Self-Sacrifice

by Struan Stevenson

  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.

  My friends and I were threatened; then the Revolutionary Guards attacked the hospital. By this time we had run away, because our colleagues had warned us that the IRGC (Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps) were coming. But in two or three months, several of our friends, including Dr Sadeq Agmashe and Dr Fahimeh Mirahmadi (who was pregnant) were arrested and executed. Two of the nurses, Shakar Mohammedzadeh and nurse Tuba Rajavi Sani were also executed.

  When I was arrested in the street, I was blindfolded. It was a major roundup by the Revolutionary Guards. Every young person in the street would be rounded up and accused of being PMOI supporters and the onus was on you to prove they were wrong. I was tied to a bed in the police station and tortured by being hit on the soles of my feet with electric cables of various diameters. If you resisted, heavier cables would be used. Lajevardi, the Iranian prison chief at that time, would go to every torture room to supervise and participate in the torture sessions in person.

  They wanted me to repent and reveal my friends’ names and appear on TV to denounce the PMOI. I could hear my friends’ screams. On the first night of our interrogation, there were dozens of wounded, tortured people on beds in our cells. My friend Tahmineh Rastegar said that under torture she had taken all the blame on herself, which suddenly explained why they had stopped torturing me. Eventually we were moved to Ward 209 in Evin Prison. We were blindfolded and put in a queue, each with a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. The person in front of me was my friend Tahmineh and she put her hand on my hand. This was the last time I ever touched her. She was executed by a firing squad two months later. We used to hear the roar of machine guns at night when the executions took place. The first time I heard it, I thought it was a lorry tipping out a load of gravel. That’s what it sounded like. But then we could hear the single pistol shots as each person was given the coup de grâce. We could count the number of our colleagues who had been executed by the number of single pistol shots. Sometimes there were hundreds of shots.

  I wasn’t aware that Tahmineh had been shot until I was interrogated for the last time and they lied to me and said Tahmineh had given evidence against me. I knew she would never do such a thing. I demanded to see her. They said they would just bring her handwriting. When they brought the papers that Tahmineh had signed, I saw that she had deliberately written misleading information and that she had only repeated the story that we had previously agreed to tell them. She had said, “Yes, these are my friends, but they are innocent.” Then she had made a false confession to shift all the blame onto herself.
>
  There is no justice in Iran. After 11 months, they said they were taking me to court to deliver the final verdict. So, I said goodbye to everyone, being certain that I would be sentenced to death and executed. But when we got to the so-called court we could see all the revolutionary guards were laughing and joking. There was a room with a single mullah, Hassan Nayyeri, sitting behind a table. He was flanked by two of my torturers. They asked me if I was a PMOI supporter. I said I was only a naive admirer and had done nothing against the regime. So they could prove nothing, but then they demanded to know why I had never got married . . . which to them was a crime and apparently possible proof that I supported the PMOI! I told them to mind their own business. So the mullah told me that I could go and that he would show mercy. Mullahs act as lawyer, judge, jury and prosecutor all in one. They argue that their sentences are the will of God and they even justify torture and the death penalty on this basis.

  However, although I was lucky not to face imminent death, I was returned to Evin Prison, where I quickly realised that all the other members of our movement with whom I had shared a cell had been killed on that day . . . that’s why the Revolutionary Guards had been laughing, joking and jubilant.

  At Evin, six people were crammed into each cell built under the Shah to hold a single person. After I was arrested, my parents made frantic efforts to discover what had happened to me, and when they heard about the mass execution of my friends, they assumed the same thing had happened to me and held a ceremony to honour my death. This was two months after I was abducted.

  I was sentenced to three years in prison, but I was still tortured regularly, not with the intention of forcing me to reveal information, but simply because they claimed that I still supported the PMOI in my heart and mind. During the second year, when I was moved to Qezel Hesar Prison, I was taken to a cage, only half a metre wide. Prisoners couldn’t sit down. No movement or noise was allowed; even if we sneezed, we would be beaten with a cable. Many people in the prison, both male and female, were tortured in these coffin-like cages. I spent seven or eight months in one of these cages.

  My parents, who by this time had discovered I was still alive, went to Ayatollah Montazeri, one of the allegedly moderate mullahs in the leadership, and bitterly complained about our mistreatment. Montazeri, together with other senior officials of the regime, then made a lot of noise in the Iranian media. This caused a division amongst the Mullahs and some of the prisoners like myself were freed. I started to work in a private hospital, because, as a former prisoner, I could no longer work in a public hospital. One year later, a colleague told me that there were two people from Evin Prison looking for me. I contacted my two closest PMOI friends who had also been released from jail and they said they knew they were also being sought. So we all decided to flee. We got money from our friends, or jewellery, bracelets and earrings to sell in order to get money, with which we paid smugglers to help get us out of the country.

  We fled to Iraq and then on to Camp Ashraf. We were lucky. Many of my friends who tried to flee were captured at the border, then taken back to Evin and executed. Many were executed during the 1988 prison massacres. I survived to fight for those people who gave their lives. I only took a small and modest step in the PMOI. But their blood is incredibly strong!’

  3

  The People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran

  Following my election to the European Parliament in June 1999, I frequently met individuals and organisations in Brussels and Strasbourg, keen to meet and lobby politicians for countless causes. These ranged from local to global issues and each sought to secure the support of European parliamentarians for their cause. As I have explained, one such group was the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran. I first met a representative of this organisation in Brussels in 2002, two years before my meetings with Mohammad Mohaddessin and Mrs Rajavi. As someone interested in foreign affairs and the Middle East, this meeting was to shape my understanding and knowledge of Iran and the political situation in that country. But I was also to be introduced to the ideology that is now known as Islamic fundamentalism. Emanating from the Islamic Republic of Iran since its inception in 1979, it is now prevalent in the wider Middle East and beyond, with tragic and far-reaching consequences.

  After this initial meeting, it was important for me to get to know the PMOI and to verify and research what I had been told. I needed to find out what the organisation stood for, its political ethos, its views and above all else its practices. This was to be no easy task. When I first met representatives of the organisation, the PMOI was on the EU list of designated terrorist organisations. It was incredibly challenging to separate fact from fiction in the labyrinth of misinformation about the PMOI. I had rarely come across an organisation that created such extremes of opinion and feeling, from staunch and passionate supporters to devout and ardent critics, all vying for support and for people to listen to them.

  The overthrow of Dr Mohammad Mossadegh (Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister) in 19531 caused political unrest throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Together with oppression and the eventual banning of all political opposition groups by Shah Pahlavi, this created disillusionment and disenchantment amongst Iran’s then 25 million population. Against this backdrop, in the autumn of 1965, three university students, Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saied Mohsen and Ali-Asghar Badizadegan, set up the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran,2 a political organisation originally formed to oppose the corrupt and oppressive dictatorship of Shah Pahlavi and the absolute rule of the monarch. The PMOI would grow to become by far the largest and most active political movement in Iranian history.

  In the 1970s, however, a brutal crackdown on the organisation and its members by the Shah’s notorious secret service (the Savak) resulted in the execution of the PMOI’s original founders, almost the entirety of its leadership and the imprisonment of the vast majority of its members and supporters, including Massoud Rajavi, then Secretary General of the PMOI. Massoud was a graduate of political law from Tehran University and had joined the PMOI when he was 20. He was only spared execution because of the efforts of his elder brother Professor Kazem Rajavi,3 a renowned human rights advocate who spearheaded an international campaign in the West, which included securing the support of Francois Mitterrand and a number of other international leaders and human rights organisations, including Amnesty International and the Red Cross.

  While Massoud Rajavi and the rest of the PMOI’s leading cadres were in prison, the organisation suffered an internal set-back. In the years 1972-1975, a number of individuals, including a member who had escaped prison and gained some notoriety among the opposition, took advantage of the absence of the PMOI’s leadership and attempted to change the organisation’s ideology and direction along Marxist lines.

  The remaining members outside prison, who strongly rejected the betrayal of the PMOI’s founders and their vision for a future Iran, vigorously opposed this Marxist coup within the organisation. But suppressing the members opposed to them, the Marxist faction engaged in several armed attacks against American personnel stationed in Iran and their interests.

  According to international experts who have closely examined the events of the 1970s, these armed activities were aimed at gaining the upper hand and silencing any opposition to the change in ideology and strategy of the organisation. Massoud Rajavi, although in prison, strongly condemned these individuals and their actions and he went on to play a vital role in returning the organisation to its true and original founding principles and ideology.4 Thus the PMOI cannot be held responsible for actions by the Marxist faction in which it played no part.

  Once released from prison in 1979, Massoud Rajavi and other senior PMOI members set about restructuring the organisation. Because of the group’s nationalist outlook, democratic values and modern and progressive view of Islam, they were the natural front-runners in the 1979 revolution. It was because of this tolerant and progressive interpretation of Islam that the ‘PMOI provided ideological i
nspiration to the millions of Iranians whose nationwide protests ultimately brought down the Shah of Iran in 1979.’5

  The PMOI wanted a secular government, elections and universal suffrage to be the basis of political legitimacy. Their interpretation of Islam and what they aspired to for a future Iran was, however, in stark contrast to the intentions of Ayatollah Khomeini, a Shiia cleric who had recently returned to Iran from exile. The Shah had imposed Khomeini’s exile in 1964 due to his increasing prominence as a religious leader, his denouncing of the Shah’s rule and of the influence of the United States and Britain in Iran.

  After widespread demonstrations against his rule in 1979, the Shah fled, never to return. Khomeini took advantage of the vacuum created by the Shah’s lengthy dictatorship and the elimination of all democratic opposition groups such as the PMOI, whose leaders had either been executed or imprisoned, and seized the leadership of the revolution. Lack of democratic institutions and public knowledge about the true nature of Khomeini contributed to his position going unchallenged at the time. He was seen as a spiritual leader who had no interest in material life or in engaging in the day-to-day affairs of the country. Indeed, he promised that this was the case.