An Explanation of the Role of the MEK in Iran

US officials have been discussing Iran and the actions that the US should take towards Iran.

Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, responded to a question about the US policy towards Iran, in a Congressional hearing, “Well, our Iranian policy is under development. It’s not yet been delivered to the president, but I would tell you that we certainly recognize Iran’s continued destabilizing presence in the region, their payment of foreign fighters, their export of militia forces in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, their support for Hezbollah. And we are taking action to respond to Iran’s hegemony. Additional sanctions actions have been put in place against individuals and others.”

He continued, “We continually review the merits both from the standpoint of diplomatic but also international consequences of designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in its entirety as a terrorist organization. As you know, we have designated the Quds [Force]. Our policy towards Iran is to push back on this hegemony, contain their ability to develop obviously nuclear weapons, and to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government. Those elements are there, certainly as we know.”

 

Jubin Katiraie, editorial staff member of Iran Focus says in an article for that publication, “The fact is that for years Iranian people have been seeking for a regime change, but the brutal internal suppression and international and especially US policy of appeasement towards Iran have been the main obstacles to reaching this goal.”

 

The Mujahedin-e-Khalq or the MEK is a democratic and organized opposition that has been struggling with the Iranian regime for over thirty-eight years. In the summer of 1988 over 30,000 political prisoners, most of them affiliated with the MEK were massacred.

 

The Iranian regime continues to create an atmosphere of fear and terror, with arrest and torture the punishment for those who have any connection with the MEK. Use of the name, “MEK” is prohibited. While MEK members were living in camps Ashraf and Liberty in Iraq, it was considered a crime for their family members to call them, and so many MEK family members were arrested and tortured.

 

The MEK continued its struggle against the regime despite pressures and suppression.  After their transfer from Iraq to Albania, the MEK focused their activities on Iran. Supporters of the MEK posted pictures and posters of Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of NCRI, in the public places in many Iranian cities during the Presidential elections.

 

Over the last eight months, MEK supporters in Iran have staged a campaign about the 1988 massacre. Many atrocities were revealed. Last week, the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, was forced to defend the massacre.

 

Katiraie writes, “The widespread activities of the MEK supporters inside Iran and formation of American-Arab coalition in the region, has become the main concern of the regime. Due to this concern, Iran lobbies have started a widespread campaign against the MEK to demonize the MEK.”

 

As part of this campaign, they try to say that the solution lies within the regime and that the West must try to find ‘moderates’ inside the regime. However, the objective of all parties inside the regime is to keep it in power. The MEK stands in opposition to this.

More about the People’s Mojahdin Organization of Iran (PMOI/ MEK)

The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (Also known as MEK, or Mujahedin-e-Khalq / Mujahedeen-e-Khalq), was founded on September 6, 1965, by Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saeed Mohsen, and Ali-Asghar Badizadgan. All engineers, they had earlier been members of the Freedom Movement (also known as the Liberation Movement), created by Medhi Bazargan in May 1961.1

The MEK’s quest culminated in a true interpretation of Islam, which is inherently tolerant and democratic, and fully compatible with the values of modern-day civilization. It took six years for the MEK to formulate its view of Islam and develop a strategy to replace Iran’s dictatorial monarchy with a democratic government.

MEK’s interpretation of Islam

The theocratic mullah regime in Iran believes interpreting Islam is their exclusive domain. The MEK reject this view and the cleric’s reactionary vision of Islam. The MEK’s comprehensive interpretation of Islam proved to be more persuasive and appealing to the Iranian youth.

MEK’s founders and new members studied the various schools of thought, the Iranian history and those of other countries, enabling them to analyze other philosophies and ideologies with considerable knowledge and to present their own ideology, based on Islam, as the answer to Iran’s problems.

MEK’s leadership’s arrest during the 70s.

The Shah’s notorious secret police, SAVAK, arrested all MEK leaders and most of its member’s in1971. On May 1972, the founders of the MEK, Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saeed Mohsen and Ali-Asghar Badizadegan, along with two members of the MEK leadership, Mahmoud Askarizadeh, and Rasoul Meshkinfam, were put before death squads and were executed after long months of imprisonment and torture. They were the true vanguards, who stood against the dictatorial regime of Shah. However, they are also recognized for their opposition to what is today known as Islamic fundamentalism.

The death sentence of Massoud Rajavi, a member of MEK’s central committee, was commuted to life imprisonment as a result of an international campaign by his Geneva-based brother, Dr. Kazem Rajavi (assassinated in April 1990 in Geneva by mullahs’ agents) and the personal intervention of the French President Georges Pompidou and Francois Mitterrand. He was the only survivor of the MEK original leadership.

Massoud Rajavi’s critical role in characterizing religious extremism

From 1975 to 1979, while incarcerated in different prisons, Massoud Rajavi led the MEK’s struggle while constantly under torture for his leading position.

Massoud Rajavi stressed the need to continue the struggle against the shah’s dictatorship. At the same time, he characterized religious fanaticism as the primary internal threat to the popular opposition, and warned against the emergence and growth of religious fanaticism and autocracy. He also played a crucial role when some splinter used the vacuum in the MEK leadership who were all executed or imprisoned at the time, to claim a change of ideology and policy. Massoud Rajavi as the MEK leader condemns these individual’s misuse of MEK’s name while continuing to stress the struggle against dictatorship. His efforts while still in prison forced these individuals to no longer operating under the name of MEK and adopting a different name for their group. These positions remained the MEK’s manifesto until the overthrow of the shah’s regime.

Release of Political Prisoners in the last days of the Shah

A month before the 1979 revolution in Iran, the Shah was forced to flee Iran, never to return. All democratic opposition leaders had by then either been executed by the Shah’s SAVAK or imprisoned and could exert little influence on the trend of events. Khomeini and his network of mullahs across the country, who had by and large been spared the wrath of SAVAK, were the only force that remained unharmed and could take advantage of the political vacuum. In France, Khomeini received maximum exposure to the world media. With the aid of his clerical followers, he hijacked a revolution that began with calls for democracy and freedom and diverted it towards his fundamentalist goals. Through an exceptional combination of historical events, Shiite clerics assumed power in Iran.

Khomeini’s gradual crackdown on MEK in fear of their popular support

In internal discourses, Rajavi the remaining leader of the MEK, argued that Khomeini represented the reactionary sector of society and preached religious fascism. Later, in the early days after the 1979 revolution, the mullahs, specifically Rafsanjani, pointed to these statements in inciting the Hezbollah club-wielders to attack the MEK.

Following the revolution, the MEK became Iran’s largest organized political party. It had hundreds of thousands of members who operated from MEK offices all over the country. MEK publication, ‘Mojahed’ was circulated in 500,000 copies.