At a hearing on Capitol Hill this month, members of the US Congress were shown footage of a pre-dawn raid on Camp Ashraf, the compound north of Baghdad that is home to 3,400 Iranian exiles. It showed Iraqi soldiers apparently opening fire on unarmed civilians, killing 36 of them, in April.
The exile group, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, says the Iraqi government uses its designation as a terrorist group as justification for such assaults.
“We should quit playing games and also remove the MEK from the terrorist list before it results in another massacre,” said Dana Rohrabacher, chairman of the hearing. The UK removed the MEK from its list in 2008 and the European Union in 2009.
The United Nations and human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, say there is a humanitarian crisis taking place at Camp Ashraf, where MEK members have lived for 25 years, and groups sympathetic to the MEK have seized on this to advance their efforts to have the group taken off the US list of foreign terrorist organisations.
“The terrorist list is a life-and-death issue for the people there,” says Javad Mirabdal, a member of the Iranian American Community of Northern California, one of the groups involved in the lobbying effort.
The MEK, formed in the 1960s by college students with a Marxist-Islamist philosophy, helped oust the Shah and install the theocratic regime in Iran in 1979, participating in the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and calling for American hostages to be executed.
But it came under attack because of its secularist principles and its leaders fled to Paris, from where they are said to have plotted to violently overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK is accused of killing seven Americans, as well as numerous Iranians, in attacks over the following decade.
But the MEK says the terrorist designation is no longer appropriate and a District of Columbia court last year ruled that the State Department must review it.
“The MEK has halted all military activity since 2001, renounced violence and condemned terrorism in all its forms in 2004,” said Ahmad Moein, executive director of the California group. It also handed over its weapons to the US army during the invasion of Iraq, he said.
The MEK now presents itself as the secular, democratic alternative to the mullahs ruling Iran, saying it wants a non-nuclear republic with a market economy.
This idea resonates particularly among pro-Israel politicians desperate to see an end to the Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, and many advocates have seized on the group’s head, Maryam Rajavi, as Iran’s true leader.
Speaking at an MEK-linked conference held at a five-star hotel in Washington this month, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Clinton administration, called the MEK “the largest, best-organised resistance to Iran’s current regime”.
“Wake up, State Department, take the MEK off the FTO list today,” he said.
Gen Shelton confirmed he was paid to speak at the conference, as were other officials, including including Louis Freeh, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and General James Conway, the former Marine Corps commandant.
Analysts say the MEK has been able to advance its cause through a surprisingly well-funded lobbying campaign. Despite the terrorist designation, government agencies do not appear to be paying much attention to the groups’ finances, which its supporters say come entirely from private donations.
“Because of this campaign, they have been able to delude many into thinking that it is a rather powerful opposition organisation, which it is not,” said Wayne White, a former Middle East intelligence official in the State Department.
The MEK is widely reviled in Iran because it sided with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980s war between the neighbours. In 1991, it also helped Saddam suppress Shia uprisings in southern Iraq and the Kurdish uprisings in the north.
It is also suspected of being a cult that brainwashes its members. Members are devoted to Mrs Rajavi, whose photo is ubiquitous, and former members have described to human rights workers an environment of forced marriages and divorce, having to hand over their salaries to the organisation, and regular indoctrination sessions.
A Rand Corporation study commissioned by the Pentagon in 2009 found that as many as 70 per cent of those living at Camp Ashraf were held against their will.
MEK members dismiss such suggestions as propaganda by the current Iranian regime. But the Green Movement, the loose opposition that emerged during 2009’s disputed presidential election, fears that de-listing the group would harm the pro-democracy forces that have emerged in Iran over the past two years.
