By Reza Shafa
The mullahs' deputy foreign minister for European Affairs, Mehdi Safari, arrived in London on Wednesday. He was scheduled to meet a number of UK officials including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary.
On the surface, it looked a healthy diplomatic trip but it was not. According to the semi-official new agency Fars on Wednesday, he spent a good amount of time convincing the British officials that they made a big mistake deproscribing the main Iranian opposition group, the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) from the UK terror list.
"Removal of the terrorist Mojahideen-e Khalq Organization (MKO) from the UK's list of terrorist groups will have adverse effects on the Tehran-London relations, a senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official said here Wednesday," Fars referred to comments made by Safari.
The removal of the PMOI from the terror list, following a long and torturous legal battle which lasted five years, on the order of the British Court of Appeal on May 7, was much a surprise to the ruling mullahs' in Tehran. The British government was ordered to abide by the court's ruling and remove the Mojahedin from its list.
On June 23, both houses of the British Parliament, after a historic debate, unanimously order the government to implement court's ruling at once.
It came as a major blow to Tehran's mullahs; their long time enemy was off the hook and their nightmare had just begun.
At the end of the day, before their eyes, UK government being the "member state" and the "authority" which guaranteed PMOI's presence on the EU black list had to comply.
Mistaking the civilized world with that of the lawless jungle of the clerical judiciary which judges can be bought either with cold cash or naked threats on their lives, the rule of law prevailed and mullahs failed.
However, the autocratic rulers in Tehran would not give up. To intimidate the British officials in Tehran, the Iranian regime has dispatched scores of paramilitary Bassij forces to the embassy protesting the removal of the PMOI from the UK list.
What made it Bizarre was the fact that in many incidents of such phony demonstrations in July and August, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) ordered its members to masquerade as the families of the PMOI members expressing dismay over the removal of their loved ones from the list.
It seems that the mullahs' will never learn that the world does not spin at their behest.
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Reza Shafa is an expert on the Iranian regime's Intelligence networks, both in Iran and abroad.
He has done extensive research on Iranian Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS) also known as VEVAK, Intelligence Office of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and Qods Force among others. Currently he is a contributor to NCRI website
