
Recognising the organisation’s impact, 5.2 million Iraqis signed a statement describing the organisation as a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. Therefore the PMOI has immense appeal in the Middle East. To my mind, the PMOI and their experiences are pivotal if we are to defeat the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalism, a disease that is sweeping across the world at an alarming rate, threatening to destroy it. The current relentless influx of ISIS across vast tracts of Syria, Iraq and Libya is a case in point.
The PMOI has immense international support. For example at their annual rally in Paris, which I have attended many times, approximately 100,000 Iranians and non-Iranians meet to support the PMOI and the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people. The PMOI enjoys the majority support of parliaments around the world, including in the European Parliament and both chambers of the British Parliament. Their support is bipartisan. I am often stunned by how politicians from extreme ends of the political spectrum can be united in their support of the PMOI, and yet disagree on just about everything else!
1.
Dr Mossadegh was overthrown in a
coup d’état
orchestrated by Britain and the United States.
2.
The organisation is variously referred to as the PMOI, Mujahedin-e-Khalq, MEK, MKO and other versions of its name.
3.
In 1990 Dr Rajavi, Iran’s first Ambassador to the United Nations after the 1979 revolution, was assassinated in Geneva by agents of the Iranian regime.
4.
For more information see
The Mujahedin-e-Khalq, MEK, Shackled by a Twisted History
, by Lincoln P. Bloomfield Jr, published by University of Baltimore, 2013.
5.
‘People’s Mojahedin of Iran – Mission Report’, Friends of a Free Iran, p. 7.
6.
‘The Mujahedin-e-Khalq’, report by the British Foreign Office prepared in March 2001.
7.
Ervand Abrahamian,
The Iranian Mojahedin
, pp. 218-219.
8.
Mohammad Mohaddessin,
Enemies of the Ayatollahs
, p. 55-56.
9.
Massoud Rajavi interview with
L’Unité
, Paris, 1 January 1984.
10.
Mohammad Mohaddessin,
Enemies of the Ayatollahs
, p. 114.
11.
Statement made at a press conference on Capitol Hill, 8 June 1995.
13.
Mohammad Mohaddessin,
Enemies of the Ayatollahs
, p. 14.
4
Interviews with Political Prisoners Refugee Camp, Tirana, Albania, May 2014
Mahnaz
(Only first name given to protect her family in Iran)
‘My name is Mahnaz. I was 16 when I was arrested in Tehran with all of my family, my mother, father, sister and two brothers. Another of my brothers had been executed in 1981. He was 17 and a member of the PMOI. He was a student, arrested, tortured and 20 days later the state-run TV reported the names of 100 people who had been accused of being ‘corrupt on earth’ and executed. My brother’s name was among them. We found out later from sources in prison that he had been strangled under torture, so they never returned the body. All we got was the number of his grave in Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery. For years, my parents refused to believe that he was dead.
I was arrested one year later. We were all taken to Evin. My 15 year-old sister and I were placed in one room. My 11-year-old brother was also taken to Evin. My father and mother were separated. My older brother aged 27 had been arrested earlier in the street. He was a medical student. We were taken to section 7 and we could hear the screams of the tortured, both male and female. But then they took me behind a room and separated me from my sister and suddenly I could hear my brother’s screams. A man nicknamed Islami came to me and threatened me, demanding to know details of my brothers’ friends and whether they were supporters of the PMOI. I was deeply shocked. I asked to see my brother. They took me to him. He had been tortured and I could see under my blindfold a glimpse of his face. Wounds up to his knees indicated that he had been beaten and was badly swollen and covered in blood. His face was bloody too. They forced him to insist that I cooperate, twisting his arms. He said, “You should tell them that you did nothing . . . they don’t know that you did nothing.”
Immediately two people named Islami and Fakoor started to beat us both with cables and batons; my brother was hit by the baton on his mouth, which broke his teeth; they accused him of instructing me not to talk. After an hour of this I was taken to a torture chamber and chained hands and feet face down on a bed, beaten on the ends of my feet and a heavy weight was placed on my back . . . so I felt I was suffocating. Fakoor said, “Just raise your hand when you want to talk.” I raised my hand to get respite and said, “You know I’ve done nothing.” They began to torture me again until I was unconscious. I think this went on for approximately four hours and it continued like this every day for three days. I was moved to the so-called clinic of Evin Prison, because my feet were infected and were bleeding. I couldn’t walk.
Two years later my brother was executed and two weeks after his execution my father, devastated by the news, died of a heart attack in prison. My mother and 11-year-old brother were released after three months in prison; they had both been beaten with cables. My brother was mentally disturbed for years thereafter, because of the screams he heard and because they took him to see my older brother being tortured, to put more pressure on him to reveal information. My mother was harassed for years after her release and also died of a heart attack. So now only myself, my sister and my youngest brother remain of my family. My brother is forbidden to leave Iran and my sister has been in prison for the past twelve years in Iran.
After being sentenced to ten years imprisonment plus four years suspended, four years after my imprisonment in 1986, I was one of the people released but on the understanding that I report weekly to a local police station. I did that three times and then escaped. Each time they asked me who did you meet this week, what have you been reading, why are you not married, what are you thinking? I realised I had to escape from Iran and I joined the resistance army in Iraq.’
5
Berlin
Back in Brussels, I was invited to be a keynote speaker at a massive PMOI Rally they were planning to organise in Paris in February 2005. I readily agreed and was somewhat surprised, a few weeks later, when my Parliamentary Assistant Ingrid took a call from a lady calling herself ‘Mrs Felicity Brown’, claiming to be a senior official at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in Whitehall, London. I asked Ingrid to put the call through and Mrs Brown said, ‘Mr Stevenson, it has come to our attention in the FCO that you are intending to address a PMOI Rally in Paris next February, in your capacity as an MEP. The FCO would like to advise you that we think this is a very bad idea. The PMOI are a listed terrorist organisation and your association with them will be damaging for your own political credibility and will be exploited as a propaganda tool by them.’
I was taken aback by this and replied, ‘Mrs Brown, please do not seek to dictate to me as an elected parliamentarian, what I should do, where I should go and whom I should meet!’ I spent a few minutes explaining to Mrs Brown why it was unjust for the PMOI to have been placed on the UK, EU and US terrorist lists in the first place and how I was actively working to have them delisted.
When the call ended, I suddenly became suspicious. Why would a senior civil servant in the FCO try to order around an elected MEP? I asked Ingrid to call FCO in London and ask for Mrs Felicity Brown. Needless to say, there was no such person. It was only much, much later that I finally discovered that Mrs Brown was actually working for MI5. It was a salutary lesson. Incredibly, my own British intelligence service was keen to sever my links with the PMOI, which had clearly come to their attention. Their attitude made me all the more determined to speak at the Paris Rally.
The tenth of February had been chosen for the great Paris Rally to mark the twenty-sixth anniversary of the revolution that toppled
the Shah of Iran in 1979. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) had obtained permission from the French authorities to hold the mass rally in Paris. They estimated that around 40,000 exiled Iranians from around the world would attend. I had purchased my flights to travel to Paris from my home in Scotland, when suddenly, only two days before the event was due to take place, I was informed that the French had pulled the plug on the whole affair. Under heavy pressure from the Iranian Mullahs, bolstered by a strong lobby of French companies holding multi-billion-dollar contracts with Iran, the French government had predictably caved in. Permission had been withdrawn at the eleventh hour.
Determined not to be out-manoeuvred by the Mullahs, and equally determined not to disappoint the hordes of PMOI supporters already making their way to Europe, the NCRI quickly shifted the focus of the Rally to Berlin, where the municipal authorities gave the green light for a demonstration in front of the historic Brandenburg Gate. The phone lines between Tehran, Paris and Berlin must have been red-hot on the eve of the demo, because at 4 am on 10 February, the German Government also pulled the plug on the rally. By dawn, a four-kilometre security cordon had been set up around the Brandenburg Gate to ensure no one was allowed near the area. Charter planes, buses and private cars bringing thousands of Iranians to Berlin were stopped and turned back by German police.
Again, the persistent dissidents refused to give up. Throngs of would-be demonstrators wandered peacefully around the city, waving their placards and flags, and thousands of them gathered in a square, some 5 km from the city centre, to hold a spontaneous rally. So it was that on a cold, drizzly day in early February, I found myself standing on top of a grassy knoll in a frozen Berlin square, trying to be heard through a megaphone, over the clatter of police helicopters hovering overhead and 40,000 cheering, flag-waving PMOI supporters thronging the surrounding streets.
You would have been forgiven for thinking that in a week when key leaders in the West were taking turns to condemn the ruling ayatollahs for their continued sponsorship of terrorism and their determination to construct nuclear weapons, that 40,000 Iranian dissidents calling for democratic change in Iran would have received a friendly
welcome. Well, not in Berlin. As I spoke on a makeshift stump, the rows of green-clad German police surrounding the square, standing ten-deep in places, wearing helmets and visors, shields and batons in hand, lines of armoured cars behind them, blue lights flashing and sirens shrieking, and police helicopters buzzing overhead, created a surreal scene.
I was told that the Chief of the Berlin Police had arrived and was demanding to speak to the ‘organisers’ of the rally. I pressed my way through the cheering, backslapping mass of people to the police lines and asked to see the Chief. Several heavily armed policemen led me through the lines to where an officer, whose uniform and peaked cap were sparkling with silver braid, was issuing orders to a clutch of senior commanders. I thrust myself into their circle and holding my parliamentary pass, announced that I was an elected member of the European Parliament and was conducting a law-abiding and peaceful rally in Berlin. The Chief of Police straightened up until he was staring me in the eye. ‘This is an illegal rally and these people are blocking streets and access roads to this square. In the event of an emergency, fire engines and ambulances would be unable to gain access. I will reluctantly permit you to continue the rally only if everyone steps off the streets and congregates on the grass in the centre of the square. If you fail to do this, I will order my men to arrest you all.’ I assured the chief that I understood and would do my best to clear the streets.
I struggled back through the chanting crowd and made my way to the top of the mound in the middle of the grassy area. Grabbing the megaphone I yelled for silence, although the roar of the helicopters made it almost impossible for me to be heard. ‘I have spoken to the Chief of Police,’ I shouted. ‘We can continue our rally only if you get off the streets and stand on the grass. You must clear the way for emergency vehicles otherwise the riot police will arrest us all!’
This announcement was met with great roars of approval and the crowds started to surge forward onto the grass. Soon the streets were cleared and the police cordon formed a tight circle around the crowd to ensure no one moved off the grass. I roared my message of freedom and democracy for the oppressed people of Iran through the megaphone to thunderous cheers and applause.
With seven other European parliamentarians, I then held an impromptu press conference on the spot to denounce the unjustified German ban on our intended rally at the Brandenburg Gate. Just as we were winding up, it was announced that a panel of judges in Berlin had ruled in favour of an emergency appeal filed by the PMOI. The court ordered that the demonstration could now go ahead at the Brandenburg Gate after all. German justice had prevailed over the policy of appeasement. The sight of tens of thousands of Iranian demonstrators waving photos of Maryam Rajavi and flashing victory signs as they made their way to the Brandenburg Gate startled Berliners, who readily responded with cheers and applause.
Amazingly, when we arrived at the Brandenburg Gate, surrounded by lines of riot police and still shadowed by armoured military vehicles and helicopters, the PMOI staff had re-erected the podium, which they had begun to dismantle earlier when news of the ban was first made public. Huge banners and flags draped the stage and towering banks of loudspeakers meant that the hand-held megaphones were now redundant. I mounted the stage to ear-shattering cheers and savoured the adrenalin rush from addressing a massive crowd in front of one of Berlin’s most famous landmarks. On that grey February afternoon in Berlin, I glanced to my left, as the crowd chanted, ‘No to appeasement, No to foreign war. Help the Iranian people and their resistance to bring about democratic change.’