MEK: Who is this Iranian 'cult' backed by the US?

TRT World
February 14, 2019

The MEK, an Iranian group that opposes the Iranian government and has committed several terrorist attacks is hugely controversial. But that doesn't stop the US from supporting them.

“Iran should be isolated until Iran changes,” US President Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who claimed to be representing the Iranian group the People's Mujahideen Organisation of Iran (MEK), during a Middle East conference in Warsaw, Poland.

Giuliani’s suggestion for who will lead the democratic government after replacing the current Iranian government is Maryam Rajavi, the leader of the group that was, until recently, listed as a terrorist organisation by the US.

US support of the MEK is controversial not least because of the cult aspects which dominate its practices, but also the group’s violent past which some suspect continues today. 

So, what is the MEK?

The MK is a religious and ‘Marxist’ group aiming to remove the Iranian government. It was founded in 1965 in Iran in opposition to the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and launched bomb attacks against him. The group is responsible for killing Iran’s then-president Mohammad Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad Javad Bahovar in 1981 and is suspected of the assassination of six American servicemen.

The group relocated to Iraq after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when Iran proved that the group had lost a power struggle against the government, and found military support and shelter in Camp Hurriya in Baghdad.

When the eight-year Iran-Iraq war broke out in 1980, the MEK fought alongside Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. That led to them being branded traitors by the Iranian government, who executed thousands of political opponents, including MEK supporters, at the end of the war in 1988.

The US State Department added the MEK to its list of terrorist organisations in 1997, and the exact reason why is unknown but the group carried out several terror attacks killing Iranians, Iraqis and Americans in the 70s and 80s. The terrorist label was reversed under the presidency of Barack Obama in 2012 after the group led a multimillion-dollar campaign. A Guardian investigation found that the group flew funds to members of Congress while running a lobbying campaign to erase its past.

When the US illegally invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, the group surrendered to the Americans and began presenting itself as a group advocating democracy.

Until 2012, the group remained in Iraq under US protection, but in fear of Iranian attacks, it was relocated to an unlikely country, Albania, where the group built a massive compound surrounded by barbed wire, high-tech surveillance and armed guards.

Why the US supports the MEK

There is one main reason behind the current US support of the MEK: defeating Iran, the biggest enemy of the US in the Middle East.

In 2015, the Obama administration, along with the UK, China, Russia and Germany reached a deal with the Iranian government. According to the agreement, Tehran would limit its nuclear programme and the world powers sat at the table would remove economic sanctions on Iran.

The US end of the deal eventually fell through when US President Donald Trump decided to withdraw from the agreement in May 2018. Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton, who long advocated for the removal of the agreement, and Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s lawyer, have been taking to the stage at the MEK’s rallies, where the speakers are reportedly paid $30,000 to $50,000 per event. Despite speaking at the rallies, neither Giuliani or Bolton have ever confirmed receiving payment from the MEK.

For the US, the rebranded version of the group is the best alternative to fight against Iran, and Rajavi has been leading an expensive propaganda campaign through events at which she aims to attract more supporters. The group’s supporters often make appearances in front of buildings where Iranian officials are attending political gatherings outside of Iran. The group advertises itself as the ‘popular opposition’, but the fact is that it is "almost universally despised among Iranians both inside the country and in the diaspora."

Is it a cult?

Despite describing its founding principles as a mixture of Marxism and Islam, the group has practices that are characteristic of neither Islam nor Marxism. For followers of the MEK, applying those practices is a matter of dedication and obligatory as much as working against the Iranian government.

It includes the strict segregation of men and women almost from toddlerhood, compulsory divorce and a ban on having children. The members of the group reportedly attend weekly gatherings where they have to confess and clean any idea they have that could conflict with the rules.

The ideology is justified by the group as being in the state of war. “Soldiers can’t have wives and husbands,” one of the followers of the group was quoted as saying in a New York Times article in 2003.

Human rights groups often denounce the group’s cult practices and reported abuses such as torture, solitary confinement and compulsory divorce.

Source: TRT World

https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/mek-who-is-this-iranian-cult-backed-by-the-us-24178

Terrorists, cultists - or champions of Iranian democracy? The wild wild story of the MEK

They fought for the Iranian revolution – and then for Saddam Hussein. The US and UK once condemned them. But now their opposition to Tehran has made them favourites of Trump White House hardliners. 

Arron Merat

The Guardian
November 9, 2018

Mostafa and Robabe Mohammadi came to Albania to rescue their daughter. But in Tirana, the capital, the middle-aged couple have been followed everywhere by two Albanian intelligence agents. Men in sunglasses trailed them from their hotel on George W Bush Road to their lawyer’s office; from the lawyer’s office to the ministry of internal affairs; and from the ministry back to the hotel.

The Mohammadis say their daughter, Somayeh, is being held against her will by a fringe Iranian revolutionary group that has been exiled to Albania, known as the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Widely regarded as a cult, the MEK was once designated as a terrorist organisation by the US and UK, but its opposition to the Iranian government has now earned it the support of powerful hawks in the Trump administration, including national security adviser John Bolton and the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.

Somayeh Mohammadi is one of about 2,300 members of the MEK living inside a heavily fortified base that has been built on 34 hectares of farmland in north-west Albania. Her parents, who were once supporters of the group, say that 21 years ago, Somayeh flew to Iraq to attend a summer camp and to visit her maternal aunt’s grave. She never came back.

The couple have spent the past two decades trying to get their daughter out of the MEK, travelling from their home in Canada to Paris, Jordan, Iraq and now Albania. “We are not against any group or any country,” Mostafa said, sitting outside a meatball restaurant in central Tirana. “We just want to see our daughter outside the camp and without her commanders. She can choose to stay or she can choose to come home with us.” The MEK insists Somayeh does not wish to leave the camp, and has released a letter in which she accuses her father of working for Iranian intelligence.

“Somayeh is a shy girl,” her mother said. “They threaten people like her. She wants to leave but she is scared that they will kill her.”

Since its exile from Iran in the early 1980s, the MEK has been committed to the overthrow of the Islamic republic. But it began in the 1960s as an Islamist-Marxist student militia, which played a decisive role in helping to topple the Shah during the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and anti-American, MEK fighters killed scores of the Shah’s police in often suicidal street battles during the 1970s. The group targeted US-owned hotels, airlines and oil companies, and was responsible for the deaths of six Americans in Iran. “Death to America by blood and bonfire on the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the Iranian people,” went one of its most famous songs. “May America be annihilated.”

Such attacks helped pave the way for the return of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who quickly identified the MEK as a serious threat to his plan to turn Iran into an Islamic republic under the control of the clergy. The well-armed middle-class guerrillas, although popular among religious students and intellectuals, would prove to be no match for Khomeini’s organisation and ruthlessness.

Following the revolution, Khomeini used the security services, the courts and the media to choke off the MEK’s political support and then crush it entirely. After it fought back, killing more than 70 senior leaders of the Islamic republic – including the president and Iran’s chief justice – in audacious bomb attacks, Khomeini ordered a violent crackdown on MEK members and sympathisers. The survivors fled the country.

Saddam Hussein, who was fighting a bloody war against Iran with the backing of the UK and the US, saw an opportunity to deploy the exiled MEK fighters against the Islamic republic. In 1986, he offered the group weapons, cash and a vast military base named Camp Ashraf, only 50 miles from the border with Iran.

For almost two decades, under their embittered leader Massoud Rajavi, the MEK staged attacks against civilian and military targets across the border in Iran and helped Saddam suppress his own domestic enemies. But after siding with Saddam – who indiscriminately bombed Iranian cities and routinely used chemical weapons in a war that cost a million lives – the MEK lost nearly all the support it had retained inside Iran. Members were now widely regarded as traitors.

Isolated inside its Iraqi base, under Rajavi’s tightening grip, the MEK became cult-like. A report commissioned by the US government, based on interviews within Camp Ashraf, later concluded that the MEK had “many of the typical characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian control, confiscation of assets, sexual control (including mandatory divorce and celibacy), emotional isolation, forced labour, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options”.

After the US invasion of Iraq, the MEK launched a lavish lobbying campaignto reverse its designation as a terrorist organisation – despite reports implicating the group in assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists as recently as 2012. Rajavi has not been seen since 2003 – most analysts assume he is dead – but under the leadership of his wife, Maryam Rajavi, the MEK has won considerable support from sections of the US and European right, eager for allies in the fight against Tehran.

In 2009, the UK delisted the MEK as a terror group. The Obama administration removed the group from the US terror list in 2012, and later helped negotiate its relocation to Albania.

At the annual “Free Iran” conference that the group stages in Paris each summer, dozens of elected US and UK representatives – along with retired politicians and military officials – openly call for the overthrow of the Islamic republic and the installation of Maryam Rajavi as the leader of Iran. At last year’s Paris rally, the Conservative MP David Amess announced that “regime change … is at long last within our grasp”. At the same event, Bolton – who championed war with Iran long before he joined the Trump administration – announced that he expected the MEK to be in power in Tehran before 2019. “The behaviour and the objectives of the regime are not going to change and, therefore, the only solution is to change the regime itself,” he declared.

The main attraction at this year’s Paris conference was another longtime MEK supporter, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, now Donald Trump’s lawyer. “The mullahs must go. The ayatollah must go,” he told the crowd. “And they must be replaced by a democratic government which Madam Rajavi represents.” Giuliani also praised the work of MEK “resistance units” inside Iran, that he credited with stoking a recent wave of protests over the struggling economy. “These protests are not happening by accident,” he said. “They’re being coordinated by many of our people in Albania.” (Giuliani, Bolton and the late John McCain are among the US politicians who have travelled to Albania to show support for the MEK.)

Meanwhile, back in Albania, the MEK is struggling to hold on to its own members, who have begun to defect. The group is also facing increased scrutiny from local media and opposition parties, who question the terms of the deal that brought the MEK fighters to Tirana.

It would be hard to find a serious observer who believes the MEK has the capacity or support within Iran to overthrow the Islamic republic. But the US and UK politicians loudly supporting a tiny revolutionary group stranded in Albania are playing a simpler game: backing the MEK is the easiest way to irritate Tehran. And the MEK, in turn, is only one small part of a wider Trump administration strategy for the Middle East, which aims to isolate and economically strangle Iran.

Before the MEK could become a darling of the American and European right, it had to reinvent itself. Democracy, human rights and secularism would become the group’s new mantra – as its leader, Maryam Rajavi, renounced violence and successfully repositioned an anti-western sect as a pro-American democratic government-in-waiting.

The long march to respectability began with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The war toppled Saddam Hussein, the MEK’s patron and protector, but it brought the group into direct contact with US officials – who would soon be looking for additional ammunition against Iran.

The US had designated the MEK as a terrorist group in the late 1990s, as a goodwill gesture toward a new reformist government in Tehran. When George W Bush accused Saddam Hussein of “harbouring terrorists” in a 2002 speech that made the case for invading Iraq, he was actually referring to the MEK. But in the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, a row erupted inside the White House over what to do with the 5,000 MEK fighters inside their base at Camp Ashraf.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, argued that the MEK was on the list of terrorist organisations and should be treated as such. But Iran hawks, including then secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and vice-president Dick Cheney, argued that the MEK should be used as a weapon against the Islamic republic – the next target in the neoconservative roadmap for remaking the Middle East. (“Boys go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran,” was their half-joking refrain.)

Rumsfeld’s faction won out. Although the group was still listed as a terrorist organisation, the Pentagon unilaterally designated MEK fighters inside Camp Ashraf as “protected persons” under the Geneva conventions – officially disarmed, but with their security effectively guaranteed by US forces in Iraq. The US was protecting a group it also designated as terrorists.

There is no doubt that US hawks regarded the MEK as a weapon in the fight against Iran: as early as May 2003, the same month that Bush famously declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, the New York Times reported that “Pentagon hardliners” were moving to protect the MEK, “and perhaps reconstitute it later as a future opposition organisation in Iran, somewhat along the lines of the US-supported Iraqi opposition under Ahmed Chalabi that preceded the war in Iraq”. In 2003, the Bush administration refused an offer, signed off by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, to hand over MEK leaders in Iraq in exchange for members of the military council of al-Qaida and relatives of Osama bin Laden, who had been captured by Iran as they fled Afghanistan after September 11.

As the US occupation of Iraq collapsed into a nightmarish civil war, the American right increasingly blamed Iran for the country’s disintegration. Senior politicians openly called for bombing the Islamic republic, amid growing panic over Iran’s nuclear programme – the existence of which had first been exposed by the MEK in what the BBC called a “propaganda coup” for the group. (Several experts on Israeli intelligence have reported that Mossad passed these documents to the MEK.) By 2007, US news outlets were reporting that Bush had signed a classified directive authorising “covert action” inside Iran.

Between 2007 and 2012, seven Iranian nuclear scientists were attacked with poison or magnetic bombs affixed to moving cars by passing motorcyclists; five were killed. In 2012, NBC news, citing two unnamed US officials, reported that the attacks were planned by Israel’s foreign intelligence agency and executed by MEK agents inside Iran. An MEK spokesperson called this a “false claim … whose main source is the mullahs’ regime”.

It was around this time that the MEK began working to remake its image in the west. Groups associated with the MEK donated to political campaigns, blanketed Washington with advertisements and paid western political influencers fees to pen op-eds and give speeches – and to lobby for its removal from the list of designated terrorist organisations.

A stupendously long list of American politicians from both parties were paid hefty fees to speak at events in favour of the MEK, including Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrich and former Democratic party chairs Edward Rendell and Howard Dean – along with multiple former heads of the FBI and CIA. John Bolton, who has made multiple appearances at events supporting the MEK, is estimated to have received upwards of $180,000. According to financial disclosure forms, Bolton was paid $40,000 for a single appearance at the Free Iran rally in Paris in 2017.

A handful of UK politicians have attended two or more of the MEK’s Paris events in the past three years, including the Conservatives Bob Blackman and Matthew Offord, and the Labour MPs Roger Godsiff and Toby Perkins. The Conservative MP and former minister Theresa Villiers has attended the past two annual Paris events. So has David Amess, the Conservative MP for Southend West – the MEK’s loudest champion in the UK parliament, who has also travelled to the US to speak at a rally in support of the group. (All of the MPs declined to reply to questions about their attendance.)

The other British attendees at this year’s Paris rally included three peers and five former MPs, including Mike Hancock, who resigned from the Liberal Democrats after admitting inappropriate behaviour with a constituent, and Michelle Thomson, who was forced to resign the SNP whip in 2015 in a controversy over property deals. The former Bishop of Oxford, John Pritchard, was also there, carrying a petition in support of the MEK signed by 75 bishops, including the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

At this year’s event, flanked by union jacks and “#RegimeChange” signs, Villiers spoke of the importance of women’s rights, “paid tribute” to Maryam Rajavi – who is barred from entering the UK – and pledged support for her “just cause” in seeking to create “an Iran which is free from the brutal repression of the mullahs”. In a carefully stage-managed performance, Rajavi laid flowers and wrote a tribute in an enormous yearbook of MEK martyrs. “The time has come for the regime’s overthrow,” she said. “Victory is certain, and Iran will be free.”

One day after the conference, the MEK accused Tehran of plotting a bomb attack against the event, following the arrest of four suspects – including an unnamed Iranian diplomat – in Belgium, Germany and France. Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, rejected claims of Iran’s involvement and described the accusations as a “sinister false flag ploy”.

Even as the MEK successfully amassed political allies in the west, its security in Iraq eroded as US troops departed. Between 2009 and 2013, Iraqi security forces raided the MEK base at least twice, killing about 100 people. Nouri al-Maliki, then the prime minister of Iraq – whose ambassador to the US called the group “nothing more than a cult” – insisted it leave the country.

Daniel Benjamin, who was then the head of counter-terrorism at the state department, told me that the US decided to remove the MEK from the list of foreign terrorist organisations not because it believed it had abandoned violence, but to “avoid them all getting killed” if it remained in Iraq. After the MEK was no longer designated a terrorist group, the US was able to convince Albania to accept the 2,700 remaining members – who were brought to Tirana on a series of charter flights between 2014 and 2016.

The group bought up land in Albania and built a new base. But the move from Iraq to the relative safety of Albania has precipitated a wave of defections. Those with means have fled the country to the EU and the US, but around 120 recent MEK escapees remain in Tirana with no right to work or emigrate. I spoke to about a dozen defectors, half of whom are still in Albania, who said that MEK commanders systematically abused members to silence dissent and prevent defections – using torture, solitary confinement, the confiscation of assets and the segregation of families to maintain control over members. In response to these allegations, an MEK spokesperson said: “The individuals who are described as ‘former members’ were being used as part of a demonisation campaign against the MEK.”

The testimony of these recent defectors follows earlier reports from groups such as Human Rights Watch, which reported former members witnessed “beatings, verbal and psychological abuse, coerced confessions, threats of execution and torture that in two cases led to death”.

The MEK grew out of Iran’s Liberation Movement, an Islamic-democratic “loyal opposition” established in 1961 by the supporters of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister ousted in a 1953 coup orchestrated by Britain and the US. The movement called for national sovereignty, freedom of political activity and the separation of mosque and state. The MEK cleaved to these traditions, but responded to the growing repression of the Shah throughout the 1960s and 70s by rejecting nonviolence.

At the time, the MEK, whose members were largely idealistic middle-class students, combined Islamism with Marxist doctrine. They reinterpreted the Qur’anic passages that undergirded their Shia faith as injunctions to socialise the means of production, eliminate the class system and promote the struggles of Iran’s ethnic minorities. Steeped in thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray, they expressed solidarity with national liberation movements in Algeria, Cuba, Palestine and Vietnam. Quoting Lenin’s famous pamphlet, the MEK posed the question: “What Is to Be Done?” “Our answer is straightforward,” the MEK wrote: “Armed struggle.”

Rajavi was among 69 members of the MEK tried in 1972 by a military tribunal for plotting acts of terrorism. “The ruling class is on its deathbed,” he told the tribunal. When the prosecutor interrupted him to ask why he had acquired weapons, Rajavi replied: “To deal with the likes of you.”

Of the 11 members of the MEK central committee tried in 1972, nine were immediately executed and one remained in jail. When Rajavi emerged from prison in 1979, three weeks before the Iranian revolution, he was the undisputed leader of Iran’s most deadly underground rebel group.

The MEK played an important role in the 1979 revolution, seizing the imperial palace and doing much of the fighting to neutralise the police and the army. Two days after the revolution, Massoud Rajavi, who was 30, met the 77-year-old supreme leader. The two did not hit it off. “I met Khomeini,” Rajavi told a journalist in 1981. “He held out his hand for me to kiss, and I refused. Since then, we’ve been enemies.”

Khomeini saw the MEK as a threat to his power, barring Rajavi from running for president and casting his organisation as an enemy of Islam. Armed members of the newly created Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) disrupted MEK events, burned its literature and beat up its members. Without political power, the MEK relied on street protests. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians attended its rallies, which the courts soon banned.

In response, the MEK and the president, Abolhassan Banisadr, who was also antagonistic to Khomeini, organised two days of protests across 30 cities – forcing Khomeini to go on television to reiterate the ban. The MEK, he said, were “waging war on God”. Other clerics warned that demonstrators would be shot on sight. On 20 June 1981, the MEK organised a mass protest of half a million people in Tehran, with the aim of triggering a second revolution. The clerics were true to their word: 50 demonstrators were killed, with 200 wounded. Banisadr was removed from office and a wave of executions followed.

Over the following months and years, the violence escalated. Khomeini rounded up thousands of MEK supporters – while his loyalists launched waves of mob violence against MEK members and sympathisers.

By December, the regime had executed 2,500 members of the MEK. The group counter-attacked with a spate of assassinations and suicide bombings against Friday-prayer leaders, revolutionary court judges and members of the IRGC. “I am willing to die to help hasten the coming of the classless society; to keep alive our revolutionary tradition; and to avenge our colleagues murdered by this bloodthirsty, reactionary regime,” wrote one MEK fighter, Ebrahimzadeh, who killed 13 IRGC and Ayatollah Sadduqi, a close advisor to Khomeini, by detonating a hand grenade in a suicide attack in July 1982.

By the mid-1980s, thousands of people labelled as MEK had been executed or killed in street battles by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

This was the time when Rajavi accepted Saddam’s offer to fight Iran from the safety of Iraq. Over the next few years, Rajavi launched an “ideological revolution”, banning marriage and enforcing mandatory “eternal” divorce on all members, who were required to separate from their husbands or wives. He married one of the new divorcees, Maryam Azodanlu, who became, in effect, his chief lieutenant and took his name.

For Saddam, the MEK was a useful, but disposable, tool in his war against Iran. The MEK, however, was totally dependent on the Iraqi leader. In addition to cash and arms, he sent Iranian prisoners of war to Rajavi as new recruits. “The whole world was Camp Ashraf,” said Edward Tramado, one of these prisoners, remembering his indoctrination. “Nothing else had any meaning for me,” recalled Tramado, who now lives in Germany. “I was living in a delusional world. Even though I knew I had a mother who was waiting for me, my entire world had become what they had constructed for me.”

In July 1988, six days after the ceasefire that officially ended the Iran-Iraq war, the MEK launched a suicidal mission deep into Iranian territory, dubbed Operation Eternal Light. Once again, Rajavi predicted his actions would spark another revolution. “It will be like an avalanche,” Rajavi told the fighters he was about to send to their deaths. “You don’t need to take anything with you. We will be like fish swimming in a sea of people. They will give you whatever you need.”

The mission would end in a massacre: hapless MEK fighters were lured into an ambush by the Iranian army, which crushed them with minimal effort. One Iranian soldier who took part in the operation recently described it to me. Mehrad, who volunteered in 1987 at the age of 15, recalled that his division, which had fought against Iraqi soldiers on the southern front, was redeployed to the north in July 1988 to repel a new assault from Iraq. His division was sent to a location near the city of Kermanshah, about 111 miles (180km) from the border with Iraq. Mehrad and his fellow soldiers were surprised to hear that enemy soldiers had managed to make such a deep incursion into Iran. “We thought our army had given up,” he said.

When he arrived, Mehrad discovered that the enemy was the MEK – which had been led into a trap. “Their military strategy was very stupid,” he told me. “They just drove down the Tehran highway. It was like if the French army wanted to invade England and they just drove down the motorway from Dover to London.”

“We very quickly killed thousands of them,” Mehrad said. “There were piles of bodies on either side of the road. What was interesting to us was that many of them were women.” Some MEK took cyanide rather than be captured alive. The MEK subsequently claimed that 1,304 of its members were martyred, and another 1,100 returned to Iraq injured.

The survivors were tried on the spot and quickly executed; Mehrad watched as hundreds were hanged at gallows erected in the nearby town of Eslamabad. Khomeini then used the failed invasion as a pretext for the mass execution of thousands of MEK and other leftists in Iranian jails. Amnesty estimates that more than 4,500 people were put to death, and some sources say the numbers were even higher.

Eternal Light marked a major turning point for the MEK. Inside the barbed wire of Camp Ashraf, as the reality of indefinite exile sank in, a traumatised and grief-stricken membership turned against itself under the paranoid leadership of Rajavi. Several former members told me that after the bloody defeat, Massoud Rajavi cast himself as the representative of al-Mahdi, the 12th Imam who was “hidden” in the 9th century and who, according to Iranian Shia, will return alongside Jesus to bring peace and justice to the world.

Outside Camp Ashraf, the MEK continued to stage cross-border attacks against Iran, and helped Saddam to crush uprisings against his rule after his defeat by the US in the 1990 Gulf war. In March 1991, Saddam deployed the MEK to help quell the armed Kurdish independence movement in the north. According to the New York Times, Maryam Rajavi told her fighters: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian revolutionary guards.” The MEK vehemently denies it participated in Saddam’s campaigns to put down the Shia and Kurdish rebellions, but an Iraqi human rights tribunal has indicted MEK leaders for their role in suppressing the uprisings.

Karwan Jamal Tahir, the Kurdistan regional government’s high representative in London, was a fighter for the Kurdish peshmerga in 1991. He told me that he remembers how the MEK arrived in the town of Kalar, about 93 miles (150km) south-east of Kirkuk, just after Saddam had lost control of the north of Iraq after the first Gulf war. “They came in Saddam’s tanks,” he said. “We thought they were returning peshmerga because the tanks were covered with portraits of Kurdish leaders … but they opened fire on the town … It was a big atrocity.”

In the next decade, the MEK continued to fight against Iran. In 1992, the group launched concurrent attacks on Iranian diplomatic missions in 10 countries, including Iran’s permanent mission to the UN in New York, which was invaded by five men with knives. The MEK also settled more personal scores. In 1998, an assassin killed Asadollah Lajevardi, the former warden of Evin prison who had personally overseen the executions of thousands of MEK members.

Back at Camp Ashraf, commanders would tell wavering members that if they escaped, they would face certain death at the hands of either Saddam or the Iranian authorities. “We were far away from the world,” one member, who only escaped the MEK after the move to Albania, told me. “We had no information. No television, no radio.” Instead, within the camp, they had “Mojahedin television”, which consisted of looped speeches by Maryam and Massoud Rajavi, played “all day long”.

Rajavi told his followers that the failure of Eternal Light was not a military blunder, but was instead rooted in the members’ thoughts for their spouses; their love had sapped their will to fight. In 1990, all couples inside the camp were ordered to divorce – and women had their wedding rings replaced by pendants engraved with Massoud’s face. Spouses were separated, and their children were sent to be “adopted” by MEK supporters in Europe.

MEK commanders demanded that all members publicly reveal any errant sexual thoughts. Manouchelur Abdi, a 55-year-old who also left the MEK in Albania, told me that the confession sessions used to take place every morning. Even feelings of love and friendship were outlawed, he says. “I would have to confess that I missed my daughter,” he says. “They would shout at me. They would humiliate me. They would say that my family was the enemy and missing them was strengthening the hand of the mullahs in Tehran.”

Another recent defector, Ali (not his real name) showed me scars on his arms and legs from what he described as weeks of torture after he first joined the group in the early 1990s, including cigarette burns on his arms. When it was over, he said, he was taken to Baghdad to meet the leader. “They took us into a big hall. Massoud Rajavi was sitting there with a group of women,” Ali recalled. “[Rajavi said] ‘If any of you say one word to any one … One word, if any of this is exposed, reaches anyone else’s ears, or if you talk about leaving, you’ll be delivered to [Saddam’s] intelligence service immediately.’”

Batoul Soltani joined the MEK in 1986 with her husband and infant daughter. At first, her family was able to live together, but in 1990, she says she was forced to divorce and give up her five-year-old daughter and newborn son, who were sent abroad to be raised by MEK sympathisers. Soltani alleges that she was forced to have sex with Massoud Rajavi on multiple occasions, beginning in 1999. She says that the last assault was in 2006, the year that she escaped from Camp Ashraf and a time when Rajavi had not been seen in public for three years. When we spoke recently, Soltani accused Maryam Rajavi of helping Massoud to abuse female MEK members over the years. “[Massoud] Rajavi thought that the only achilles heel [for female fighters] was the opposite sex,” Soltani told me. “He would say that the only reason you women would leave me is a man. So, I want all of your hearts.”

Soltani, who was one of three women to speak about sexual abuse inside the MEK in a 2014 documentary aired on Iranian television, alleged that Rajavi had hundreds of “wives” inside the camp.

Another former female member, Zahra Moini, who served as a bodyguard for Maryam Rajavi, told me that women were threatened with punishment if they did not divorce their husbands and “marry” Massoud. “Maryam was involved in this sexual abuse, she used to read the vows to allow for the marriage to be consummated,” Moini said, in a telephone interview from Germany.

“Those who didn’t accept to marry would be disappeared. I was told that if I didn’t divorce [my husband], I would end up in Ramadi prison and I would have to sleep with the Iraqi generals every night.” (In response to questions about these allegations, an MEK spokesperson said: “The mullahs’ propaganda machine has been churning out sexual libels against the resistance and its leader for the past 40 years.”)

Two other female defectors, Zahra Bagheri and Fereshteh Hedayati, have alleged that they were given hysterectomies without their consent in the Camp Ashraf hospital, under the pretext they were being operated on for minor ailments. In the eccentric ideological language of the group, the women say the procedure was retrospectively justified to victims as representing “the peak” of loyalty to their leader.

Hedayati, who survived the massacres of Operation Eternal Light, joined the MEK as a 22-year-old in 1981 with her husband, who is still inside the group. “They said I had a cyst,” she told me. “But they also took out my womb. They told me that it meant that I had an even stronger connection to our ideological leader.” Hedayati, who left the group in Iraq and now lives in Norway, says she was never sexually abused, but was “brainwashed” by the group into divorcing her husband, and alleges that more than 100 other women were sterilised by MEK doctors. “I always ask myself why they did this to us,” Bagheri said. “Of course, to take away our futures.”

Between an escape attempt in 2001 and her exit from the MEK in 2013, Hedayati says she was subject to extraordinarily harsh treatment by her commanders. “They said I was a lesbian,” she says. “They spat on me, they beat me, they locked me up. I was put in jail, in solitary confinement.”

Albania ostensibly accepted the MEK members for humanitarian reasons – but the country’s leaders may have seen an opportunity to curry favour with the US government, which had seen its offers rejected by various other European states. “They were the only ones who would take them,” the former state department official Daniel Benjamin has said.

Olsi Jazexhi, a professor of history at the University of Durres critical of the government’s decision to accept the MEK fighters, says that Albanian politicians hoped the deal would lead the US to turn a blind eye to their own corruption. “The MEK is a card which gives them leverage with the United States,” he said. “They think that by taking the MEK, the Americans will leave their business alone.” (A secret US state department cable from 2009, published by WikiLeaks, said that the country’s three major parties “all have MPs with links to organised crime … Conventional wisdom, backed by other reporting, is that the new parliament has quite a few drug traffickers and money launderers.”)

For the Trump administration, the MEK is a valuable asset in the escalating regional conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This summer, Trump abruptly pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement and announced new sanctions, triggering a currency collapse and four months of sporadic protests across Iran. The US has reimposed tough sanctions this week, targeting Iranian oil exports and banking. But Trump’s Middle East strategy has come under new scrutiny after the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul – which has sparked a backlash against the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and his allies in the Trump administration.

For most of its life in exile, the MEK was funded by Saddam. After his downfall, the group says it raised money from Iranian diaspora organisations and individual donors. The MEK has always denied it is financed by Saudi Arabia – but the former Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, made waves when he attended the group’s 2016 rally in Paris and called for the fall of the Iranian regime.

“The money definitely comes from Saudis,” says Ervand Abrahamian, a professor at the City University of New York and author of the definitive academic work on the group’s history, The Iranian Mojahedin. “There is no one else who could be subsidising them with this level of finance.”

Analysts agree that the MEK lacks the capacity or support to overthrow the Iranian government – as even Bolton and Pompeo would surely concede. “They are probably smart enough to know that this group is not democratic and anyway has no constituency inside Iran,” said Paul Pillar, who served in the CIA for 28 years, including a period as the agency’s senior counter-terrorism analyst. Trump and his Iran hawks, Pillar said, are not concerned with replacing the current regime so much as causing it to crumble. “They are pursuing anything that would disrupt the political order in Iran so they and the president can cite such an outcome as a supposed victory no matter what comes afterwards.”

According to one recent MEK defector, Hassan Heyrani, the group’s main work in Albania involves fighting online in an escalating information war between Iran and its rivals. Heyrani, who left the MEK last summer, says that he worked in a “troll farm” of 1,000 people inside the Albanian camp, posting pro-Rajavi and anti-Iran propaganda in English, Farsi and Arabic on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram and newspaper comment sections.

“We worked from morning to night with fake accounts,” he says. “We had orders daily that the commanders would read for us. ‘It is your duty to promote this senator, this politician, or journalist writing against Iran’ and we would say ‘Thank you, the Iranian people support you and Maryam Rajavi is the rightful leader’, but if there was a negative story on the MEK, we would post ‘You are the mercenaries of the Iranian regime, you are not the voice of the Iranian people, you don’t want freedom for Iran’.” An MEK spokesperson called these allegations “another lie” made up to support the Iranian foreign ministry.

According to Marc Owen Jones, an academic who studies political bots on social media, “thousands” of suspicious Twitter accounts emerged in early 2016 with “Iran” as their location and “human rights” in their description or account name, which posted in support of Trump and the MEK. These accounts, says Jones, were created in batches and would promote Trump’s anti-Iran rhetoric using the hashtags #IranRegimeChange, #FreeIran and #IstandwithMaryamRajavi.

Albanian journalists say that the MEK, which has close contacts with senior politicians and the security services, operates with impunity within Albania. Ylli Zyla, who served as head of Albanian military intelligence from 2008 to 2012, accused the MEK of violating Albanian law. “Members of this organisation live in Albania as hostages,” he told me. Its camp, he said, was beyond the jurisdiction of Albanian police and “extraordinary psychological violence and threats of murder” took place inside.

Former members accuse the MEK of responsibility for the death in June of Malek Shara’i, a senior commander who was found drowned by police divers at bottom of a reservoir behind the group’s Albanian base. Shara’i’s sister, Zahra Shara’i, said that his family had received news from former members that Malek was about to escape, and says the MEK was responsible for his death. “I am their enemy and I will not rest until I get my revenge,” she told the Guardian from Iran. The MEK said that Shara’i drowned while attempting to save another member from drowning. The Albanian police said the death was not suspicious.

While defectors with private means have been smuggled out of the country into the EU, many former members live hand-to-mouth in Tirana. The Albanian state has not granted refugee rights to the MEK or its defectors, and a UN monthly stipend of 30,000 lek (£215) lapsed on 1 September. “They’re stuck,” says Jazexhi, who has worked to support the defectors. “They don’t know the languages, they don’t know the laws, they don’t know what democracy is. They are used to dictators. We tell them that they shouldn’t be afraid.”

Migena Balla, the lawyer representing Mostafa and Robabe Mohammadi, the couple in Tirana fighting for the release of their daughter Somayeh, believes that pressure has been put to bear on both the police and the judiciary to ensure the MEK does not “create political problems”. “Politics is interfering in the judicial system,” she says. “When I went to the police station to register their complaint the police officers actually ran away. They are scared of losing their jobs.”

The MEK has not taken kindly to the presence of the Mohammadis in Albania. They accuse Mostafa – and any former member who has spoken out against the MEK – of being a paid agent of the “mullah regime”. On 27 July, Mostafa was hospitalised following an assault by four senior members of the MEK, which was captured on video by his wife. The attackers, who shouted “Terrorist!” at Mohammadi, were briefly detained by Albanian police. But, after a phalanx of MEK members arrived at the police station, the men were promptly released.

The MEK has published letters, purportedly written by Somayeh, accusing her father of being an Iranian intelligence agent. A nervous-looking Somayeh recently gave a video interview inside the MEK base saying that she wishes to remain a member of the group.

The Mohammadis have responded with open letters to their daughter and to Albanian politicians, calling for an unsupervised meeting with their daughter. “I am your mother Mahboubeh Robabe Hamza and I want to meet with you,” Robabe wrote to Somayeh. “I am the woman who fed you at my breast, I held you in the crook of my arm. You are my flesh and blood … I love you more than my life … I’m getting old, I am getting tired, but life is not worth living without seeing you.”

Arron Merat was a Tehran correspondent for the Economist between 2011 and 2014. He has covered Iran for the Guardian, the Sunday Times and Vice News. He tweets at @a_merat

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/09/mek-iran-revolution-regime-trump-rajavi

RIDC - Research Institute on Destructive Cults

Articles & papers by Masoud Banisadr
English/Farsi

http://www.ridc.info/

Deceptive Recruitment - from Canada to Colorado

Anne Khodabandeh
Iranian.com
February 9, 2016

Neda Hassani (center)

A father from Aurora, Colorado managed a last minute rescue of his daughter and two other girls from the nightmare of travelling to Syria. He said he’d had no previous indication that she had been radicalised, but that his intuition kicked in when he discovered that her passport was missing and he found texts to Lufthansa airlines and a local taxi firm on her phone.

Once his daughter was home safe he learned how ISIS tricked his daughter and others over the internet.

“ISIS plays on Muslims’ emotions,” he said. “They play on the [idea] that you are living in a country where people are going to go to hell. Your parents, since they are living there, they are the same like these other people, even if your parents are Muslim. And you need to save yourself. How am I going to save myself? You need to come over here .. live under Islamic rule. We’re going to give you a house, you’re going to get married. You’re going to get to have nice kids, have a nice life … and it’s a noble cause. But all that’s wrong. All that’s wrong. There is no safe place there. People are all on the run. There’s always fighting going on somewhere. There’s no houses, there’s no nice life. There are just a bunch of terrorists. And for these females to get there, they’re just going to get raped, get killed.”

This put me in mind of a young Iranian woman I got to know in London in 1996 just as I was on the point of finally severing all ties with the Mojahedin Khalq (MEK) terrorist cult. Interestingly it was through Neda Hassani that I met my future husband because she worked in the MEK’s Westminster based PR office where he was also stationed and I was sent to work with her. How ironic it seems now that while Massoud and I were leaving, she was getting more deeply involved. Like ships in the night we passed each other by, unaware of our future destinies. Even at the time I remember trying to talk to her and explain that the MEK are not what she thought they were. But of course, the radicalisation process had already begun and she couldn’t heed my warnings.

Neda was in London for only a brief time before being dispatched to the military training camp in Iraq. Her parents had sent her from Canada after she had finished her studies and had just begun working. Neda had told me she hadn’t wanted to leave Canada and that she enjoyed her new job there. But the MEK had persuaded her parents that she would be in moral danger if she stayed in Canada, that she would abandon her Iranian upbringing and become a wild, immoral girl, taking drugs, drinking and having a series of boyfriends. Of course, anyone who met Neda could instantly see that she wasn’t that kind of person. Her parents should have been tremendously proud of this kind, thoughtful, ambitious young woman who exuded joie de vivre.

Instead the MEK tricked them into believing that their harsh military camps in Iraq were the ideal place to keep her safe from bourgeoise Western corruption. The MEK, they were told, promoted women and gave them responsibilities above men. Neda, they were told, would be at the forefront of a noble struggle to free Iran and that she would remain celibate until ‘after the revolution’.
  
As long-time peripheral supporters of the MEK, Neda’s parents had no idea of the reality behind the lies and propaganda. They had no idea of the cultic abuse taking place in Iraq turning ordinary people into disposable brainwashed gladiators.

The next time I came across Neda was in a photograph for a magazine article taken in Camp Ashraf showing her sitting on a tank with another combatant looking relaxed and happy. The writer had clearly been easily fooled by such appearances and wrote in glowing praise about the women there. This was in direct contrast with another article The Cult of Rajavi by Elizabeth Rubin in The New York Times magazine on July 13, 2003. Rubin had also visited Camp Ashraf but was not fooled by the MEK’s talk. She graphically described the cultic conditions in the camp, and the bizarre behaviour of the group and its members, especially the women.

This article was published one month after Neda Hassani’s death. Neda died from her injuries after setting herself on fire in London to ‘protect’ MEK second-in-command Maryam Rajavi. Rajavi, who had been arrested on terrorism charges in Paris only days before, ordered several members to commit self-immolation to force the French government to let her go. Neda’s family found a poem to Maryam Rajavi written the night before she died which said "Against the flow of savage winds, I give my spirit to protect you".

What kind of brainwashing does it take to get a young woman who has everything to live for to kill herself so that someone else wouldn’t have to face criminal charges? As a leader of a terrorist cult, Maryam Rajavi had already ordered the deaths of thousands of Iranians and Iraqis. This was business as usual for her. But Neda’s death wasn’t even for the cause her parents believed in. They sent her to Iraq to struggle for the freedom of the Iranian people, not the freedom of a vain and cruel woman.

Former members of cults like the MEK are familiar with the deception and psychological manipulation exerted on the members. They now see that young people in Western countries are being deceived in much the same way by ISIS.

Fortunately for the young women in Aurora, at least one parent was vigilant and courageous enough to rescue them. I like to think that Neda’s parents very quickly became aware of their mistake. Certainly when her mother was asked if others should follow her daughter's example she told reporters: "I hope not, I hope not”.

I don’t know what lesson can be drawn from this except that every society needs to learn about deceptive recruitment and cultic abuse. People – young and old – who know how deceptive psychological manipulation is used will not succumb to its persuasions.

Living and Escaping a Terrorist Cult

ANNA PIVOVARCHUK AND MASOUD BANISADR
Fair Observer
January  8, 2016

In this edition of The Interview, Fair Observer talks to Masoud Banisadr, a former member of Mujahedeen-e-Khalq.

In 1965, Mujahedeen-e-Khalq(MeK) was established in Iran in opposition to US imperialism. Espousing a blend of Marxism and Islam, the group helped bring about the Iranian Revolution of 1979. However, after breaking with the revolutionary government, MeK embarked on a terrorism campaign and was forced into exile, losing followers in Iran after its support for Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War.

MeK was designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department until 2012. The Iranian government estimates that MeK activity has claimed some 12,000 Iranian lives over the last three decades.

Operating from exile, the organization had all the trappings of a cult. Attracting young, idealistic Muslims with slogans of Islamic justice and social freedom, it disrupted familial and social ties, forcing members to divorce their spouses and abandon relatives, making them dependent on the group through isolation, misinformation and manipulation.

Masoud Banisadr, a cousin of former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr, joined MeK while studying in Britain and served in its political wing for nearly 20 years. Finally leaving the group in 1996, he now writes about the dangers of cult ideology and the appeal of extremism. His books include Masoud: Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel and Destructive and Terrorist Cults: A New Kind of Slavery.

In this edition of The Interview, Fair Observer talks to Masoud Banisadr about what first attracted him to the MeK and what eventually forced him to escape. 

Anna Pivovarchuk: How was MeK different from other political organizations? What is your definition of a cult, and how does it fit into that image?

Masoud Banisadr: Cults resemble slavery more than they do political parties, which are idea-based. Cults, on the contrary, are leader- and behavior-based. They claim to have an ideology that is useful for recruitment, to use it as a mind manipulation tool and to glue followers to each other. But when you look at them closely, you will see that they have taken shape around a leader and a code of behavior dictated by that leader.

Cult dogmas are shaped around behavior. For example, for a cult member, it is more important how he looks than how he thinks. In MeK, you could say I don’t believe in this or that principal of Islam, and nobody cared much. But if you behaved differently, if you didn’t follow or have enough loyalty toward the leader, you couldn’t stay in MeK for a second—same as al-Qaeda, same as Daesh [Islamic State]. In all of these organizations, you can see that what is important is survival of the group and absolute loyalty and obedience toward the leader.

The other main difference is that a cult is a way of life, and as slavery there is no way out of it till you die. When you are a member of a cult, it is the whole of you. Your motherhood and sisterhood is defined by being member of a cult. Your work is defined by being a member of a cult.

Pivovarchuk: So what makes people join a cult in the first place? Are there some common reasons?

Banisadr: I think people are recruited by cults rather than joining them freely. However, some people might be more vulnerable than others to fall in the trap of cults due to three main reasons.

The first is personal: I might have a problem of belonging, identity or not having a sense of purpose in life. These days, many young people lack a sense of belonging. Family ties are not as strong as before. Religion is not as important as before. Even nationality is not as relevant as before. This lack of feeling of belonging might attract them toward gangs, cults or groups of any sort to feed that longing. Imagine a young Muslim on the street who has nothing: Suddenly, when he joins a group like al-Qaeda or Daesh, he becomes a warrior, a martyr, a great hero. It’s a great change. People either love you or hate you, but at least you are not insignificant anymore.

The second is the cause: ideological, political, or philosophical, mainly as a means to seek justice. If you feel or see injustice and discrimination against yourself or against your community or religion, you feel you have to do something. Many young Muslims feel injustice against Palestinians in Israel, or they see the rise of Islamophobia in Western countries and feel they have to do something against it. Cults feed on injustice and claim they can offer people a way to seek justice. Cults also give an illusion of a sense of honor and a way for an ordinary normal person to feel that he/she can have an honorable life and that if one dies for the cause, they will be remembered as a martyr or a hero.

And the third reason might be that you have been born into a cult. Your parents have been followers of a cult, and as a result you have been raised in the cult.

Pivovarchuk: You talk about the personality of a cult leader being very important. You have to get people to buy into your narrative. How is that achieved?

Banisadr: After being recruited comes their mind manipulation. Although they have recruited you, using some sort of doctrine, or cause, forcing you to accept that if you join their cult you will become a better person. Still, they have to change you into a committed or, if I may say, blind follower or a “zealot” member. And here comes mind manipulation that I have divided in three intertwined stages.

The first stage is rational trickery and influence techniques that change your belief system. For example, if you are attached to the family, through some rational trickery, through some influence techniques, they can persuade you that your new family are the cult members rather than your parents or your siblings. They persuade you to fight for them—[as] the only way that you can seek justice for yourself or your community. Then using some influence techniques they will force you to do something to affiliate yourself with the group. They might start with small requests and then build on those small steps and gradually pull you deeper and deeper into their swamp.

The next stage is of “mind control”—control of environment and control of behavior. Because at this stage you are divided between who you were and who you are going to be, your feelings, your personality will force you to go back toward who you were.

I was born the year when the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh was violently overthrown by a CIA coup. It affected my generation and the later ones deeply.

To overcome the effect of your old feelings, cult leaders have to isolate you from the society and your past life; this will be done through control of environment. There is an Iranian expression that says, “Whoever leaves your eyes will eventually leave your heart.” By stopping you from having any contact with your parents and friends, gradually cults can stop you remembering your feelings toward your loved ones.

They can change your personality gradually by changing your behavior. For example, if you look at the people who became followers of Daesh or al-Qaeda, you can immediately see a change of appearances and behavior. For example, they grow a beard, or they grow or cut their hair, their clothes change, and also their behavior will change—in extreme form of it, used by Daesh. You have seen in the media that they have asked a British-born person to behead another person, or even destroy shrine of a Muslim saint. By doing that, Daesh will force that person to stand against his old personality by an extreme change of behavior. It is also a way of dehumanizing the outsiders and isolating a new follower not only from the society, but also from history, tradition, ethic and culture of his previous being.

Pivovarchuk: How important is this isolation from family and friends in altering someone’s idea of yourself? In your personal experience, what have you been told to do or asked to do?

Banisadr: When you say that I am a person, what does it mean? I am a person because of my set of beliefs, because of my principles, because of the way I think, because of the things that I enjoy, because of my relation to my family, my relation to parents, siblings, wife, children and so on. If you lose them one by one, then eventually you become an “unperson.” Nobody.

For example, I was in the last year of my PhD. But the way that MeK educated me, I was feeling ashamed of being a PhD student, not proud of it. Why? Because they were telling me that while I was studying and wanted to become a doctor, followers of the group were in prison under torture during the shah’s time. So instead of fighting, instead of sacrificing my life for the people, selfishly, I was studying. So instead of being proud of who I was, I was ashamed of it.

I was even ashamed of my family, because of my family name—because of my cousin, who was the president of Iran.

This is the new you—this new personality of yours. You change into a nobody, and you define yourself according to your cult personality. What is your rank in the cult? What is the relationship between you and the leader of the cult? How have you behaved in the cult? How successful have you been in the pursuit of the cult’s objectives?

I am calling it slavery because you change into an “unperson.” Your relationship with everybody else is defined via your relationship with the cult leader. Because whatever you do, you are not gaining anything for yourself and even your family and your society but for the cult leader. Like slaves whose existence was defined through their relationship to the master, and the fruit of their life was going to the master.

In MeK, we were not even allowed to think of our children and their wellbeing. The logic behind it was that while children in Iran are suffering, you wouldn’t dare let yourself think about your own children. As with slavery, you are a parent, but you are not a parent. You are a supervisor of your children, a person responsible for educating a child so he can change into another follower/slave of the leader/master. You have to teach your children: instead of loving you, love the leader. Instead of remembering grandparents, remember those who have sacrificed their life for the cult.

In slavery, at least in your dreams, in your desires, you are free. You can desire freedom because you can see that you are a slave. In your dream, you can remember your old life. Your country, your family. But in cults you can’t. Because through brainwashing, they have changed you into your own jailer. You even don’t dream of freedom as you are educated to think that you are freest person on earth.

Pivovarchuk: In your book, you say that you underwent a transformation from a “liberal middle-class semi-intellectual” to a zealot ready to die for the leader. It shows that those who join cults are not stupid or naïve, but that it’s a complicated psychological process. What caused this transformation that you talk about?

Banisadr: For me personally, I guess I have to go back to three slogans of the Iranian Revolution: independence, freedom and Islamic Republic.

I was born the year when the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh was violently overthrown by a CIA coup. It affected my generation and the later ones deeply. We wanted independence because we used to feel that our country was ruled by Americans—not physically, but we knew that the shah was a puppet of the US. So independence was very important to us.

The first thing to understand is what attracts young Muslims to these groups. I believe it is injustice—injustice against Muslims in different countries. It is very important we recognize this.

The second one was freedom, which was opposite of the dictatorship, and the censorship of shah’s regime. We understood political freedom more than any other freedom, probably because of the lack of it. So when we talked about freedom, we meant political freedom rather than liberalism as it is in the West, where it is mostly about personal freedom. During the shah’s regime, we almost had all personal freedom enjoyed by the Western youth, but there was a total lack of political freedom.

The third one was the Islamic Republic, which was mainly about social justice promised in Islam. We felt that people were divided between the superrich and super-poor, and if you were part of the system you could have everything. What attracted me among many other young people to the revolution were these three ideas, these slogans.

After the revolution, because I was in the UK, I couldn’t see for myself what was going on in Iran. I couldn’t judge for myself. The only source of information we had about what is going on in Iran was MeK papers. Even Western media, because they were against the Islamic Revolution and the new government in Iran, were feeding us with the same kind of news—all negative ones. So we felt that our country was even more unjust than before. What happened to freedom and Islamic justice?

MeK was even telling us that sooner or later, this new government would become the puppet of the United States. That because they cannot run the country, they will need the help of foreigners and will invite Americans and British. As you can see, for us it looked like everything was ruined and lost.

Pivovarchuk: What made you change your mind? What was the catalyst for you leaving the MeK?

Banisadr: As I mentioned before, cults—I believe all cults—have one weakness. They can change you, they can change your set of beliefs and everything, they can change your behavior, your appearance and so on. But they are unable to change one very important thing: They are unable to wipe out your memories. There are some fantasy stories where people have been brainwashed and have lost their memories and have found completely new personalities. That is fiction.

If you do not think about your feelings toward your past life, friends and families, your feeling toward them is still alive—though it is passive, paralyzed or asleep.

Anything can make it active. A smell reminds you of your childhood. A flower, a color or kindness from a stranger. Walking in the streets, seeing somebody who looks like your mother. Seeing love between a parent and children in the street. For the majority of followers of groups like MeK, Daesh and al-Qaeda that have been isolated (both psychologically and physically) from society and normal life, it is more difficult to save themselves because their feelings toward their loved ones cannot be triggered and remembered.

 MASOUD RAJAVI

But for a person like me, who had to travel to different countries to represent the group politically at the United Nations in Europe and the United States, the situation was different, because I could see other ordinary people.

The first thing that forced me to remember ordinary kindness was when I was traveling from France to the United States. I was so tired that I slept on the airplane, from the beginning almost to the end. When I woke up, there was an old lady sitting beside me, and I found out that she kept for me whatever was given out in the plane. It was a very natural, ordinary kindness, but it affected me greatly to understand ordinary life, ordinary human behavior, because in the cult you will categorize ordinary people just above animals. They dehumanize outsiders, so followers are ready to do anything for the cult. As you have noticed, followers of Daesh are ready to behead other human beings without any remorse or doubt.

In MeK, if you were called ordinary, it meant that they had called you a dog or a pig. To be ordinary is worse than any other swear words. And suddenly, I was facing the beauty of being ordinary. Beauty through love, through understanding, through simple empathy and compassion.

And the second thing that saved me was seeing my daughter and old friends in the UK. Remembering my love for my daughter. My family and friends.

And also after that, I was lucky because of my back problem I had to be hospitalized. And because the group was so busy with the different political meetings that Maryam Rajavi [wife of Masoud Rajavi and co-leader of MEK] had in London, they forgot about me. So for almost a month, or three weeks, I was in the hospital without having any kind of connection to the group.

In the hospital I could see other people. I remember there was a guy beside me who had an accident and his hands were in plaster. I used to give him lunch and I even helped him to shave. And he showed me kindness as well. These kinds of things suddenly force you to remember who you were and who you truly are: a human being.

Remembering feelings suddenly forced me to wake up from a very, very bad dream. Although I can admit that still I could not understand what was happening or what had happened. I could not understand the political deception; I could not understand the hypocrisy of the group. But I could understand and I could see who I was. I could see my old personality, I could see my old feelings, and I think this was the trigger that helped me leave the group.

Pivovarchuk: How long would you say it took you to process all that had happened to you?

Banisadr: Very long. They say you can leave a cult, but it takes a long time for the cult to leave you. Because it infiltrated your mind, your heart, your philosophy, your way of thinking, and it’s very difficult to get rid of it.

I think for a year I couldn’t understand it as a cult. I couldn’t understand the procedure as brainwashing or mind manipulation. After I started writing my memoirs—gradually, because I was remembering stage by stage what had happened—I think it was in the last chapter of the book that I finally felt that it was a cult and I had been brainwashed.

Pivovarchuk: How did this realization make you feel?

Banisadr: It was great and horrible at the same time.  If you find a very close friend has robbed you, it hurts; if you find him violating your trust and dignity and deceiving you for years, it hurts much more. Then imagine finding out a guy who you thought of as a saint and the holiest person on earth has been just a charlatan wanting to make you his slave through manipulating your mind—robbing not only your wealth, health and happiness, but your individuality, personality and humanity. Then you will understand what I felt.

To get rid of Daesh and al-Qaeda in the Middle East, to find a long-lasting peace and stability in the region, America and Iran have to talk and work with each other. But can they?

After that comes realization of nothingness, loneliness and powerlessness. You feel you are free to do anything you like, but you are neither who you were before the cult, nor a follower of the cult.

So you ask yourself, who am I? If I am going to buy clothes for myself, what should I buy? What kind of food do I enjoy? Suddenly making any decision became huge. Impossible. I used to get help from my daughter. Ask her to choose for me, to buy clothes.

What do you consider as honor, and what are you proud of? What are your political or philosophical beliefs? And how do you run your daily life and make a new relation? All these are very big questions.

When people look at you, they see a grown man. But I can say that somehow you are a newborn child without the support of parents. There is no solid wall to lean on. You are really vulnerable, and there is nobody to tell you what has happened to you and how should you find your way.

Suddenly you’re coming out of a cult penniless—the things that I knew were obsolete. For example, I went to a job interview, and they asked me, “What do you know?” I answered: mathematics, chemical engineering, programming and so on. The guy asked me, “Okay, very good, nice great, what kind of programming do you know?” I started saying, “Fortran, Assembly, basic language…” And he looked at me: “Where are you from?”

Suddenly I realized that I knew nothing. I even didn’t have common sense of ordinary people. I had lost it. If you wanted to talk with me about music or movies, or the kind of programs I like on TV, I didn’t have a clue what to say. So what kind of connection and communication could I have with you?

After that you will face another big problem: how to get rid of the cult in your mind. How to change your behavior. How to change your way of thinking, your worldview from a black-and-white into a colorful one. How to see bad and good beside each other. How to get rid of the cult’s way of thinking, what they have forced you to believe and accept as reality. All this will take a lot of time.

Pivovarchuk: Ironically, what they tried to isolate you from—your family, your children—has become something that brought you back to normality. As you said, you can’t destroy memory, so there’s this hope that people can find their way back.

Banisadr: I think so. And this is my advice to parents of all those children who have been recruited by cults: show them love. Instead of arguing and discussing political, religious or philosophical issues, give them love. Let them remember the kind of relationship, the kind of emotion that they had with you. The kind of feelings that existed between you. In this way, they can remember who they were, and in this way they can find a way to get rid of cultic manipulation and become somebody again.

Pivovarchuk: It’s interesting that you mentioned that, because obviously there’s been a lot of attention given to Islamic extremism and groups like al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, ISIS. How do we stop people from joining? Where does this battle for their hearts and minds begin?

Banisadr: The first thing to understand is what attracts young Muslims to these groups. I believe it is injustice—injustice against Muslims in different countries. It is very important we recognize this. For politicians and the media to recognize it—accept that yes, there is injustice against, for example, Palestinians in Israel. There are double-standards toward Israel. We understand this, we accept this. This acceptance is very important.

Then we have to separate the religion of Islam and Muslims from these groups. Calling them Islamic or Muslim is a horrible thing to do. Why? Because we are enabling them to recruit from a 1.6 billion population pool. If you call them Muslim, you will create sympathy, shared ideas and religion between them and these 1.6 billion Muslims. Even these Muslims might see them as their own children—they might see them as their fellow Muslims in need of help and support.

So it’s a very big mistake, which unfortunately many mass media and some politicians make and in a way will help these groups to recruit even more. By calling these terrorist groups Muslim and using Islamic State instead of Daesh, first they enable these groups to recruit more. At the same time, they advocate Islamophobia among non-Muslims in society, and finally alienate ordinary Muslims from the rest of the society.

Therefore, Muslims in the West think of themselves more as Muslim than, for example, as British. Even if the media want to talk about ideology of these groups, they should use the name of their ideology—Wahhabism or Takfiri—and not Islam. The same thing they do when they want to talk about other groups such as David Koresh’s or Jim Jones’s cults, or when they talk about the Moonies.

Second, we have to educate young people about Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance, and at the same time, we have to educate them about cult and mind manipulation—to immunize them against mind manipulation of the cults. To teach them how people can be manipulated, how people can be influenced, be tricked by rational manners. How they can be brainwashed.

Finally, we have to show them a way out of the cult. Instead of criminalizing them, which will stop them coming back. We should realize that followers of a cult are victims as well—a victim of mind manipulation and not a criminal. If we help them and show them kindness and education, they can change into an antidote of cults and terrorism. It is very important for those who have left Daesh and al-Qaeda to say what they have witnessed and educate other people not to fall in the trap of cults.

 © SHUTTERSTOCK

By criminalizing them, by putting them in prison, we change them into heroes of the next generation of terrorist cults. By executing them, we make them into martyrs.

Pivovarchuk: Can Iran and the US work together against Daesh successfully?

Banisadr: To get rid of Daesh and al-Qaeda in the Middle East, to find a long-lasting peace and stability in the region, America and Iran have to talk and work with each other. But can they? True, every week in the Friday prayer, Iranians chant “Death to America,” but what they mean is “Death to those Americans who tried to destroy our country and still want to do so.”

After all, while no American has ever been killed by any Iranian (except those killed by MeK), but on the opposite side. The CIA overthrew the first democratically-elected prime minster of Iran; America established and supported the shah’s dictatorship; supported Saddam Hussein’s war and his chemical attacks against Iran. During aggression of Saddam against Iran, Americans even shot down Iran Air Flight 655, an Iran Air civilian passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai in 1988, killing all 290 passengers, without any proper apology.

And now some warmongering American politicians are supporting MeK, who have been the lobbying force behind the sanctions against Iran and are lobbying Western countries to attack the country, praying for the destruction of Iran so they might become its new rulers. They are mostly hated in Iran, and I believe this will add to why Iranians don’t trust Americans.

As long as America doesn’t review its foreign policy, realizing who its friends and who its enemies are, and the Western media doesn’t stop this propaganda against Iran based on its love for Saudi petrol dollars, we will hardly see any improvement in Iran-US relations. And, unfortunately, we have to witness growth of Saudi-backed Wahhabi terrorist groups and more instability and suffering in the region.

http://www.fairobserver.com/author/Anna%20Pivovarchuk/

Brainwashing? There should be a law against it

Iranian.com
Anne Khodabandeh
December 9, 2015

Shocking revelations about Maoist cult leader Aravindan Balakrishnan and his female victims in a suburb of London shone a light on the normally hidden phenomenon of cultic abuse which pervades society. The danger now will be that this is treated as just another sensational story before being placed on a journalistic ‘bizarre incident’ list along with Jonestown, Wako and Heaven’s Gate, as a freak occurrence.

Sadly, practitioners in the field of cult awareness know of thousands of lonely families suffering the loss of loved ones to cultic abuse with little recourse to help or even acknowledgement.

As a former member of the political cult Mojahedin Khalq, I am intimately familiar with the methods which Balakrishnan used to control and exploit his victims. As this case has highlighted, for a person caught up in cultic abuse there is no exit, they are in fact modern slaves. Indeed, the 2005 report on the MEK by Human Rights Watch was named ‘No Exit’.

If the experience of the daughter and the other victims in the Balakrishnan case are to teach us anything, it is that this is more common than we’d like to believe and that such ghastly behaviour – much like child abuse - thrives on secrecy and collusion; that is, the unwillingness of successive governments to acknowledge this as a widespread problem. More than anything we need to explode the myth that cults are about religion. They are not. The illusion that ‘new religious movements’ are relatively harmless belongs thirty years in the past. But for years, families and former cult members have been dismissed, even denigrated, as hysterical, malicious or delusional or have been exploited for entertainment by the media. No wonder they are reluctant to speak out.

Even when families do bravely confront the cults which have enslaved their loved ones, they find themselves battling litigation, intimidation and disbelief.

Government failure to engage with this phenomenon has left the public unprotected. While civil law protects a designated group of vulnerable people from undue influence, cult experts argue that anyone can be susceptible to deceptive cult recruitment at some point in their lives; people are usually in a state of transitioning when they get involved in cults. This emphasis on susceptibility not vulnerability is an important distinction because it places culpability directly on the intention and activities of the perpetrator rather than looking for deficiencies in the victims. The Balakrishnan cult case is unusual because the leader was prosecuted, not just because the victims were rescued.

Interestingly, techniques for deceptive psychological manipulation are already acknowledged and understood in various modern contexts where coercive persuasion is used for cynical exploitation and enslavement. These include partner abuse, grooming for sex, spiritual abuse, abusive therapy, extremist violence and terrorism. All these are regarded as morally repugnant. But as yet we lack a law which covers the activity which underlies them all.

In the modern vernacular, the term brainwashing is used by ordinary people exactly to describe an unaccountable change of mind and/or personality in an otherwise normal person. Bewildered families of young people travelling to Syria say their children have been brainwashed. The government needs to catch up with scientific and social understanding of this phenomenon if we are to be protected. Are MPs aware, for example, not whether, but how many fully brainwashed cult members are working in sensitive national security roles? We know they exist because as cult counsellors we talk with their families. Yet the phenomenon is glossed over as almost immaterial.

Cultic abuse - known in the vernacular as brainwashing - has a very precise definition. It is not about ‘using advertising to brainwash us into buying things’ or ‘brainwashing us into becoming docile citizens under government dictates’. These are false and unhelpful myths. Neuropsychology explains that ‘changing your mind’ is a physical experience which can be scientifically identified. Brainwashing is not about doctrine, it is about the psychologically manipulative techniques used to literally ‘change’ our minds.

In more legalistic terms it is ‘the deliberate and systematic application of an array of recognised techniques for psychological manipulation without the knowledge or informed consent of the victim in order to effect a breach of a person’s mental, emotional, intellectual and social integrity for the purposes of abuse, exploitation, slavery and/or pecuniary gain, and to so inhibit their critical faculties that they do not recognise their own predicament so that they may act in ways harmful to their best interests and the interests of society on instruction or by command or by neglect.

The advantage of criminalising cultic abuse in this way is that it is ideologically neutral and does not reflect any particular belief system but straightforwardly describes harmful behaviour. This would protect all our citizens and an obvious place would be an amendment to the new Modern Slavery Bill passed in March.

Prime Minister David Cameron has already uttered the word brainwashing in speeches about Radicalisation. There was no public outcry or panic. Ordinary people know what he means. What a law would do is to give a precise definition which would allow us to ‘join the dots’ between seemingly disparate events like the Balakrishnan cult, the Rotherham grooming for sex scandal and terrorist recruitment.

Indeed, public apprehension over the war on terrorism in Syria and the perceived threat of blowback, is the perfect opportunity for the government to introduce and explain the phenomenon of brainwashing in this narrowly defined sense as an element of the Prevent Strategy. The introduction of a criminal offence which allows the detection, prosecution and punishment of this abhorrent behaviour will aid public understanding and allay fears.

Anne Khodabandeh

Anne Khodabandeh, a leading authority on cultic abuse and terrorism, works as a consultant within the remit of the UK Prevent Duty. After twenty years in the MEK, a dangerous, destructive mind control cult, she helps families through Iran-Interlink.
Leeds, UK

http://iranian.com/posts/brainwashing-there-should-be-a-law-against-it-61318

Cult Leader Will Tell Congress: Fight ISIS by Regime Change in Iran

Ali Gharib
The Nation
April 28, 2015

Last week, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade announced that a controversial Iranian exile opposition figure would be testifying via video uplink at a hearing on the Islamic State, known as ISIS. What does the witness, Maryam Rajavi, a co-leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK), have to say about the subject at hand?

Rajavi’s written testimony, a copy of which was obtained by The Nation, focuses on an unexpected way of bringing ISIS to heel: by fostering regime change in Iran. “The ultimate solution to this problem” of Islamic extremism, such as ISIS, Rajavi says in the written statement, “is regime change by the Iranian people and Resistance”—a reference to the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the MEK’s political wing.

It sounds counter-intuitive—Iran’s aid to the Iraqi government and various Iraqi militias, after all, is widely credited with stopping ISIS’s advances there—but not when you know about the MEK’s tortuous past. Over the years, the MEK has been nothing if not opportunistic; animated by the twisted logic that the enemy of its enemy is its friend, the group seizes whatever political angle is fashionable at the moment to bring them relevance (Congress is happy to oblige). But more to the point, the MEK has always had only one goal: the overthrow of the Iranian regime. For decades, it has tried to shoehorn regional and geopolitical dynamics into its aim, irrespective of any salient connections.

The plan to bring down ISIS by toppling Iran’s government, then, is little more than the latest chapter of group’s 50-year history of monomaniacally trying to install itself atop the Iranian government. Indeed, Rajavi is testifying at Congress with the title of “president-elect” of the NCRI, which hopes to run a transitional government immediately upon the fall of the Islamic Republic.

Founded as an Islamo-Marxist revolutionary group in the 1960s, the MEK spent its early years pursuing its quixotic aims by opposing the Shah’s government with a vengeance: through student organizing, outright terrorism—including against American targets when the United States was allied with the Shah, helping to earn its 1997 American designation as a terror group—and fighting at the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution. By the 1980s, after the leader of the revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini, kicked the group out of Iran, critics were regularly deriding the MEK as a cult of personality—not least because of its continuing “wacky” behavior, as a former congressional aide put it to me for a feature I wrote this winter with Eli Clifton.

So how do Rajavi and MEK plan to end the threat from ISIS by upending the Iranian regime? That’s not so clear. But it definitely involves ignoring, despite the current clashes, the distinction between Sunni and Shia extremism—including, for example, propagandistic exaggerations like saying that “Shiite militias act more viciously than their Sunni equivalents, such as ISIS”—and pointing out several times that Iran went Islamist before anyone else. That’s about it.

It’s worth noting, however, that the MEK does have some experience in Iraq: after going into exile, its leaders gathered their fighters in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, to take his side in the Iran-Iraq war—earning the enmity of many Iranians. After the war ended, the MEK, led by Maryam Rajavi and her husband Massoud (who hasn’t been seen in public for a dozen years), stuck around and enjoyed Hussein’s largesse, acting, periodically, as mercenaries to crush incipient uprising against the Iraqi strongman—earning, in turn, the enmity of many Iraqis.

After Hussein’s fall in 2003, the American invaders stripped the MEK of its multitude of arms. (Curiously, for a group that claims to have renounced violence in 2001, Rajavi cites in her Congressional testimony the “disarming” of the MEK as a “misguided polic[y]” that helped give rise to Muslim extremism—but not the invasion that toppled their benefactor itself.) The MEK then languished in its camps, coming under periodic attack by a murky combination of the Iraqi army and, reportedly, government-aligned Shia militias. Dozens of MEK adherents were slaughtered.

The period also marked the growth of an ardent pro-MEK lobby in the United States. As Eli Clifton and I detailed in our Intercept piece this winter, a multimillion-dollar campaign kicked into gear to remove the MEK from the US State Department’s terrorist list. Once that hurdle was cleared, the MEK—despite its cult-like practices—began to accumulate more mainstream power in Congress, where super-hawkishness against Iran is guaranteed to attract powerful bedfellows, including large amounts of pro-Israel donor money and more modest cash from MEK supporters themselves.

Meanwhile, the massacres of the MEK’s ex-fighters at its Iraqi desert bases fueled the group’s hatred of the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki, which had failed to protect them. Just as the MEK had grown close to Hussein because he was an arch-enemy of the Iranian regime, the group likewise reviled Maliki’s government, and vice-versa, for its closeness to the Iranians—the Islamic Republic had hosted and fostered Maliki’s movement in exile before the 2003 war, and supported his Shia government after its rise to power in Iraq.

When ISIS began to rip apart what was still then Maliki’s Iraq, the MEK’s prevailing logic seemed to again fall back on the enemy of its enemy. Perhaps chastened by their own labeling by the US as a terrorist organization, the group seldom uses the word “terrorism” in conjunction with ISIS. Instead, MEK propaganda refers to ISIS as “extremists,” in some instances. At other times, the language is more ambiguous: Last June, when ISIS took the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, one MEK website gave a triumphalist account of the conquest, referring to ISIS as “revolutionary forces.”

Historical revisionism of the ISIS assault started almost immediately. “These forces have taken over the Badoush prison and they had hundreds of prisoners that had been proclaimed to be terrorists and they freed them,” read a Persian-language post on the website Mojahedin.org. HRW, however, collected survivor testimonies from the prison takeover that told a different story: “After seizing Badoush Prison near Mosul, the gunmen from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, separated the Sunni from the Shia inmates,” an HRW release said, “then forced the Shia men to kneel along the edge of a nearby ravine and shot them with assault rifles and automatic weapons.”

Herein lies the MEK contradiction behind its early positions. On the one hand, ISIS, like the MEK, is militantly opposed to Iranian influence in the region. But Rajavi needs to gin up support in Washington. So she poses herself in opposition to ISIS, claiming the best strategy for fighting the marauding Sunni terrorists is to… overthrow the first regime in the region to commit blood, money and heavy weaponry to the fight against ISIS.

As ISIS became the world’s most famous terrorist group, the MEK eased its whitewash and adopted the stances Rajavi will bring to Congress on Thursday: namely, that ISIS is an extremist group—whose model and inspiration is Iran, however nonsensical that point is. That Congress would invite these ex-terrorists—Rajavi’s past prevents her from getting a visa, the reason for her video testimony—speaks ill of their commitment to shaping serious policy on either ISIS or Iran. Rajavi’s participation proved such an embarrassment that a distinguished diplomat, Ambassador Robert Ford, and another witness withdrew from the hearing rather than speak alongside her on the dais—just as the top UN official for human rights in Iran withdrew from a program last year in Canadian parliament where Rajavi was set to appear.

The MEK’s story is a tragic one of sustained failure, of being massacred and massacring, of being abused and abusing its own people, of terrorizing and being terrorized, and of a constantly morphing politics consistent only in its oddness and toxicity. That story needs to be heard, but as a cautionary tale, not as expert advice. Instead, Congress is asking one of the groups most hated in Iraq and Iran what to do about those countries’ woes. What could go wrong?

http://www.thenation.com/blog/205521/cult-leader-will-tell-congress-fight-isis-regime-change-iran?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=email_nation&utm_campaign=Email%20Nation%20%28NEW%29%20-%20Most%20Recent%20Content%20Feed%20-%20filter%20fix%2020150428&newsletter=email_nation