At the end of January this year, a lead article in the Daily Telegraph on Iran concluded with a call for Britain to back the "main resistance group in the country," Mojahedin-e Khalq (MKO). The MKO, which also describes itself as the People's Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), or the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) among other titles, is one of the more egregious terrorist organisations in existence. From time to time it scores a new propaganda success by taking in people with little knowledge of Iranian politics. The Telegraph leader asserted that Britain had in the past treated the MKO as a terrorist organisation in order to appease the current hardline leadership of Iran. In fact, Britain, the EU and the US have condemned them as terrorists, because… they are terrorists.
The MKO began its existence in the 1960s as a revolutionary opposition group under the Shah, combining Marxism and Islam, and assassinating US military and civilians in Iran. Having coasted on the wave of revolution in 1979 and having supported the taking of the US embassy hostages, the MKO lost out to Khomeini's clerical leadership in a power struggle and was forced into exile—but not before it had killed an estimated 2,000 or more of the regime's adherents in a vicious bombing campaign. In one attack alone the MKO assassinated 74 leading members of the Islamic Republic party with two bombs, including its leader, Ayatollah Beheshti. The mullahs responded in kind by killing many hundreds of MKO members or sympathisers who were left behind. The episode marked a loss of innocence for the revolution, and had the effect of hardening and brutalising the regime.
Ejected from Iran, the MKO's leader, Masud Rajavi, went briefly to Paris and then set up shop in Baghdad, accepting funding from Saddam Hussein and sending MKO militia to fight on the side of Iraq against their own countrymen in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran's suffering in that war was enormous, and most Iranians have never forgiven the MKO for fighting for Saddam. The MKO thereby torpedoed forever any chance of regaining power in Iran on its own account. Along the way, Rajavi stole the wife of one of his closest colleagues in the MKO, and since then Maryam Rajavi has been his partner at the head of an organisation that has increasingly looked less like a political movement and more like a cult, complete with brainwashing, mass weddings and a website for escapees. Any MKO members in Iraq who dissented from the leadership were thrown into Saddam's prisons, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
After his defeat in 1991 in the first Gulf war, Saddam used the MKO to crush Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. Throughout the 1990s, Rajavi directed terrorist attacks in Iran which killed many innocents. In the west, the MKO in its many guises lobbied for support with mixed results, but failed to convince governments of its democratic credentials. Since the fall of Saddam in 2003, Masud Rajavi has gone into hiding, leaving Maryam to run the organisation. The MKO personnel in Iraq have been disarmed and are held by coalition forces at their former base north of Baghdad, Camp Ashraf. The organisation has failed to get its listing as a terrorist organisation lifted, but is supported by a number of members of the US congress, and some British parliamentarians. This is despite the availability of the facts on the MKO, in the Katzman report to the US Congress of 1992 and John Simpson's Lifting the Veil, among other trustworthy sources.
Seemingly undaunted by the collapse of its position in Iraq, the MKO has responded to its misfortunes with another propaganda push. On 28th January, the International Herald Tribune published an article by Maryam Rajavi, claiming credit for the MKO for the revelation of Iran's nuclear weapons programme, and calling for the terrorist designation to be lifted. Trading on the violence of its opposition to the hardline regime in Iran, the MKO seems to have won some support among right-wingers in the US, presumably on the basis that my enemy's enemy is my friend.
But the US's recent experience with opposition movements in exile should prompt caution. There is general agreement now that the US government and the CIA relied too heavily on information from the exiled Iraqi National Congress in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, and should not have accepted its exaggeration of the danger from weapons of mass destruction. It would be dismal indeed if the US were to repeat its mistake by trusting the MKO's self-interested version of events in Iran, or by according it any kind of role in efforts to bring about change there. As a proxy for regime change in Iran, the MKO is a horse that will simply not run. The organisation is too corrupt, and is irrelevant to the complex process of internal politics in Iran which, as Paul Wolfowitz noted in his recent Prospect interview (December), is still capable of bringing about evolutionary change despite the repression of the clerical regime.
The best course would be to allow the MKO to die, and even to help it on its way. With calls within Iraq for the MKO to be expelled from the country en masse, and with its former leader in hiding, some of its people in Iraq have already taken advantage of an amnesty and gone back to Iran, where they have been returned to their families after brief questioning. Some reports suggest that large numbers within Camp Ashraf have told their guards they no longer belong to the organisation. But there are also rumours that the US has been using MKO people in covert incursions into Iran. It would be a bad mistake for the US or any other western government to breathe new life into this terrorist cult.
