Self-Sacrifice Read online

  Self-Sacrifice

  First published in 2015 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Struan Stevenson, 2015

  The moral right of Struan Stevenson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher

  ISBN: 978 1 78027 288 7

  eISBN: 978 0 85790 868 1

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Set in Sabon at Birlinn

  Printed and bound by

  Gutenberg Press Ltd, Malta

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Maryam Rajavi and countless other sisters and brothers of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran with whom I have had the privilege to work and campaign. Their self-sacrifice and the self-sacrifice of the PMOI over decades has been an inspiration.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword by Patrick J. Kennedy

  1. Brussels

  2. Interview with Hengameh Haj Hassan

  3. The PMOI

  4. Interview with Mahnaz

  5. Berlin

  6. Interview with Azam Hadj Heydari

  7. London

  8. Interview with Najmeh Hadj Heydari

  9. Strasbourg

  10. Interview with Mohammad Hossein Ebrahimi

  11. Tehran

  12. Interview with Abdal Nasser

  13. Amman

  14. Interview with Fatimah Alizadeh

  15. Camp Ashraf and the July 2009 Massacre

  16. Interview with Mahtab Madanchi

  17. Ashraf Ultimatum

  18. Interview with Hassan Habibi

  19. Iraqi Elections

  20. Interview with Akbar Saremi

  21. The Second Ashraf Massacre

  22. Interview with Fatimeh Nabavi Chashmi

  23. Baghdad

  24. Interview with Hossein Farzanehsa

  25. Erbil

  26. Interview with Mohammad Shafaei

  27. The Stevenson Plan

  28. Interview with Amir Ali Seyed Ahmadi

  29. Martin Kobler

  30. Interview with Mahmoud Royai

  31. The Final Ashraf Atrocity

  32. Interview with Reza Haft Baradaran

  33. Paris

  34. Interview with Ali Mohammad Sinaki

  35. Washington D.C.

  36. Interview with Hassan Nezam

  37. Dr Tariq al-Hashemi

  38. Interview with Nasser Khademi

  39. Kurdistan

  40. Interview with Khadija Borhani

  41. Can Iraq Rise from the Ashes?

  42. Interview with Bahar Abehesht

  43. I Am Ashrafi

  Postscript

  Books and Publications Consulted

  Index

  Illustrations

  Struan Stevenson meeting Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani of Kurdistan

  Struan with PMOI protesters outside the UN headquarters in Geneva

  More than 100,000 people attending the 2013 PMOI rally at Villepinte, Paris

  Struan with PMOI protesters outside the White House, Washington D.C., 2006

  Alejo Vidal-Quadras and Struan welcome Mrs Rajavi to the European Parliament, Brussels

  Struan hosts a press conference in Brussels for Iraqi Vice-President, Dr Tariq al-Hashemi, in 2013

  Struan and Sheikh Dr Rafie al-Rafaee, the Grand Mufti of Iraq, in 2014

  Struan with Patrick Kennedy at an NCRI rally at Villepinte, Paris

  Struan addressing the ‘illegal’ PMOI rally in Berlin, 2005

  Friends of a Free Iran meeting in the European Parliament, Strasbourg

  Struan meeting President Massoud Barzani of Kurdistan

  Struan with President Talabani of Iraq, Baghdad, 2011

  Struan at the PMOI’s International Women’s Day Rally in Berlin, March 2015

  The landscaped grounds and gardens of Camp Ashraf

  Mud and rock-strewn ground surround flimsy portacabins at Camp Liberty

  Acknowledgements

  My great thanks to my many friends in the PMOI and the Iranian resistance for their encouragement in persuading me to write this book, and for the many hours they spent editing and correcting facts, dates, times and places; and in particular, for their friendship and kindness over many years.

  Foreword

  by

  Patrick J. Kennedy

  Former Member of the US Congress for Rhode Island

  Struan Stevenson’s remarkable book details the horrors of repression, torture and execution in Iran and the strange acquiescence of the West in the face of irrefutable evidence of the Mullahs’ desire to deploy nuclear weapons and to sponsor terror across the Middle East and worldwide. In Self-Sacrifice: Life with the Iranian Mojahedin, the author outlines his own role as an elected member of the European Parliament, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the main Iranian opposition movement at a time when they were listed as a foreign terrorist organization. More than three decades ago, my father – the late Senator Ted Kennedy – stood alongside Nelson Mandela and the ANC when they were listed as terrorists. Like Stevenson, he was prepared to put his reputation on the line in his fight for freedom, democracy and human rights.

  Self-Sacrifice: Life with the Iranian Mojahedin is perhaps the first such book in which the author takes the reader through his personal experiences to show how, as a British Conservative MEP, he ended up getting to know, engaging with, trusting and supporting the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), despite all the allegations levelled against the organisation. In the course of an interesting and sometimes difficult journey, he even heard the allegations repeated by government officials who sought to discourage him from supporting the movement. He had to conduct his own research and investigations, studying the merits of each allegation and concluding that they were false and originated from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, to be distributed by Tehran’s lobby and unintentionally repeated by others. Stevenson further demonstrates how these allegations have been used by governments to justify their policy of appeasing the Iranian regime.

  Struan Stevenson faced threats and smears from the Iranian Mullahs and even from countries closer to home. His vivid chronicle berates Western countries that were prepared to follow a policy of appeasement so that they could continue to do business with one of the world’s most evil regimes. His harrowing account of the abject betrayal by the West of 3,400 Iranian refugees trapped in Iraq should stand as a shocking indictment of US, EU and UN policy in that country. In his role as President of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations with Iraq he courageously exposed the corruption and brutal sectarianism of the Iraqi Government, encouraged and endorsed by the Iranian Mullahs, and warned that it would lead to civil war. In repeated visits to Iraq he met with political leaders and warned that the Iranian regime was exploiting the insurgency to extend its toxic influence across the region.

  Stevenson intersperses each chapter in his book with harrowing interviews conducted with survivors of Iran’s medieval prisons, detailing the cruelty, torture and executions that continue to this day. His brilliant narrative and in-depth research have laid bare the stark choice we face between the past and the future. He demonstrates clearly that the theocratic dictatorship in Iran is the key problem in the M
iddle East and should never be regarded as part of any solution. He argues forcibly that Iran’s future as a just and stable democracy can only be achieved through support for the main opposition movement, the PMOI.

  Stevenson’s exposé of Western ineptitude will leave readers horrified. This is a book that should be read carefully by opinion-formers and decision-makers around the world and by students of foreign policy. There is much we can learn from Stevenson’s disturbing account of mistakes, duplicities and blunders that have led directly to the rise of ISIS (Islamic State) and the catastrophic events that now engulf the Middle East.

  1

  Brussels

  When does a person reach their tipping point? For me it was the hanging of a 16-year-old girl in Iran for ‘acts incompatible with chastity’. Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh was hanged in public from a crane in the city of Neka in August 2004. She had been raped and tortured for three years by a 51-year-old former Islamic Revolutionary Guard member turned taxi-driver. He was sentenced to 100 lashes and she was arrested, tortured and then hauled before Neka’s local chief religious judge Haji Rezai. Atefeh was so outraged at the injustice of her treatment that she tore off her headscarf and threw one of her shoes at the judge, committing the ultimate offence of contempt of court. The judge not only sentenced her to death but acted as her executioner as well, placing the rope around her neck before the crane dragged the child, choking, into the air. Judge Rezai stated that this would ‘teach her a lesson and silence her sharp tongue.’

  I was sitting in my office at the European Parliament in Brussels when my senior Parliamentary Assistant at that time, Ingrid Kelling, came in to tell me that the Ambassador to the EU from the Islamic Republic of Iran had arrived for our pre-arranged meeting. Ingrid showed him in and I asked him to sit. He thanked me warmly for agreeing to meet him and launched into a lengthy discourse on the achievements of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I held up my hand to silence him. ‘Mr Ambassador,’ I said, ‘last week your country hanged a 16-year-old girl in public. This was an outrage against all of our core European values of human rights, the rights of women and the rights of children. I am utterly appalled at this barbarous crime. I have watched in dismay as your country has condoned torture, stoning, amputations and public executions. I can no longer stand on the sidelines. I do not want any explanation or attempts to justify this crime from you. I would ask you now kindly to leave my office and I can assure you that you will not be welcome here again.’

  The Ambassador looked stunned. He started to speak and I interrupted him, calling to Ingrid to show him out. I was shaking with rage.

  Atefeh was a child. Her crime was to have been the victim of a sexual attack by an older man. To be tortured and hanged in such circumstances was barbarous. Students of Hitler’s SS would be familiar with such savagery, but for the vastly cultured and civilised people of Iran, this case, the tenth child to be hanged in the Islamic Republic since 1990, marked another grim milestone on their country’s regression to the Stone Age.

  I asked Ingrid if she could put me through to the Iranian opposition activist, Firouz Mahvi, who had been to see me on quite a few occasions over the past two years, but with whom I had only made a slightly reluctant acquaintance. Ingrid put through the call. ‘Firouz, it’s Struan Stevenson.’ I explained what had happened and said that I was now so angry that I wanted to do anything I could to help his opposition movement. Firouz asked if he could come straight round to see me. It was to be the start of a long, exciting and often highly emotional journey.

  Firouz was overjoyed at my offer of assistance. He briefly reminded me how he represented the People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), also known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a dissident group which had fought to overthrow the Shah, but then had been seen by the Ayatollahs as a threat to their supremacy. In the 1980s, tens of thousands of PMOI supporters had been arrested, tortured and executed. Many had fled to the West and were now engaged in building international opposition to the turbaned tyrants in Tehran. Firouz asked if he could arrange for me to meet the PMOI’s Foreign Affairs Spokesman, Mohammad Mohaddessin, who had written an authoritative book on Islamic fundamentalism. I readily agreed and a date was fixed.

  Several days later, Mohammad came to my Brussels office. It was hard to believe that this small, well-groomed man was at the top of Iran’s ‘Most Wanted’ list and had been sentenced to death in absentia. Mohammad explained how Iran had become a rogue state playing a malign role in the Middle East. He showed me a report on the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorist attack, published by the US in July 2004, which detailed how the hardline Mullahs’ regime in Iran had direct links with Osama Bin Laden and had sponsored numerous terrorist attacks on Western targets. Intelligence reports stated that the regime was moving towards the development of a nuclear bomb, threatening to plunge the Middle East into apocalyptic conflict.

  Mohammad explained how it had been the PMOI which had revealed the Mullahs’ top-secret nuclear programme to the West, whose intelligence services had failed to discover it. He explained that PMOI supporters inside Iran were risking their lives to provide this type of intelligence to the West and yet, bizarrely, he described how the PMOI was listed as a terrorist organisation in the EU and US, resulting in the freezing of their assets and making it difficult for them to operate. Mohammad said that this blacklisting was part of the West’s mistaken appeasement policy towards the Mullahs in Tehran and had no justification in fact.

  Mohammad told me that attempts at reform within Iran had been met with repression. In February of that year (2004), he said, the moderates lost control of Parliament when thousands of their supporters were banned from standing for election. Attempts by UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to suck up to Tehran in the pursuit of lucrative oil contracts had also hit the buffers, underlining the failure of the Blair government’s policy of appeasement. Earlier in the summer of 2004, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had seized three British navy patrol boats, on false charges of straying into Iranian waters. The eight British crewmen who had been kidnapped by the Iranian security forces were blindfolded and forced into a ditch, where they thought they would be executed. The Iranians only released the eight men following a grovelling apology from Straw.

  The only real hope of regime-change, to avoid another disastrous US intervention, explained Mohammad, lay in the hands of the Iranian resistance. The Mojahedin and the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), under the leadership of its President-elect Mrs Maryam Rajavi, had led the war against the fundamentalist fascists for the past 25 years, he said. The overthrow of a regime that had executed over 120,000 political prisoners, hanged children in public, endorsed the stoning to death of women and had links with Al Qaeda, was now a matter of urgency.

  Mohammad said the EU and the US must be urged to remove the terror tag from the PMOI and instead offer their support to this movement, in the fight to rid the world of one of its most evil regimes. He finished our discussion by inviting me to travel to Auverssur-Oise on the outskirts of Paris, to the PMOI headquarters, where I would meet with their leader, Mrs Maryam Rajavi. With a little hesitation, thinking that perhaps I was getting into this issue more deeply than I had at first intended, I agreed.

  So it was that some weeks later I found myself on the TGV from Brussels to Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris, where Firouz and his young and energetic colleague Hanif met me. I was a little nervous. I had dug around into the background of the PMOI and discovered that President Chirac had ordered a raid on their Auvers-sur-Oise headquarters in June 2003, arresting Mrs Rajavi and hundreds of her colleagues and seizing vehicles, computers and cash. Protests from respected US Senators and Congressmen accusing Chirac of doing Iran’s dirty work for them, together with mass protests by PMOI supporters around the world, quickly led to their release. But, I wondered, what would happen if another raid took place today, while I was there?

  As a Conservative Euro MP, I was beginning to wonder why I had agreed to visit the headquarters of a
group that I had seen variously described as Marxist and an evil sect, and that I knew was blacklisted as a terrorist organisation. I had read how the PMOI had been accused of waging a terror campaign in Iran in the 1970s, during which they had allegedly assassinated six Americans and bombed many Western targets. Was this something that I should be getting involved in? My nervousness increased as we began negotiating a series of narrow backstreets in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise. My PMOI companions were making repeated calls on their mobile phones, yattering away in Farsi. Soon we entered a long cul-de-sac, with a high security wall running down one side and a tall hedge on the other.

  Our car drew up in front of a huge iron gate and immediately Mohammad Mohaddessin and several other men emerged to hold open my door and offer warm handshakes in welcome. I was ushered through the gate and was met with a roar of applause and cries of welcome from a double line of men and women who had gathered to greet me in the courtyard of the PMOI headquarters. I noticed the women were all veiled, and each proffered a freshly plucked rose as I walked slowly down the line, shaking hands with the men and accepting the flowers from the women. Cradling a, by now, large bunch of roses, I was led on to the steps of the main building in the compound, where Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran and the effective leader of the PMOI, stood waiting to greet me.

  Mrs Rajavi is an elegant woman, with a presence that can captivate a crowd. She also was veiled; she welcomed me in French, her English being poor. She soon switched to Farsi, and with the help of an interpreter, she welcomed me to the PMOI headquarters and invited me inside, where a large meeting room had been specially prepared for our discussion, with two formal-looking wooden thrones, separated by a small table on which had been placed cups of tea and bowls of nuts.

  Mrs Rajavi is a lady who displays great humility and who clearly feels the pain and suffering that has been inflicted by the Iranian regime on her people for more than three decades. As such, she feels an enormous sense of responsibility towards her people, but also she longs for peace and stability in the Middle East and the wider world. Despite the difficulties she has encountered, she is courageous, energetic, tenacious and inspiring. She is a Muslim woman who stands for a free, democratic and secular Iran. She represents the rights of the oppressed people in Iran, from women and students to ethnic and religious minorities. Moreover, her modern and progressive interpretation of Islam is an important and necessary example to others. It is for these reasons that she enjoys the support of thousands of democrats around the world, and it was for these same reasons that I quickly recognised Maryam Rajavi as a future President of a free Iran.