Self-Sacrifice (6 page)

Past the Brandenburg Gate and the famous Adlon Hotel, there was the open ground above the site of Hitler’s bunker. It was here in 1945 that the Nazi leader had committed suicide, bringing to an end his murderous regime. It seemed an appropriate place to be calling for an end to another evil dictatorship. While the resilience and courage of the Iranian dissidents turned the Berlin rally into a great success, the knee-jerk decisions taken by Paris and Berlin to ban the demonstration raised serious concerns in my mind. Where on earth was European policy on Iran heading?

When Tony Blair in the first week of February 2005 grudgingly admitted that the Iranian regime was a ‘sponsor of international terror’, and when the French and German foreign ministers expressed concern at Iran’s policies, it was more to do with pressure from the Americans than any wish to criticise Tehran. Tony Blair, Gerhard
Schroeder, the German Chancellor, and Jacques Chirac, the French President, had been at the forefront of a failed ‘engagement policy’ with Iran that had only strengthened the most radical factions of the theocratic regime. The UK Foreign Minister Jack Straw had shuttled back and forth to Tehran in zealous pursuit of a diplomatic policy that to many was reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s ‘peace in our time’ sop to fascism.

For me, it was becoming increasingly obvious how wrong this policy had been. It was already clear that the Mullahs had no intention of halting their accelerating quest to build a nuclear bomb. More than a decade later, we still seem not to have learned that lesson. Back in 2005 the Mullahs had already developed the Shahab-3 missile system, capable of delivering a nuclear payload over a distance of 1,000 miles. The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Gholamali Khoshru, during a visit to the European Parliament, had lied that these missiles were purely for defensive purposes, to protect Iran from its immediate neighbours in the Middle East. Why, then, he was asked, was Iran developing a new generation of missiles capable of reaching Berlin, Paris or London?

It seemed glaringly obvious that the policy of appeasement would never succeed. Indeed, the more the EU sought to appease the Mullahs, the more oppressive their regime had become. I pointed this out in speech after speech in the European Parliament. In the 26 years since the overthrow of the Shah, the tyrants in Teheran had executed 120,000 opponents. Women were routinely hanged in public and stoned to death. Offenders were regularly publicly flogged. Convicts had their limbs amputated or eyes gouged out. Democracy, freedom of speech and human rights were clearly alien concepts in Iran, where the Mullahs played host to al-Qaeda and poured unlimited funds and agents into the bloody insurgency now raging in neighbouring Iraq. The West turned a blind eye to all of this. Oil contracts and money were more important than human rights.

Mrs Rajavi and her allies in the NCRI had produced a political platform from which to build a secular democracy in Iran. Their activities were unnerving the Ayatollahs in Tehran. Indeed, when Britain, France and Germany sought a temporary halt to Iran’s nuclear programme, the Mullahs’ top demand was to keep the PMOI on the
EU terrorist list. By accepting this ludicrous demand, the EU played into the hands of Tehran, effectively handcuffing the only viable opponents of the Islamic fundamentalist regime.

Iran’s clandestine nuclear project, exposed to the West by the PMOI, had steadily evolved into a major international challenge; and this challenge had become even more pressing since the ‘election’ in 2005 of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. The son of a blacksmith, Ahmadinejad was a populist hardliner who called America ‘The Great Satan’ and took a defiant stance on Iran’s right to a nuclear programme. A Holocaust denier who called for Israel to be ‘wiped off the map’, Ahmadinejad initially enjoyed the full support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who liked his hardline approach. However, the international community was alarmed at Ahmadinejad’s rise to power. It was claimed that he had been one of the hostage-takers during the notorious siege of the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, although he fiercely denied it. Nevertheless, like most powerful figures in the Iranian elite, he had served his time in the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Despite all of this, Jack Straw and other political leaders in Europe still thought that appeasement was the way to go.

Risking their lives to uncover more intelligence about the Mullahs’ nuclear ambitions, PMOI agents were able to tell the West that the programme was no longer in the hands of the scientists, but had been handed over to the control of the military. The IRGC, whose role since 1979 had been to defend the Khomeini revolution, was now in charge of the weapons programme, giving the lie to the assertion by the Mullahs that this was simply a domestic energy programme.

6

Interviews with political prisoners, Refugee Camp, Tirana, Albania, May 2014

Azam Hadj Heydari

My name is Azam Hadj Heydari. I was a teacher because I wanted to serve my people. Their lives were full of pain and my job was to provide life by way of education. My school was in an impoverished area of Southern Tehran. Every morning my students would describe the pain of being deprived of the freedom they had sought by getting rid of the Shah. So I looked for a new direction and found the PMOI.

After four years the regime arrested me, and my whole family were made to turn against each other. We tried to pursue our goal peacefully; by 21, I was arrested four times and taken to secret houses. I was tortured in a new unnamed secret prison opened by Khomeini. Houses previously owned by the Shah had been converted into secret prisons. I was held for 15 days and given only water, no food. We were told that we should get the idea of freedom out of our minds and that the revolution’s goal was to institute the absolute rule of the clergy. Eventually I was thrown out onto the street barefoot and walked home.

In the summer of 1981, I was walking in a Tehran street when I saw my brother. I knew he would betray me because he was opposed to the PMOI. I went to my aunt’s house at 1.30 am. Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang. I looked out the window and saw that the square was surrounded by Revolutionary Guards, with my brother among them. Ten minutes later, they started to bang on the door. They broke the glass, entered the house and both my cousin and I were arrested. We were blindfolded and taken away.

They drove us around for hours to prevent us from identifying the destination. I was eventually placed in a 1 x 1 metre-square cell. I got a dirty, broken plate of food pushed in through the door once a day. I was held for 25 days and allowed out only for prayers. One
day I heard somebody screaming and realised that it was my older sister. They were threatening and torturing her to put pressure on me. My sister was placed on an electric chair, in hopes of forcing her to reveal more information about me, but neither of us said anything. A month later we were taken out of the cell and mixed in with ordinary prisoners. My sister was held in the cell across from mine. They kept threatening to kill us. After 20 days, my sister and I were gagged and transferred to Evin Prison.

There we were tortured. In 1982, it was freezing cold in winter and we had 500 people in our cellblock. We were given ten minutes each a week for a cold shower. There were women as old as 80, pregnant women, people horribly injured by torture, and children as young as four. The regime wanted total silence as a sort of psychological torture. The prison windows had bars, but did not allow any light to come in. Despite that, however, we were full of energy and were determined to fight on. One day 80 of us were taken out and made to stand in deep snow from 6 am until 9 pm. The cold was unbearable. On another night I realized that Masoumeh Azadanlou, Mrs Maryam Rajavi’s sister, who was pregnant, was tapping on the wall of the neighbouring cell to deliver a sort of message. She had been badly tortured. She said, “Be brave; and remember PMOI fighters never get tired of fighting.” They had placed live snakes in her cell for four days, but they did not harm her. She was executed shortly thereafter.

We were made to stand all day and every day in the snow for a week. I was moved to another prison and placed in a tiny cage for eight months, where there was total silence. The punishment for making even the slightest sound was severe beating. A guard called Mohammad would beat us with batons and threaten to keep us there until our teeth were black and our hair turned grey. Eventually, after ten years of imprisonment, they released my sister and me. I escaped from Iran, but could not walk properly as a result of being tortured. After leaving Iran, I joined the ranks of the resistance in Iraq.’

7

London

Our campaign to remove the PMOI from the UK and EU terror lists now moved into top gear. Intensive lobbying was taking place in the European Parliament and in parliaments throughout the EU. Eminent lawyers and legal experts were preparing evidence to supply to the courts.

The PMOI/MEK was first registered on the US list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997, as the result of a direct request by the Iranian Mullahs to President Bill Clinton. On 9 October 1997, the
Los Angeles Times
quoted a senior official as saying that the PMOI was put on the US terrorist list ‘as a goodwill gesture to Mohammad Khatami, the new Iranian president.’ On 26 September 2002, a senior US official, Martin Indyk, special assistant to President Clinton and the senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the United States National Security Council in 1997, told
Newsweek
that ‘The Mojahedin’s designation was part of Clinton’s policy of rapprochement with Tehran.’

(In October 1999 this listing was amended to include what the US State Department described as the MEK’s aliases, namely the PMOI and the NCRI.) Then on 15 August 2003, several months after the invasion of Iraq, the US closed down the offices of the PMOI/MEK and NCRI in Washington. This was a follow-up to America’s promise to the Ayatollahs on the eve of the Iraq invasion. Jack Straw, who was the British Home Secretary, added the PMOI to the UK terror list in March 2001. The EU listed the PMOI as a terrorist organisation in May 2002, at the specific request of the UK Government, and its assets were frozen.

In February 2006, the European Court of First Instance took up this case and I, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Vice President of the European Parliament, and several prominent dignitaries such as France’s former First Lady, Danielle Mitterrand, attended the court in Luxembourg.
The lawyers representing the EU did not have much to say, and simply emphasized the authority and competence of the EU. On 12 December 2006 the Court ruled that the EU had not followed the correct legal procedure and had failed to inform the PMOI about the freezing of its assets in Europe. They ordered the money to be unblocked.

In an extraordinary move, the European Council of Ministers decided to ignore this ruling. The Council of Ministers reviewed the list of groups and individuals in the terrorist list every six months. In this way the Council played a dirty game by claiming that the European Court had annulled the decision of the EU during the first half of 2006, but the PMOI was placed on a new list during the second half of 2006! In this seemingly endless cycle the Council continued to preserve the PMOI’s terrorist listing.

Meanwhile, in the UK, a complaint by 35 senior MPs and Peers, representing all three major British political parties, had been lodged against the Home Secretary for his refusal to lift the terror ban on the PMOI. The British government made an enormous effort to prevent the Court from making a ruling in favour of the PMOI. In an unusual move, in August 2007 the government sent a letter to point out the dangers of delisting and the Iranian regime’s potential retaliation against British interests, urging the Court that before it informed the PMOI of any delisting, it should inform the government two weeks prior to making such a decision. This was clearly a new ploy to prevent the removal of the PMOI from the UK list. The Court however did not accept this request.

On Friday 30 November 2007, after five days of public hearings, several days of judicial discussions behind closed doors and four months of intensive deliberations, the judges of the UK’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) released a 144-page and 362-point verdict declaring the inclusion of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) on the list of proscribed organisations to be void and unlawful. The Labour Home Secretary – Jacqui Smith – appealed against this judgement, but the Court of Appeal rejected her case and ordered that the blacklisting of the PMOI should be revoked following a debate in both Houses of Parliament. The PMOI was finally removed from the UK terrorist list in June 2008.

During the course of reviewing the case by the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) and the Court of Appeal, lawyers acting on behalf of the 35 MPs and Peers who had lodged the original appeal with the POAC demanded sight of all the so-called ‘classified’ evidence on which the UK government had based its claims of terrorism against the PMOI. Hundreds of pages of carefully censored files were duly released to the courts. These included details of the mysterious phone-call from Mrs Felicity Brown, the lady pretending to work for the Foreign Office who turned out to work for British Intelligence. There were even several pages of transcripts of our conversations, with the MI5 officer admitting candidly that I had seemed ‘well informed’ about the PMOI.

There was also a detailed, almost verbatim, account of a meeting that I had held in Brussels following a request from a senior FCO civil servant. I thought the FCO official was coming to the European Parliament to speak to me about international fisheries agreements, as I was president of the Fisheries Committee at that time. However, it turned out to be another attempt to browbeat me into severing my ties with the PMOI. I really blew my top at this meeting and gave the civil servant a piece of my mind, reminding him that he was a paid official, while I was elected by the UK citizens. I warned him to tell his political masters that I was not going to be intimidated or bullied in this way and that their policy towards Iran and their proscribing of the PMOI was simply wrong. I demanded evidence to substantiate claims that the PMOI were indeed engaged in acts of terrorism and I was bluntly told that such evidence was far too sensitive to divulge to a mere member of the European Parliament and was ‘classified’. It was a very ill-tempered exchange, all of which duly appeared in the ‘classified’ documents released to the POAC.