06.07.2023

MEK’s strange journey

Nowadays they are the darlings of the neocon right, but most consider them a loony cult. Yassamine Mather traces the evolution of the ‘holy war’ fighters

Last Saturday, two political has-beens attended the annual gathering of Iran’s Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) in Paris: Britain’s former prime minister Liz Truss and former US vice-president Mike Pence. Both are hoping for a future return to frontline politics. The MEK rally had initially been banned by the police, but that was overturned by the Paris administrative court. Speaking at the rally, Britain’s 45-day premier, referring to Russia, China and Iran, said:

These regimes have been emboldened, as the free world has not done enough. I will never give up hope for a free and democratic Iran. Democracy is under threat around the world. Now is the time to turn our backs on accommodation and appeasement.

In addition to Pence, Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo appeared by video link, warning against any nuclear deal with Iran.

Of course, all three no longer hold office. However, even in the case of such has-beens, it is bizarre that they stoop so low as to attend the annual rally of a loony cult that can only be compared to some of the most weird mad religious groups of our time (more on the bizarre history of the MEK later).

Nevertheless, one would have thought that even a second-rate American or British politician would have noticed the irony of supporting an organisation led by Maryam Rajavi - a woman who wears a full hijab, while claiming to support protests in Iran that started after the death of a young woman who had refused to adhere to the full Islamic dress code for women (Mahsa Amini died while still in custody). True, the majority of young protestors in Iran might have different opinions about the political and economic issues facing the country, but they all seem united in defending the right of women to show their hair if they choose.

In the last couple of weeks the Mojahedin have said they are victims of western “appeasement” towards Iran. On June 20, a block of flats in Tirana, Albania, which is used as a compound to house several hundred MEK members, was raided by police. One person died and dozens were injured - leading to claims and counterclaims, as well as conspiracy theories, about why it happened. According to the Albanian authorities, the police were concerned about reports that the premises were being used in cyberattacks against Albania and other countries, not to mention criminal “acts of larger dimensions”.

On Friday June 30, speaking to Der Spiegel, Albania’s prime minister said that the Mujahideen cannot use the country to fight the Iranian regime. Albania had given refuge to MEK members who were forced to leave Iraq (where they had camps since the 1980s, when Iraq was under US ‘protection’ following the 2003 occupation by US/UK forces). The exodus to Albania was overseen by the Obama administration.

Then, to add insult to injury, on July 3 Sepehr Khalji, who heads the Information Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran, wrote in a tweet that “hard drives and cases have arrived … we are working on data recovery” - all this without naming the Mojahedin. But it seemed clear he was referring to recent events in Albania and the confiscation of computers in MEK residences.

Split

So who are the Mojahedin-e Khalq?

The MEK was founded in September 1965 by Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saeid Mohsen Ali-Asghar Badizadegan and Ahmad Rezaei - all left-leaning Islamic students who had some affiliation with Nehzat Azadi (Freedom Movement), which opposed the then shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the late 1960s and 70s the group waged guerrilla attacks against the regime and its US backers.

In May 1972, soon after the imprisonment and execution of its leaders and shortly before president Richard Nixon’s state visit to Iran, it was reported:

… the MEK launched a wave of bomb attacks which targeted the Iran-American Society, the US Information Office, the Hotel International, Pepsi Cola, General Motors and the Marine Oil Company. They failed to assassinate general Harold Price, head of the US Military Mission in Iran. Less than three months later, they bombed the Jordanian embassy to revenge King Hussein’s September 1970 crackdown on their PLO patrons.

In 1973, the MEK bombed the Pan-American Airlines building, Shell Oil, and Radio City Cinema in Tehran, and assassinated colonel Lewis Hawkins, the deputy chief of the US Military Mission. They did not only target foreigners. In a wave of bombings that continued into 1975, the MEK group attacked clubs, stores, police facilities, minority-owned businesses, factories it accused of having “Israeli connections” and symbols of the state and capitalism.¹

However, in 1975, the group experienced a bitter and bloody split. Sections of the leadership - probably disillusioned with Islam and eager to gain more support amongst secular students, who were often attracted to the Marxist Fedayeen organisation - declared they were no longer Islamist and called themselves Mojahedin Khalq Marxist-Leninist, later renamed Peykar (Organisation of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class). Clearly the name itself was an oxymoron, as ‘Mojahedin’ derives from the Arabic word, ‘Jahed’ (‘holy war’) and ‘Mojahedin’ means ‘holy war fighters’.

Taghi Shahram, a leading figure of the organisation who had escaped from Sari prison (along with several others, including guerrilla leader Bahram Aram), published a declaration called ‘Changing the organisation’s ideology’, which declared that they had become communist and had abandoned their religious beliefs. The declaration added: “They had reached the conclusion that Marxism, not Islam, was the true revolutionary philosophy.”

One leading member of the original Mojahedin, Majid Sharif-Vaghefi, refused to join and led the opposing Muslim faction, claiming that only 20% of the organisation’s membership had sided with the Marxist faction. All this led to a bitter infighting and Sharif-Vaghefi and his main ally were allegedly killed by the Marxist faction. The Islamic faction, headed by Maryam Rajavi - at the time detained in Qasr prison - accused the Marxists of being unscrupulous entryists. There are contradictory reports about the split, with both sides accusing each other of cooperating with Savak, the shah’s notorious secret police.

Inevitably the ‘Muslim’ faction started to move in a rightwing Islamist direction - a process that has continued relentlessly. Before the February uprising the group allied itself with ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, who was marginally to the left of the Ruhollah Khomeini (soon to become Iran’s supreme leader), and gave critical support to the Islamic regime from the day it came to power - until Iran’s first presidential elections in 1980, that is, when Massoud Rajavi (later to marry Maryam) nominated himself as a candidate and was disqualified by ayatollah Khomeini.

By 1981 Mojahedin had joined the ranks of the opposition. In June of that year, a bomb destroyed the headquarters of the ruling Islamic Republic Party, killing over 70 government officials, including the head of the Iranian judicial system, ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti. A couple of months later another powerful bomb exploded in the offices of prime minister Mohammad Javad Bahonar - killing him, along with president Mohammad-Ali Rajai. The Islamic Republic regime blamed the Mojahedin-e Khalq for these acts and, as far as I know, the organisation has never denied them (although in the last couple of decades the MEK has issued statements saying it has renounced violence as a means to advance its goals in Iran).

Rajai had replaced Abolhassan Banisadr, who was the Islamic Republic’s first president and had been impeached by the Islamic parliament, the Majles, and dismissed by Khomeini. It was in 1981 that Banisadr and Rajavi formed an alliance and jointly fled to Paris. But, once they were in exile, they fell out, with Banisadr later claiming he opposed Rajavi’s insistence on continued armed struggle.

Rajavi’s first wife, Ashraf Rabiei, who had stayed inside Iran, was killed in an armed attack by the regime’s security forces in 1982. The same year Rajavi married Firouzeh Bani-Sadr, the daughter of the ex-president in exile. He subsequently divorced Firouzeh and married Maryam Ozdanlou, who until then was married to Rajavi’s second-in-command, Mehdi Abrishmachi. This was no ordinary wedding, in that the MEK had previously declared an ‘ideological revolution’ - followed by an organisational dictat that all married members should divorce their spouses, while marriage was prohibited for single members of the organisation.

But later the MEK staged a number of mass weddings between divorced members and new spouses. It is assumed that this whole ideological event was to justify Massoud Rajavi’s own third wedding to the wife of his second-in-command. However, it created resentment and much dissatisfaction amongst members and supporters who were practising Muslims. Many of them tried to escape, often unsuccessfully, from camps in France and later in Iraq. The well publicised videos and images of the mass wedding showed that they were very similar to ceremonies held by the Christian cult, the Moonies. It is from that period that many Iranians started to use the word ‘cult’ when referring to the MEK.

MEK and Iraq

In 1986, eager to renew relations with Iran’s Islamic Republic, French president Jacques Chirac forced the MEK out of France. Rajavi and a few thousand members went to Iraq as guests of Iran’s arch-enemy, Saddam Hussein. It should be noted that this exile in Iraq coincided with the bitter Iran-Iraq war that lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. At least half a million died - the majority being Iranians.

One of the most deplorable episodes of the MEK association with Saddam Hussein came at the end of the war. In July 1988, the Mojahedin started ‘Operation Forough Javidan’ (Eternal Light) with the support of Iraqi military, including its airforce. The MEK launched an armed incursion into western Iran that had initial success. However the combined forces of the Iranian army and the revolutionary guards defeated the Mojahedin. It was this adventure, soon after the ‘ideological revolution’, that led to the disillusionment of the overwhelming majority of MEK supporters inside Iran.

In the organisation’s camps in Iraq, dissidents claimed they were arrested and held against their will. The Mojahedin relied for support and protection on Hussein’s security and military forces until 2003, when, following the invasion of Iraq, US forces attacked MEK military targets. According to Jonathan Masters, writing on the Council For Foreign Relations website,

The two sides eventually negotiated a ceasefire that disarmed MEK members and confined them to Camp Ashraf - a 14-square-mile former Iraqi military base in the country’s northeast. In 2004, US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld designated the group as civilian “protected persons” under the Geneva convention - a designation that ran against the recommendations of the US department of state, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.²

Although the group claims to be led by the husband-and-wife Rajavi team, there has been no word from Massoud Rajavi since 2003. There are unconfirmed reports that he either died or was severely injured some time after the US invasion of Iraq.

In recent years leading Saudi Arabian officials have made comments implying Massoud Rajavi is dead. This is significant because Saudi Arabia is (or until recently was) one of the major financial backers of the Mojahedin. For example, we can refer to comments made by prince Turki Al Faisal (former head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence organisation), when he addressed an annual gathering of the Mojahedin, which made headlines. He referred to Maryam Rajavi as a widow and twice referred to Massoud Rajavi as “deceased”. However, there is no official confirmation of his death.

It was inevitable that, once the US withdrew from Iraq, violence would break out between pro-Iran Shia Iraqi forces and the MEK. They were forced out of their camp in 2011 and moved to what the Americans called Camp Liberty. From the onset this was designated as a “temporary transit” camp, while the organisation waited for another country to accept members of the MEK as refugees. According to a report from the UN Human Rights Council in 2017, “A total of 1,900 Iranians in need of international protection were relocated from Iraq to Albania in the course of 2016, bringing to an end years of efforts by many stakeholders to find solutions.”³

In reality the Obama administration had persuaded Albania to accept MEK members - most of them by now in their 60s or 70s, and some allegedly spending their time hacking websites and initiating bots on social media.

It should also be noted that the current US administration has distanced itself from neoconservative Republican positions regarding the MEK. In November 2022, the state department, replying to an accusation by the Iranian government, issued an official statement reiterating that it does not provide any form of assistance to the People’s Mojahedin, adding that it does not see it as “a democratic movement against the government that represents the people of Iran and has a chance of success” (my emphasis).

However, it is clear that a large section of Republican Party, including former Trump appointees, not only favour ‘regime change from above’ in Iran: they think the Mojahedin-e Khalq are the alternative - and even in opposition they are doing their best to make sure there is no ‘verbal’ or unofficial nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Dangerous

All this might be related to recent accusations against Robert Malley, who was in charge of the Iran desk in the state department until last week. On June 29, US media reported that Malley had been ‘placed on leave’ and that his security clearance had been suspended.

There are contradictory reports about Malley’s absence. According to his opponents, he is too sympathetic to the Islamic government in Iran, while his supporters say that his comments opposing recent protests in Iran have been taken out of context and he has repeatedly condemned the Islamic Republic’s repression. Neocon Republicans have also referred to Malley as a ‘new MacFarlane’ of the infamous Irangate era. In June 1985, Robert McFarlane wrote a National Security Decision Directive, which called for the United States to begin a rapprochement with Iran, which he later visited.⁴

All this shows the influence of Republican legislators on foreign policy and what we can expect if Trump or another Republican wins the next US presidential elections. There was widespread speculation in Tehran and Washington that the suspension will lead to delays or cancellations of any unofficial Iran nuclear deal.

John Kirby, who is the White House national security spokesperson, was keen to emphasise that Malley’s possible departure “will not affect” the Joe Biden administration’s Iran policy.

But Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican congressman, said in a letter to secretary of state Antony Blinken that the Biden administration owed Congress a full explanation for

the suspension of envoy Rob Malley’s clearance and his being placed on unpaid leave ... These reports raise serious concerns, both regarding Malley’s conduct and whether the state department misled Congress and the American public ... While the suspension of special envoy Malley’s clearance is independently troubling, our concern is compounded by the state department’s failure to respond to the committee’s efforts to conduct oversight of its negotiations with and policy toward Iran.⁵

In the midst of an extremely dangerous situation in the Middle East, with Iran and Israel continuing their cold war, in my opinion the MEK event in Paris with Pence and Truss had more significance than newspaper headlines implied.

1. www.meforum.org/888/monsters-of-the-left-the-mujahedin-al-khalq.↩︎

2. www.cfr.org/backgrounder/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek.↩︎

3. reporting.unhcr.org/regional-office-south-eastern-europe-former-ashraf-residents-relocated-albania.↩︎

4. See P Kornbluh and M Byrne The Iran-contra scandal: the declassified history New York 1993.↩︎

5. apnews.com/article/us-iran-biden-blinken-malley-e7192eb7cc32af7a54f30dbffaa2ece1.↩︎