BY BRIAN KNOWLTON
Source: The International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON – By Wednesday, the 50th day of their hunger strike, Zolal Habibi said she had lost 20 pounds, Zahra Rashidi reported losing 25, Hamid Goudarzi, 26, and Mehran Ebrahimi, 33, for a total of 104 pounds — which is exactly how much is left of the now-skeletal Mr. Goudarzi.
“I’m getting weaker every day,” said the diminutive Mr. Goudarzi, who gave up his job in San Antonio, Texas, to join the protest and now weighs 47 kilograms. “But I’m here to the end.”
BY BRIAN KNOWLTON
Source: The International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON – By Wednesday, the 50th day of their hunger strike, Zolal Habibi said she had lost 20 pounds, Zahra Rashidi reported losing 25, Hamid Goudarzi, 26, and Mehran Ebrahimi, 33, for a total of 104 pounds — which is exactly how much is left of the now-skeletal Mr. Goudarzi.
“I’m getting weaker every day,” said the diminutive Mr. Goudarzi, who gave up his job in San Antonio, Texas, to join the protest and now weighs 47 kilograms. “But I’m here to the end.”
He and the others are among two dozen Iranian-American hunger strikers in Washington protesting the deaths of 11 of their friends and comrades, part of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e Khalq, in a bloody clash with Iraqi troops trying to enter their camp north of Baghdad. Similar sympathy strikes are under way in Ottawa, London, Berlin, Stockholm and The Hague.
The protesters are seeking the release of 36 members of the group in Iraqi detention since that July 28 clash, and the resumption of American protection of the camp until a United Nations presence can be arranged. They say they fear mistreatment of the 36, and the 3,400 others in Camp Ashraf, at Iraqi hands, or even expulsion to a hostile Iran.
So far, little has been heard from the White House, which lies just a stone’s throw from the protesters’ encampment. But that may be because Mujahedeen-e Khalq, or M.E.K., has a complicated history and still-disputed connections to enemies of the United States.
It remains on the State Department list of foreign terrorist groups (though Britain and the European Union have dropped that designation); it was linked in the past to the assassinations of senior Iranian figures; it has been called “far left” and “cult-like” by analysts; and at one time it had friendly relations with Saddam Hussein, who provided space for Ashraf when the exiled group, enemies of his enemy, needed a home.
Analysts say the administration is torn. The group’s fierce opposition to the Tehran government and its help in providing intelligence about the Iranian nuclear program have made it useful to those in the administration seeking to contain that threat, but awkward for those seeking dialogue and reconciliation.
“This is not a black-and-white situation,” said Jon B. Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington.
“There’ve long been people in the U.S. government who thought the M.E.K. was useful as a way to put pressure on the Iranian government;’ said Mr. Alterman, a former senior policy planner at the State Department. “And there are people who’ve said these are not the kinds of people we should be hanging out with.’
Asked for comment this week, a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, issued an almost solicitous response.
“The U.S. government continues to urge the government of Iraq to honor its public commitments to treat the M.E.K. humanely and in accordance with Iraqi and international law;’ he said. “We are working with international organizations to help address the difficult situation of this group in Iraq. We empathize with and respect the concerns that many have expressed for their friends and loved ones in Iraq.”
Despite the administration stance, the group has garnered support from some of the most staunch conservatives in Congress, and some liberals.
The Iranians, said one of the conservatives, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Republican of California, were “an imperfect group.” But, he added in a phone interview, “My belief is that we should be helping anybody who’s dedicated to bringing down the mullah regime in Iran?’
Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, said, “The United States has a moral and legal obligation to protect these Iranian political dissidents and Camp Ashraf.”
Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee, Democrat of Texas, has expressed particular concern about the welfare of the estimated 1,000 women in Ashraf.
For Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, it is the latest chapter in a quest toward wider acceptance. The group renounced violent tactics in 2001. In 2003, it proclaimed neutrality in the U.S-Iraq war and turned over its weapons to U.S. troops. Its members were declared by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2004 to be “protected persons” under the Fourth Geneva Convention, and now it is pressing to be dropped from the U.S. terrorist list.
“Times have changed, we’ve grown up, the movement has evolved,” said Ali Safavi, a spokesman.
Many U.S. officials remain deeply skeptical of the group, including the claims that the 36 detainees in Iraq are on their own serious hunger strike.
Their colleagues in Washington say they are limiting themselves to tea, water, sugar and Gatorade. Dr. Gary Morsch, 58, a physician in the U.S. Army Reserve who in that capacity spent months at Ashraf in 2004 — and expresses sympathy for the Iranians’ cause — said that the Washington hunger-strikers’ situation is precarious. A half-dozen of the Washington protesters have required hospital treatment.
The controversies over the group aside, the hunger strikers appear committed.
Ms. Habibi, 28, of Washington, said that her mother had moved to Ashraf to take up her husband’s cause after he was killed in Iran because of his protest activities, in 1988. “That changed everything in our lives;’ she said.
She said she had no doubt that the Iraqi incursion in Ashraf was done “at the demand and at the behest of the Iranian regime;’ by an Iraqi government with sympathies to Tehran.
Saleh al-Mutlak, who heads the National Dialogue Front, a small opposition party in Iraq, said during a visit to the Washington protest site that he shared Ms. Habibi’s sense, and added that many Iraqis were angered by the treatment of people at Ashraf.
Mr. Ebrahimi, 53, said he was disappointed that the administration has not done more for those in the camp, including his sister, who has lived there for 20 years.
“I was an Obama supporter — a staunch Obama supporter — and I feel like I was betrayed;’ he said.
“Now,” he said, “whatever happens to us will be on their watch?’
