Authors: Struan Stevenson
Self-Sacrifice (2 page)
The Ambassador looked stunned. He started to speak and I interrupted him, calling to Ingrid to show him out. I was shaking with rage.
Atefeh was a child. Her crime was to have been the victim of a sexual attack by an older man. To be tortured and hanged in such circumstances was barbarous. Students of Hitler’s SS would be familiar with such savagery, but for the vastly cultured and civilised people of Iran, this case, the tenth child to be hanged in the Islamic Republic since 1990, marked another grim milestone on their country’s regression to the Stone Age.
I asked Ingrid if she could put me through to the Iranian opposition activist, Firouz Mahvi, who had been to see me on quite a few occasions over the past two years, but with whom I had only made a slightly reluctant acquaintance. Ingrid put through the call. ‘Firouz, it’s Struan Stevenson.’ I explained what had happened and said that I was now so angry that I wanted to do anything I could to help his opposition movement. Firouz asked if he could come straight round to see me. It was to be the start of a long, exciting and often highly emotional journey.
Firouz was overjoyed at my offer of assistance. He briefly reminded me how he represented the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), also known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a dissident group which had fought to overthrow the Shah, but then had been seen by the Ayatollahs as a threat to their supremacy. In the 1980s, tens of thousands of PMOI supporters had been arrested, tortured and executed. Many had fled to the West and were now engaged in building international opposition to the turbaned tyrants in Tehran. Firouz asked if he could arrange for me to meet the PMOI’s Foreign Affairs Spokesman, Mohammad Mohaddessin, who had written an authoritative book on Islamic fundamentalism. I readily agreed and a date was fixed.
Several days later, Mohammad came to my Brussels office. It was hard to believe that this small, well-groomed man was at the top of Iran’s ‘Most Wanted’ list and had been sentenced to death in absentia. Mohammad explained how Iran had become a rogue state playing a malign role in the Middle East. He showed me a report on the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist attack, published by the US in July 2004,
which detailed how the hardline Mullahs’ regime in Iran had direct links with Osama Bin Laden and had sponsored numerous terrorist attacks on Western targets. Intelligence reports stated that the regime was moving towards the development of a nuclear bomb, threatening to plunge the Middle East into apocalyptic conflict.
Mohammad explained how it had been the PMOI which had revealed the Mullahs’ top-secret nuclear programme to the West, whose intelligence services had failed to discover it. He explained that PMOI supporters inside Iran were risking their lives to provide this type of intelligence to the West and yet, bizarrely, he described how the PMOI was listed as a terrorist organisation in the EU and US, resulting in the freezing of their assets and making it difficult for them to operate. Mohammad said that this blacklisting was part of the West’s mistaken appeasement policy towards the Mullahs in Tehran and had no justification in fact.
Mohammad told me that attempts at reform within Iran had been met with repression. In February of that year (2004), he said, the moderates lost control of Parliament when thousands of their supporters were banned from standing for election. Attempts by UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to suck up to Tehran in the pursuit of lucrative oil contracts had also hit the buffers, underlining the failure of the Blair government’s policy of appeasement. Earlier in the summer of 2004, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had seized three British navy patrol boats, on false charges of straying into Iranian waters. The eight British crewmen who had been kidnapped by the Iranian security forces were blindfolded and forced into a ditch, where they thought they would be executed. The Iranians only released the eight men following a grovelling apology from Straw.
The only real hope of regime-change, to avoid another disastrous US intervention, explained Mohammad, lay in the hands of the Iranian resistance. The Mojahedin and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), under the leadership of its President-elect Mrs Maryam Rajavi, had led the war against the fundamentalist fascists for the past 25 years, he said. The overthrow of a regime that had executed over 120,000 political prisoners, hanged children in public, endorsed the stoning to death of women and had links with Al Qaeda, was now a matter of urgency.
Mohammad said the EU and the US must be urged to remove the terror tag from the PMOI and instead offer their support to this movement, in the fight to rid the world of one of its most evil regimes. He finished our discussion by inviting me to travel to Auverssur-Oise on the outskirts of Paris, to the PMOI headquarters, where I would meet with their leader, Mrs Maryam Rajavi. With a little hesitation, thinking that perhaps I was getting into this issue more deeply than I had at first intended, I agreed.
So it was that some weeks later I found myself on the TGV from Brussels to Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris, where Firouz and his young and energetic colleague Hanif met me. I was a little nervous. I had dug around into the background of the PMOI and discovered that President Chirac had ordered a raid on their Auvers-sur-Oise headquarters in June 2003, arresting Mrs Rajavi and hundreds of her colleagues and seizing vehicles, computers and cash. Protests from respected US Senators and Congressmen accusing Chirac of doing Iran’s dirty work for them, together with mass protests by PMOI supporters around the world, quickly led to their release. But, I wondered, what would happen if another raid took place today, while I was there?
As a Conservative Euro MP, I was beginning to wonder why I had agreed to visit the headquarters of a group that I had seen variously described as Marxist and an evil sect, and that I knew was blacklisted as a terrorist organisation. I had read how the PMOI had been accused of waging a terror campaign in Iran in the 1970s, during which they had allegedly assassinated six Americans and bombed many Western targets. Was this something that I should be getting involved in? My nervousness increased as we began negotiating a series of narrow backstreets in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise. My PMOI companions were making repeated calls on their mobile phones, yattering away in Farsi. Soon we entered a long cul-de-sac, with a high security wall running down one side and a tall hedge on the other.
Our car drew up in front of a huge iron gate and immediately Mohammad Mohaddessin and several other men emerged to hold open my door and offer warm handshakes in welcome. I was ushered through the gate and was met with a roar of applause and cries of welcome from a double line of men and women who had gathered
to greet me in the courtyard of the PMOI headquarters. I noticed the women were all veiled, and each proffered a freshly plucked rose as I walked slowly down the line, shaking hands with the men and accepting the flowers from the women. Cradling a, by now, large bunch of roses, I was led on to the steps of the main building in the compound, where Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and the effective leader of the PMOI, stood waiting to greet me.
Mrs Rajavi is an elegant woman, with a presence that can captivate a crowd. She also was veiled; she welcomed me in French, her English being poor. She soon switched to Farsi, and with the help of an interpreter, she welcomed me to the PMOI headquarters and invited me inside, where a large meeting room had been specially prepared for our discussion, with two formal-looking wooden thrones, separated by a small table on which had been placed cups of tea and bowls of nuts.
Mrs Rajavi is a lady who displays great humility and who clearly feels the pain and suffering that has been inflicted by the Iranian regime on her people for more than three decades. As such, she feels an enormous sense of responsibility towards her people, but also she longs for peace and stability in the Middle East and the wider world. Despite the difficulties she has encountered, she is courageous, energetic, tenacious and inspiring. She is a Muslim woman who stands for a free, democratic and secular Iran. She represents the rights of the oppressed people in Iran, from women and students to ethnic and religious minorities. Moreover, her modern and progressive interpretation of Islam is an important and necessary example to others. It is for these reasons that she enjoys the support of thousands of democrats around the world, and it was for these same reasons that I quickly recognised Maryam Rajavi as a future President of a free Iran.
Mrs Rajavi told me about the French security police raid on her compound in the previous year, explaining that computers, mobile phones, vehicles and millions of dollars had been seized and had still not been returned.
1
She herself had been held in a prison cell in Paris
for several days. She said that it was vital now to put all of our efforts into removing the terror tag from the PMOI. She said that they had teams of eminent lawyers working on this in the UK, the EU and US and she hoped that I might be able to help. She then went on to describe how 3,400 PMOI fighters were living in a place called Camp Ashraf, north-east of Baghdad. As enemies of the Mullahs, they had gone to Iraq in the early 80s and had been provided with a large area of land in Diyala Province, which, through hard work and sheer endeavour, they had transformed into a small city, with living accommodation, workshops, parks, hospitals, a mosque and teaching facilities.
Mrs Rajavi said that these 3,400 people were the frontline fighters of the PMOI, but they had been bombed and harassed by the US military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. She reminded me that the previous year I had written an urgent letter to President George W. Bush, pleading with him not to bomb Camp Ashraf, as these people posed no threat to the US. She thanked me for this, but said it was regrettable that the US military had nevertheless bombed the camp, killing several of the PMOI residents.
An article in the
Wall Street Journal
on 17 April 2003 revealed what had been behind the attack:
The dismantling of the Iranian opposition force in Iraq, known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MEK, fulfils a private U.S. assurance conveyed to Iranian officials before the start of hostilities that the group would be targeted by British and American forces if Iran stayed out of the fight, according to U.S. officials . . .
But National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell contended that Tehran could be persuaded to remain neutral toward the U.S. invasion next door, especially if it knew the MEK would be attacked and prevented from harassing Iran in the future, the official said.
That message was conveyed by British officials before hostilities began. Foreign Minister Jack Straw informed his Iranian counterpart Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi in a meeting in London in February.
Britain’s Iranian Ambassador Richard Dalton repeated the message in March in a meeting with Hassan Rouhani, the cleric who heads the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s chief foreign policy-making body.
2
The
Washington Post
wrote on 18 April 2003:
Two senior U.S. officials met secretly in January with Iranian officials to discuss potential cooperation. The U.S. officials asked that Iran seal its border to prevent the escape of Iraqi officials, among other requests, and suggested that the United States would target the Iraq-based camps of the Mujahedine-Khalq Organization, or People’s Mujahedin, a U.S. official said.
We told them they would find it advantageous if the United States struck the Mujahedin camps, the official said. A more concrete commitment to attack the camps was later relayed to Tehran through British officials. The Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which has been a source of information on Iran’s nuclear programs, has protested angrily about the attacks, saying they were unprovoked.
3
Now, Mrs Rajavi explained, the residents had voluntarily given up their weapons in exchange for a guarantee of protection by the US army, who were now stationed around the camp perimeter. She suggested that I would be most welcome to visit Camp Ashraf at any time.
As I made ready to leave, Mrs Rajavi presented me with an elegant, heavy, leather-bound volume that she explained was the PMOI
Book of Martyrs
. I leafed through the pages and saw that each page contained the photos and descriptions of PMOI supporters who had been executed by the Mullahs. There were thousands of pages. It was a shocking reminder of how these people were suffering for the cause of freedom and democracy in Iran. This was sacrifice on a scale I had never before encountered.
As I was driven back down the narrow lanes of Auvers-sur-Oise, I no longer had those worries of earlier. I felt comfortable that I had made the right choice. After meeting Mrs Rajavi, I realised that I was dealing with sincere people who were fighting for a good cause and were personally prepared to pay any price. A decade later, looking back, after many meetings and encounters with Maryam Rajavi and her colleagues, my confidence then is confirmed.
1.
The case was finally resolved in September 2014, ten years after the raid, when French judges ruled that there was no case to answer and that the PMOI/NCRI were innocent of all charges.
2.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB105053141922836600
3.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/doc/409532967.xhtml
2
Interviews with Political Prisoners Refugee Camp, Tirana, Albania, May 2014
Hengameh Haj Hassan
‘My name is Hengameh Haj Hassan. When I was in a prison cell alone and waiting to be sentenced to death, I always thought, “Will anyone ever hear about me? Will I die in secret and be forgotten?”
Almost all of my classmates were executed by Khomeini. In 1981, I was working in the Sina Hospital in Tehran as a nurse. We were supporters of the PMOI because of the repression of women and we were forced to wear the mandatory veil etc. Many women who came to our hospital had had bits of their face sliced off by Khomeini’s torturers. I was horrified and said so and soon was identified as a possible PMOI supporter by spies of the regime (the Islamic Association) and was placed under constant surveillance.