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A discredited political agenda |
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Thursday, 19 May 2005 |
 Human Rights Watch pushes a discredited political agenda under the smokescreen of a “human rights report”
- Procedure and sources used in the Human Rights Watch report
on People's Mojahedin and its content unveil a political agenda serving
the Iranian regime
- In flagrant breach of recognized norms of all human rights
organizations, Human Rights Watch did not make any enquiries with the
Mojahedin to substantiate its accusations
A report by Human Rights Watch released yesterday ("No exit: human
rights violations in People's Mojahedin Organization's camps") accuses
the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, a member of the National
Council of Resistance of Iran, of mistreatment of its members. Joe
Stork, Washington director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East division
claimed: "Members who try to leave the MKO pay a very heavy price."
The report cites remarks by a number of agents of the mullahs' Ministry
of Intelligence and Security (MOIS), who identify themselves as former
members of the People's Mojahedin. They claimed that they were
imprisoned and subjected to maltreatment by the PMOI. But they have
provided no evidence to back their claims. The report is a scandal for
the Human Rights Watch in the way it was prepared, the sources used,
the content and the procedure it has adopted.
1. The PMOI strongly denies the claims made by Human Rights
Watch in this report. These accusations only serve as a license to the
mullahs' regime to continue the execution and suppression of PMOI
members and supporters in Iran.
2. Contrary to the recognized methods by all human rights
organizations, HRW has made not a single contact with the People's
Mojahedin Organization of Iran in the course of preparing the report
and has not raised a single allegation with the PMOI prior to the
publication of the report. This contradicts the modus operandi of all
human rights organizations and United Nations human rights rapporteurs.
Had it wished to investigate the allegations instead of using them in a
vitriolic attack on the Iranian opposition group, Human Rights Watch
could have easily contacted PMOI officials in Camp Ashraf in Iraq or,
at the very least, Paris-based officials of the National Council of
Resistance of Iran, the coalition that includes the PMOI among its
members. This flagrant failure to give the right to respond to the
organization facing these allegations clearly unveils the political
nature of the report.
3. Similar accusations against the Iranian Resistance were made
by Human Rights Watch in 1994 in collusion with the clerical regime. In
a letter on October 28, 1994, Mr. Massoud Rajavi, President of the
National Council of Resistance of Iran, invited HRW to send its
representatives to visit PMOI bases in Iraq. But HRW, which was not
concerned over the PMOI's human rights practices, never responded to
the invitation. The accusations by the HRW in that year appalled many
human rights organizations and personalities, particularly the British
Parliamentary Human Rights Groups.
4. The report solely relies on oral claims with no proof by 12
agents of the mullahs' regime who identify themselves as former members
of the Mojahedin. The report admits that all the interviews with these
people were made over telephone in a short period between February and
May 2005. This is while the report concludes that: "These witnesses
provided credible claims that they were subjected to imprisonment as
well as physical and psychological abuses because they had either
expressed criticism of the MKO's policies or had requested to leave the
organization's military camps." It is not clear how HRW managed to
verify claims made over telephone by these individuals, especially
allegations of physical torture? How were their identities verified
over the telephone? It is noteworthy that several telephone interviews
were carried out on May 6, only 12 days before the release of the
report in four languages, English, French, Arabic and Farsi.
5. The HRW report is a highly politicized invective against the
Iranian resistance movement. This has nothing to do with an impartial
and objective human rights report and clearly smacks off a political
agenda. Referring to growing support for the PMOI in the U.S. and calls
by members of Congress and political figures to remove the PMOI from
the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations, HRW
official Joe Stork is quoted as saying, ""The Iranian government has a
dreadful record on human rights. But it would be a huge mistake to
promote an opposition group that is responsible for serious human
rights abuses." These remarks constitute a clear political statement to
justify keeping the PMOI in the list of foreign terrorist
organizations. Demonizing Iran's main opposition group is an old tactic
to justify the policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the clerical regime in
Iran by advocates of this policy. Being unable to defend the mullahs'
record of widespread atrocities, the protagonists of appeasement seek
to discredit the legitimate alternative to the religious tyranny in
Iran in a bid to impose their policy as an unavoidable reality.
6. Referring to the PMOI on March 15, 2005, Ali Younessi, Iran's
Minister of Intelligence and Security, said: "Those individuals who
fell into their hands were subjected to torture … I instructed my
deputy today to inform international organizations of the [PMOI's]
crimes immediately, so that people know what kind of crimes they
committed in Iraq…" It appears that the mullahs' intelligence agency
has been successful in its efforts with HRW.
7. Allegations of human rights abuses by the PMOI against its
"dissident members" have been churned out by the Iranian regime's
Ministry of Intelligence and Security for years. PMOI members in Iraq,
contrary to HRW's unsubstantiated and arbitrary claims, are all
volunteers who have chosen to go to Iraq to fight for the liberation of
their homeland. In the four decades of its struggle for democracy, the
PMOI has never incarcerated or tortured anyone, even though 120,000 of
its own members and supporters have been executed. The PMOI has even
released under the supervision of the International Committee of the
Red Cross all the members of the mullahs' Revolutionary Guards, who
were captured when they attacked PMOI bases. The PMOI has not even
punished undercover terrorists sent by the MOIS to infiltrate and
murder PMOI members and has sent them to Iran, even though some of them
had killed several PMOI members.
8. In the past two years, every single PMOI member in Camp
Ashraf in Iraq has been thoroughly interviewed and screened by seven
agencies of the United States government. These investigations
exonerated all PMOI members and led to the announcement that "a
16-month review by the United States has found no basis to charge
members of the [PMOI] in Iraq with violations of American law" and the
statement by senior U.S. officials that "extensive interviews by
officials of the State Department and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation had not come up with any basis to bring charges against
any members of the group." (New York Times, July 27, 2004). HRW's
deliberate omission of such extensive investigations is another
indication that the only purpose for raising such allegations is to aid
the religious dictatorship ruling Iran.
9. Human Rights Watch has not only failed to raise any questions
with the PMOI in preparing this report, but has found it unnecessary to
corroborate these grave allegations by contacting the American
officials who have interviewed and screened all of PMOI members. Even
if it has raised the question with American officials, it has not found
it expedient to reflect their views in the report. Meanwhile the report
cites the number of the individuals who are present at Camp Ashraf
according to remarks "of an American military source." Clearly, Human
Rights Watch has had no problem in approaching American officials. Why
did it not ask the same American sources about the purported prisons,
torture chambers and the torturers claimed by the one dozen members of
the Ministry of Intelligence?
10. The report claims that members of the organization are
barred from leaving it. The Knight Ridder news agency reported from
Camp Ashraf on March 19 2005 (at the same time that the report was
being prepared): "The U.S. military has investigated claims that the
Mujahedeen were keeping people in Ashraf against their will, but found
no solid evidence." It further quotes one senior U.S. military official
as saying that "they are not prisoners. They are reasonable and
physically free to leave."
11. The report acknowledges that four of the individuals who
have been interviewed, Karim Haggi, Tahereh Eskandari (Khoram),
Mohammad Reza Eskandari and Habib Khoram have left the Mojahedin in
early 1990s. All of these individuals have been working for the Iranian
Ministry of Intelligence in the Netherlands since the mid-1990s. In the
first years, they were briefed in Far Eastern countries and Turkey by
senior officials of the mullahs' Ministry of Intelligence, including
the notorious Saeed Emami. But subsequently they began making trips to
Tehran to receive their directions there. In a number of statements,
Karim Haggi has acknowledged that he was interrogated by the Dutch
police for his contacts with and receiving money from the MOIS. Habib
Khorami was sentenced by a Dutch court for abducting an 11 year-old boy
from his legal guardians in Canada and sending him to Iran. This
criminal act was carried out on the orders of the Ministry of
Intelligence and with the cooperation of the Iranian ambassador in the
Netherlands.
12. HRW carried out a series of interviews with Karim Haggi and
a number of other agents of the MOIS who claimed they were former
members of the Mojahedin in person in Cologne in Germany in early 1997.
But it seems as though the political setting was not suitable for
publishing interviews at that juncture. Karim Haggi and a number of
other agents of the MOIS met with Prof. Maurice Copithorne, the U.N.
Human Rights Commission's Special Rapporteur on Iran in 1996 in order
to get Prof. Copithorne to write a report against the Mojahedin but
they failed in their attempt.
13. The report claims that eight of these individuals who were
interviewed had left Iraq between 2002 and 2004, but it keeps silent on
the fact that all these individuals had gone abroad from Iran. Five of
these people make similar claims by saying that they were in the
Mojahedin prisons in Iraq and were handed over to the Iraqi prisons and
the Iraqi government handed them over to the mullahs' intelligence and
were imprisoned in Iran. They later succeeded in fleeing prisons in
Iran and get out of the country. Indeed, how many people have been able
to run away from the medieval prisons of the regime in the past quarter
century? But now we see them fleeing one after another. The other three
with almost the same scenario claim that they had managed to run away
from the Mojahedin and go into Iran and then later come out of the
country. The fact is that these people were sent to Germany for
activities against the Iranian Resistance after receiving special
training by the Intelligence Ministry in Iran. For instance, Mohammad
Hossein Sobhani is an already-exposed agent of the Ministry of
Intelligence and Security. His brief, while working as an infiltrator
in the PMOI for the Iranian intelligence, was to deal a blow to the
PMOI in Iraq. When his terrorist mission was uncovered, he returned to
Iran. In 2002, the MOIS sent Sobhani to Europe on a new mission against
the Iranian Resistance. The PMOI’s weekly Persian journal exposed the
activities and mission of Sobhani in issues 590 and 592 in July 2002.
The weekly, in its August 8, 2002, issue, exposed a document which
clearly showed that Sobhani was a team leader of the MOIS and had been
given the task of training several MOIS members on a new mission
against he PMOI. The MOIS used Hotel Laleh in Tehran for these
instructions.
14. Most of the persons interviewed by Human Rights Watch as
"dissident members" of the PMOI are now in Germany and the Netherlands.
The reports by the official security agencies in these two countries
are revealing with regard to the way these agents operate for MOIS. In
its latest annual report, published in May 2005, the German security
agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) wrote
that the PMOI and the National Council of Resistance of Iran "remain
the focus of the activities of the Iranian intelligence agency in
Germany." The report adds, "The Ministry of Intelligence and Security
of Iran uses a network of agents to collect information and carry out
espionage. These agents are former members of the People's Mojahedin
and are invited to go to Iran to be briefed."
15. The Dutch security service, BVD, wrote in its 2001 report,
"Supporters of the most important [Iranian opposition] groups, namely
the Mojahedin-e Khalq, are more than anyone the focus of attention of
the Iranian secret service. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security
tries to collect as much information about this group as possible
through the 'former members' of the MeK. Agents of MOIS are instructed
to spread negative information against the MeK and its members. The
MOIS thus tries to undermine the MeK and end its social and political
activities by demonizing the image of the MeK in host countries." The
BVD report in 1999 also noted, "An important job of Iran's secret
services is to trace and recruit members of the opposition abroad,
particularly past and present members of the MeK."
16. HRW's rehash of old accusations regarding human rights
violations by PMOI have been rebutted time and again in PMOI or NCRI
publications in Farsi, English and French. In addition to countless
publications in Farsi on this issue, the Iranian Resistance has
published dozens of books or essays in English on the subject, all of
which have been at the disposal of HRW. "Human Rights Betrayed" (1995),
"Legacy of a Misguided Policy" (1997), "Enemies of the Ayatollahs"
(2004) are among the English and French publication which have dealt
with this issue. That HRW's report has not dealt with any of these
replies reflects the organization's pressing political objective of
keeping the PMOI on the blacklist. The main beneficiaries of this, of
course, are the mullahs ruling Iran.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
May 19, 2005
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