Zebari: Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult) expulsion from Iraq will be strictly monitored by a special committee(Feb 16, 2009)
Zebari: Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult) expulsion from Iraq will be strictly monitored by a special committee
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... The foreign minister also dismissed reports that Iraq is showing leniency in expelling Mojahedin Khalgh Organization (MKO), saying the Iraqi government has taken its decision on the group and the expulsion will be strictly monitored by a “special committee”...
BAGHDAD, Feb. 16 (MNA) – Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has stated that Baghdad intends to host talks between Iran and United States over the security situation in Iraq and called for maintaining “Iraq-Iraq-U.S. triangle”.
In an exclusive interview with the Mehr News Agency, Zebari said the Iraqi government, given the current situation in the country, views hosting such talks as a priority.
He pointed out that Iran is “one of Iraq’s most important neighbors” that is seeking “special relations with Baghdad with goodwill” and that Baghdad’s relations with Tehran are of “great significance”.
He added the U.S. influence in Iraq is also “undeniable”.
Iran’s foreign minister has ruled out holding new security talks with the United States over Iraq, saying improved security situation has made such talks unnecessary.
However, Zebari said there are issues that Iran and the United States should “settle between themselves”, and in the run-up to “new Iraq” Baghdad favors cooperation between the three parties by maintaining “Iran-Iraq-U.S. triangle.”
The foreign minister also dismissed reports that Iraq is showing leniency in expelling Mojahedin Khalgh Organization (MKO), saying the Iraqi government has taken its decision on the group and the expulsion will be strictly monitored by a “special committee”.
The MKO has claimed responsibility for carrying out numerous terror attacks against Iranian nationals and officials, and has also been accused of assisting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.
The MKO established a camp for about 3,500 members in Iraq, which its forces used to launch cross-border attacks into Iran. It fought alongside Saddam Hussein’s forces during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Many senior Iraqi officials have assured Iran that the MKO members will soon have to leave Iraq.
Zebari also stated that Baghdad understands Tehran’s concerns about the Iranian diplomats detained by U.S forces and expressed hope that Iraq’s negotiations with the U.S. will lead to the release of the diplomats.
The U.S. military detained five Iranian diplomats in the city of Arbil, 310 km (190 miles) north of Baghdad, in January 2007. In November that year, U.S. officials said they would release two of the five diplomats.
Envoy says Mojahedin Khalq (MKO, MEK, Rajavi cult) leaders must be extradited to Iran
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BAGHDAD – Those Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) leaders who masterminded terror operations inside Iran must be extradited to the country to stand trial, Iranian Ambassador to Baghdad Hassan Kazemi Qomi has said.
Tehran Times Political Desk, February 16, 2009 http://www.tehrantimes.com/Index_view.asp?code=189343 Iran has presented Iraqi officials a list of the MKO leaders who must be handed over to the country, he told the Mehr News Agency.
MKO members immigrated to Iraq in the 1980s and fought alongside Iraqi forces against Iran in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
The ambassador also said, “The Iraqi government has been serious about expelling the terrorist organization members.”
Kazemi Qomi noted that Baghdad has officially informed the MKO members that they “can not choose” between staying and leaving the country, warning that they will be expelled from Iraq.
There are reports that 1,031 MKO members have so far decided to leave Iraq either by acquiring citizenship or by obtaining passport and so they will leave the country or those countries that have granted them citizenship will have to take them out of the Iraqi soil, he pointed out.
The MKO has claimed responsibility for carrying out numerous terror attacks against Iranian nationals and officials, and has also been accused of assisting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the slaughter of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the 1990s.
(Maryam Rajavi directly ordered the massacre of Kurdish people)
(British Lord!! Corbett promoting terrorism under the Logo of MKO for the past 25 years)
This is a documentary about the terrorist organization, MKO, told through the eyes of former MKO agents who have turned away from their former terror activities. An insight into this organization which has caused terror and is recognized as a terror organization worldwide
MKO Leader Maryam Rajavi's calls for her groupto be removed from blacklists have fallen on deaf ears in Canada and in the United States. The EU, however, has long sought to legitimize the anti-Iran activities of the MKO.
(Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, cult leaders)
The European Union has reportedly decided to remove the anti-Iran Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) from its terror blacklist.
"The deal has been done. [MKO] will be delisted," an EU diplomat said on conditions of anonymity on Thursday.
He, however, asserted that the consensus must win final approval from EU foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels on Monday in order to become fully operational.
The Mujahedin Khalq Organization, which identifies itself as a Marxist-Islamist guerilla army, was founded in Iran in the 1960s but was exiled some twenty years later for carrying out numerous acts of terrorism inside the country.
(Maryam Rajavi directly ordered the massacre of Kurdish people)
The terrorist group is especially notorious for the help it extended to former dictator Saddam Hussein during the war Iraq imposed on Iran (1980-1988).
The group masterminded a slew of assassinations and bombings inside Iran, one of which was the 1981 bombing of the offices of the Islamic Republic Party, in which more than 72 Iranian officials were killed, including then Judiciary chief Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti.
A May 2005 Human Rights Watch report condemns the MKO for running prison camps in Iraq and committing human rights violations. According to report, the outlawed group puts defectors under torture and jail terms.
(MKO members in European Countries 2003)
In recent months, high-ranking MKO members have been lobbying governments around the world to acknowledge the dissidents as those of a legitimate opposition group.
The group has a 40-year history of involvement in terrorist activities. It assassinated several Americans in Iran in the 1970s and criticized the founder of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for releasing the American diplomats in 1981, arguing instead that the hostages of the embassy takeover should have been executed.
The United States and Canada have refused to drop the MKO from their lists of terrorist organizations.
Massoud Rajavi - the pattern of violence continues
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Anne Singleton, January 20, 2009
We are only half way through January and the EU terrorism list (from which the Mojahedin Khalq Organisation has been removed) has still not been announced but the MKO (aka the Rajavi cult, MEK, NCRI, NLA) has been unable to refrain from showing its true nature.
Iraq’s National Security Advisor has reported the arrest of an MKO member who is currently in custody after surrendering himself to an Iraqi security unit. The man, who is a resident of Camp Ashraf, was about to perform a suicide mission, but could not go through with it. According to a statement from the office of the National Security Advisor, the MKO member has claimed the MKO use severe torture and brainwashing on its members. He claims that: “I was sent with a clear and precise plan to perform a suicide mission in this Iraqi base”. http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=5720
This news will come as no surprise to those who know the MKO. Looking at Massoud Rajavi’s track record over thirty years, nothing more or less than this could be expected. While he was able to send over 2,000 civilians their deaths back in 1988 in the failed Eternal Light operation, he has since then sent numerous smaller groups to perform suicidal terrorist attacks in Iran with the added instruction that if captured the person should use their cyanide pill to kill themselves. More recently, MKO were instructed to set fire to themselves to protest the arrest of Maryam Rajavi on terrorism charges in Paris. Two died and several others sustained serious injury with their permanent disfigurement and disability a direct result of Rajavi’s order.
Massoud Rajavi who owns the MKO also owns the blood of the members and will spill it whenever he needs to. In this case to rescue himself from the mess he has made in Iraq. The MKO members are his capital which buys him power. They are expandable assets which have been used and reused shamelessly by western agencies who have found this a useful and cheap resource in their ‘regime change’ armoury. It is clear that the neoconservatives and Zionists are using the MKO against the Iraqis, and are helping them by facilitating the impunity enjoyed by MKO leaders at the cult’s headquarters in Europe.
This latest fiasco in the Rajavi saga is surely the result of negligence and apathy of the European Union toward the MKO which apparently couldn’t summon the energy or interest to properly investigate the MKO and deal with it accordingly. A feat which has been assiduously performed by successive US Governments since 1994 and which has resulted in the MKO retaining its terrorism designation to date with the added information that the group is a cult. However, the Bush Administration has also proved itself to be overly greedy in wanting to have their cake and eat it. The US army has ‘protected’ this ‘terrorist’ outfit for five and a half years in Iraq in spite of repeated demands by the Iraqis for removal of this known FTO, which collaborated with the former regime, from Iraqi territory.
It is surely time for the international community as represented by the UNHCR and UNCHR to to help the Iraqis ensure that all the individuals held captive in Camp Ashraf are accorded their basic human rights. Rajavi's victims must be given the opportunity to renounce violence and to leave Camp Ashraf for third countries or to accept voluntary repatriation to Iran. Any delay in dismantling this notorious cult is to condemn the inhabitants to enforced membership of an illegal paramilitary terrorist group.
... The security forces of Iraq have arrested a member of Mojahedin Khalq Organisation (aka: MKO, MEK, PMOI, NCRI, Rajavi cult) after he failed to carry out his suicide mission inside an Iraqi security base...
The office of Mr. Movafagh Al Rabiee, Iraq’s National Security Advisor, has issued a statement.
The security forces of Iraq have arrested a member of Mojahedin Khalq Organisation (aka: MKO, MEK, PMOI, NCRI, Rajavi cult) after he failed to carry out his suicide mission inside an Iraqi security base.
According to the source this resident of Ashraf camp (MKO base) gave himself up and is now being kept in secure and safe conditions.
According to the statement this member of Mojahedin Khalq has now complained about the severe exercise of torture and brainwashing techniques employed by the heads of the organisation.
According to his written statements, he claims that: “I was sent with a clear and precise plan to perform a suicide mission in this Iraqi base”.
According to the statement of the office of Iraq’s National Security Advisor, “the aim of this suicide attack has been to put pressure on the security forces of Iraq, to entangle them in this because it is this new force that has taken over the security of Ashraf camp from January 01, 2009”
The statement says it is believed that this was to be used in the media in the Arab world as well as the western media by MKO and its supporters. It also has the aim of making the disaffected members inside the camp afraid of giving themselves up to the Iraqi forces.
The statement adds that every effort is being made to either repatriate him voluntarily or find another country to transfer him. The Iraqi government wishes to announce that while the government of Iraq is committed to all its international obligations, including any promises made to the United State administration, that: “the security forces of Iraq are aware and conscious of the fruitless activities of Mojahedin Khalq Organisation in creating disturbances in Iraqi society and have been briefed to be able to carry out their duties”.
The State Department has again decided to keep the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MKO) with all its aliases on the US terrorism list. There are a growing number of people who are calling for the US to have done with the group once and for all. Commentators on several blogs and articles suggest the leaders be ‘tried in internationally approved courts and let the membership go home.’ But this ignores the heavy price that has been paid for the group both politically (Iran has constantly accused the US and Europe of double standards on terrorism for their palpable support for the MKO) and financially (one of the key indicators of the actual irrelevance of adding the MKO to western terrorism lists is the tens of millions of dollars, euros and pounds the group has been able to spend on legal challenges and propaganda to keep itself alive – money which must come from somewhere).
With MKO personnel permanently camped-out in most of Europe’s parliaments for the past two years it should come as no surprise that the group will be removed from Europe’s terrorism list when it is announced on January 15. In July 2008, the EU announced that there were “no grounds” to amend the list of terrorist organisations, which includes 48 groups, and EU officials insisted that the decision to keep the MEK on the list of the terrorist groups is not related to the Western efforts to persuade Iran to halt its nuclear enrichment program.
What is behind this peculiar change which will redefine the group as non-terrorist in Europe?
As with removal from the UK terrorism list in June 2008, no material difference will accrue to the MKO. In his book on the Mojahedin Dr. Ronen A. Cohen says the MKO “does not have the characteristics of a classic terror organization as it does not initiate terror against innocents” – although the indiscriminate nature of many of its attacks mean 12,000 civilians have been killed in MKO operations inside Iran over two decades.
The most pertinent explanation for why removal from the lists is irrelevant is because the MKO even at the height of its military prowess in 1988 and with the full backing of Saddam Hussein and the west was unable to fulfil its aim of replacing the Islamic Republic with its own rule. Massoud Raajvi’s long term premise that such change would come about as a result of a popular uprising has been pragmatically replaced in the past five years with the conviction that regime change would be imposed on Iran from external powers – the USA, Israel - and that the MKO could reap the benefit of being there as a viable alternative when that happened.
Of these two, perhaps the latter version is currently more possible and perhaps probable even with a new US Administration in place.
So, what use do the MKO’s backers envisage for the group?
The protection of a uniformed anti-Iran mercenary group in Camp Ashraf in Diyali province for five years has been intentional. The price paid has been too great to allow jettisoning the group now, both politically and financially. However, it is important to note that even if it is removed from the UK, EU and perhaps US terrorism lists, the MKO does not enjoy governmental recognition or legitimacy anywhere in the world. Nor does any country need to give the group legitimacy in order to make use of it.
Essentially the use of the MKO is, as Rajavi himself has used them, as perpetrators and victims of violence. The MKO’s talent is that they are trained to kill and be killed according to Rajavi’s order. That they will do this to fulfil a western agenda without needing western approval is the group’s unique selling point and is enough to justify not continuing to label them as terrorists.
There is no doubt that for many observers the removal of the MKO from the European list will clarify the European position toward terrorism. Public opinion in the Middle East has never regarded western terrorism lists as about terrorism per se but as lists of enemies of western interests.
Inclusion of the violently anti-Iranian MKO along with groups which are genuinely anti-western has been a major discrepancy of all the western terrorism lists, a glaring error of political judgement. The MKO may have begun life as an anti-imperialist group with armed struggle its core value, and continued this path under the patronage of Saddam Hussein. But, since its forced disarmament at the hands of the US army, the group has been able to beguile western powers, including Israel, into believing it shares common cause against Iran and is a friend and ally of at least some in the west.
After spending hundreds of millions of dollars on propaganda and legal fees to keep the MKO alive, these backers are now obliged to use this blunted tool in any way they can, perhaps to justify the expenditure, perhaps because they really believe the MKO can be an effective tool against Iran.
Anne Singleton, an expert on the MKO and author of ‘Saddam’s Private Army’ explains, “With a new Administration in the White House a pre-emptive strike on Iran looks unlikely. Instead the MKO’s backers have put together a coalition of small irritant groups, the known minority and separatist groups, along with the MKO. These groups will be garrisoned around the border with Iran and their task is to launch terrorist attacks into Iran over the next few years to keep the fire hot.
“The role of the MKO is to train and manage these groups using the expertise they acquired from Saddam’s Republican Guard. The price the MKO has had to pay is to accept their removal from their main base Camp Ashraf and relocate to other bases not their own. The inducement will be to remove the group from the terrorism list in Europe.”
Once the MKO has been declared in Europe as ‘no longer terrorists’, the group’s overt backers, Lord Corbett, Struan Stevenson MEP, Paulo Casaca MEP, and others who see the world, and in particular Iran, through neoconservative/Zionist tinted glasses will move to promote this coalition in their various circles.
Although it is tempting to cast this move into the sphere of betting both ways on the new Obama Administration’s Iran policy, the key trigger for this move has been the Iraqi government’s insistence on the removal of the MKO from Iraq and the handover of Camp Ashraf to Iraqi sovereignty. This has not been an unreasonable request of US forces over a five year period. However, it is only since the agreed handover of control of Camp Ashraf on January 1 that this became an inevitable outcome. For over a year, MKO backers in western parliaments have lobbied for the MKO to remain in Camp Ashraf on the grounds that the group would be massacred by vengeful Iraqis or forced back to Iran to face certain torture and execution. The falsity of this position has become exposed as the Iraqi government has continued to protect the group and has given repeated assurances that no one will be forced home against their will. Beyond this, the Iranian government’s own position on prosecuting leading members has made it impossible to send anyone back that Iran does not want.
The reason for the insistence on maintaining the MKO in Camp Ashraf – and now in new border based garrisons alongside other armed groups – has been because the only use for the group is to act as an irritant against Iran. If a full scale military attack could not be manufactured which would involve them, then small scale terrorist attacks are the next best alternative.
What all this overlooks, of course, is the human aspect of this group. For years former members of the MKO have warned of severe human rights violations perpetrated against the members. Human Rights Watch conducted its own investigation into the group’s recent history in 2005 and published a damning report titled No Exit. But more recently, those who escaped the camp since its capture by American forces in 2003 and who have managed to reach Europe, are alleging continued cruelties including unnecessary hysterectomies imposed on women to rob them of any hope of having children.
For five years the American army has effectively prevented any independent investigation into these allegations. The primary task of the Iraqi military now in charge of the camp must be to allow humanitarian agencies to access the camp’s residents and individually assess their mental, physical and emotional status. Anything less than this is to condemn 3,250 people to being part of an illegal paramilitary group without their active consent.
This still leaves the fundamental question of what the west will get from its investment in the MKO. It is looking likely that the US will cherry-pick whoever it wants from the MKO to perform in its new coalition strategy. The old, sick, disabled and disturbed will be left for the Iraqi government to deal with.
In view of western patronage of this group, albeit largely covert in nature since it does not acknowledge that it is the group’s willingness to die that is its main use, then it is western countries which ultimately have a responsibility, if not an outright duty, to rescue the group from Iraq. If the group’s membership is indeed moved to other bases in Iraq to continue involvement in acts of violence, then any blood shed will be on western hands not those who are defending their country’s security.
Iraqi MP: London should now take its soldiers out of our country - UK is fully responsible for any future terrorist act of Mojahedin Khalq http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=4698
Report on the situation of remaining members of Mojahedin Khalq Organisation in Camp Ashraf after Consultation with Iraqi Government officials http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=4095
Asghar Farzin, Reza Sadeghi, and Ali Biglary, former members of the MKO, plead for justice against the organisation to the Iraqi judicial authorities and urge them to deal with the situation in Ashraf camp http://iran-interlink.org/?mod=view&id=4272
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