[Mb-civic] FW: Article on MEK's meeting in DC yesterday.

[Golsorkhi]

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From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 11:42:47 -0400
Subject: Article on MEK's meeting in DC yesterday.




Iranian Group Asks State To Lift Terror Designation

BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
April 15, 2005
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/12299

WASHINGTON - Three hundred supporters of an Iranian opposition group
characterized by the State Department as a terrorist organization
gathered here yesterday to pressure the Bush administration to lift the
designation.

Supporters of the Mujahedin e-Khalq, or MEK, gathered just four blocks
from the White House at Constitution Hall, where a handful of
congressmen and two former military officers praised the group as the
vanguard of a democratic opposition to the reigning mullahs in Iran.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Cantwell, the former military police
commandant of Camp Ashraf, a facility in northern Iraq where some 4,000
fighters associated with the MEK are under military supervision,
expressed solidarity with fighters he used to guard. To cheers of
support, he told the audience, "If there is a terrorist group in
Ashraf, where are the terrorists?"

After his speech, the colonel told reporters that, in his interactions,
he believed the MEK fighters were sincere in their pledge to cooperate
with American soldiers after they voluntarily disarmed in 2003. "Our
assessment was that the Mujahadin represented a minimal threat to U.S.
forces. There were no incidents of violence. They complied with
everything we told them to do," he said.

The MEK and its political arm, known as the National Council of the
Resistance in Iran, are considered terrorists by the State Department
for their role in a string of successful attacks on Iranian regime
targets in the country throughout the 1990s. The organization, which
initially supported the Islamic revolution in 1979, was purged by
Ayatollah Khomeini in the early 1980s. With many of its leaders in
prison, the MEK sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war by 1985.

In 1991, MEK fighters were on the front lines of Saddam's brutal
counterinsurgency campaigns in the Shiite south and Kurdish north. "Up
until the fall of the regime, they were part and parcel of the Iraqi
military. And they were heavily involved in suppressing the Kurdish
uprising of 1991," the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan representative in
Washington, Qubad Talabani, said yesterday.

Nonetheless, before the Gulf War, the group reached out to America and
shared intelligence on a clandestine Iranian nuclear centrifuge program
in Natanz. President Bush this year acknowledged that the first bit of
information on the Iranian program came from the group.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, American special forces initially
encountered MEK military units equipped with tanks, artillery, and
armored personnel carriers. According to reserve Army Captain Vivian
Gembara, the military lawyer who negotiated the deal for the MEK
fighters to hand over their arms in 2003, the MEK was highly
disciplined and knowledgeable about military affairs.

"We have more reason to trust them than some of the other groups we
worked with," Captain Gembara said. Specifically, she said she was
mystified as to why coalition forces allowed the militia trained by
Iran's revolutionary guard, known as the Badr Brigade, to remain intact
while dismantling the MEK fighting unit. "We let the Badr Brigade keep
their uniforms, but we disarmed people willing to work with us," she
said.

Yesterday's event, which the organizers called a national convention,
featured groups of regional supporters of the MEK, who were in the
audience and identified with the vertical placards of state names
normally associated with political conventions. The similarities ended,
though, when a message from an MEK leader, Maryam Rajavi, was beamed to
an audience that shrieked and applauded with rapturous fervor.

"Just as the time has come to abandon the appeasement of tyrants, so
the time has come to remove the ominous legacy of that policy, namely
the terror label against the Iranian resistance," Ms. Rajavi said to
thunderous cheers. In 2003, members of the MEK immolated themselves in
protest when French police briefly arrested Ms. Rajavi in Paris.

Some congressmen shared Ms. Rajavi's position on the terrorist
designation. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican of Colorado, compared
those gathered yesterday to America's Founding Fathers. Not all members
of the Iranian opposition, however, have such fond words for the MEK.
The organization has been left out of the nascent movement inside the
country to press for a constitutional referendum.

An Iranian activist in Los Angeles, Roxanne Ganji, told The New York
Sun yesterday, "They are definitely a cult, and that is a dangerous
thing. If anyone goes to Iran and takes the pulse of the people,
though, 90% would never allow them to go back. That does not mean the
information they gave America was not good. But they are a terrorist
organization. If the United States wants information, then they can get
it from viable groups and not terrorists."

April 15, 2005 Edition > Section: Foreign > Printer-Friendly Version


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