Self-Sacrifice Page 5

  They drove us around for hours to prevent us from identifying the destination. I was eventually placed in a 1 x 1 metre-square cell. I got a dirty, broken plate of food pushed in through the door once a day. I was held for 25 days and allowed out only for prayers. One day I heard somebody screaming and realised that it was my older sister. They were threatening and torturing her to put pressure on me. My sister was placed on an electric chair, in hopes of forcing her to reveal more information about me, but neither of us said anything. A month later we were taken out of the cell and mixed in with ordinary prisoners. My sister was held in the cell across from mine. They kept threatening to kill us. After 20 days, my sister and I were gagged and transferred to Evin Prison.

  There we were tortured. In 1982, it was freezing cold in winter and we had 500 people in our cellblock. We were given ten minutes each a week for a cold shower. There were women as old as 80, pregnant women, people horribly injured by torture, and children as young as four. The regime wanted total silence as a sort of psychological torture. The prison windows had bars, but did not allow any light to come in. Despite that, however, we were full of energy and were determined to fight on. One day 80 of us were taken out and made to stand in deep snow from 6 am until 9 pm. The cold was unbearable. On another night I realized that Masoumeh Azadanlou, Mrs Maryam Rajavi’s sister, who was pregnant, was tapping on the wall of the neighbouring cell to deliver a sort of message. She had been badly tortured. She said, “Be brave; and remember PMOI fighters never get tired of fighting.” They had placed live snakes in her cell for four days, but they did not harm her. She was executed shortly thereafter.

  We were made to stand all day and every day in the snow for a week. I was moved to another prison and placed in a tiny cage for eight months, where there was total silence. The punishment for making even the slightest sound was severe beating. A guard called Mohammad would beat us with batons and threaten to keep us there until our teeth were black and our hair turned grey. Eventually, after ten years of imprisonment, they released my sister and me. I escaped from Iran, but could not walk properly as a result of being tortured. After leaving Iran, I joined the ranks of the resistance in Iraq.’

  7

  London

  Our campaign to remove the PMOI from the UK and EU terror lists now moved into top gear. Intensive lobbying was taking place in the European Parliament and in parliaments throughout the EU. Eminent lawyers and legal experts were preparing evidence to supply to the courts.

  The PMOI/MEK was first registered on the US list of foreign terrorist organisations in 1997, as the result of a direct request by the Iranian Mullahs to President Bill Clinton. On 9 October 1997, the Los Angeles Times quoted a senior official as saying that the PMOI was put on the US terrorist list ‘as a goodwill gesture to Mohammad Khatami, the new Iranian president.’ On 26 September 2002, a senior US official, Martin Indyk, special assistant to President Clinton and the senior director of Near East and South Asian Affairs at the United States National Security Council in 1997, told Newsweek that ‘The Mojahedin’s designation was part of Clinton’s policy of rapprochement with Tehran.’

  (In October 1999 this listing was amended to include what the US State Department described as the MEK’s aliases, namely the PMOI and the NCRI.) Then on 15 August 2003, several months after the invasion of Iraq, the US closed down the offices of the PMOI/MEK and NCRI in Washington. This was a follow-up to America’s promise to the Ayatollahs on the eve of the Iraq invasion. Jack Straw, who was the British Home Secretary, added the PMOI to the UK terror list in March 2001. The EU listed the PMOI as a terrorist organisation in May 2002, at the specific request of the UK Government, and its assets were frozen.

  In February 2006, the European Court of First Instance took up this case and I, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Vice President of the European Parliament, and several prominent dignitaries such as France’s former First Lady, Danielle Mitterrand, attended the court in Luxembourg. The lawyers representing the EU did not have much to say, and simply emphasized the authority and competence of the EU. On 12 December 2006 the Court ruled that the EU had not followed the correct legal procedure and had failed to inform the PMOI about the freezing of its assets in Europe. They ordered the money to be unblocked.

  In an extraordinary move, the European Council of Ministers decided to ignore this ruling. The Council of Ministers reviewed the list of groups and individuals in the terrorist list every six months. In this way the Council played a dirty game by claiming that the European Court had annulled the decision of the EU during the first half of 2006, but the PMOI was placed on a new list during the second half of 2006! In this seemingly endless cycle the Council continued to preserve the PMOI’s terrorist listing.

  Meanwhile, in the UK, a complaint by 35 senior MPs and Peers, representing all three major British political parties, had been lodged against the Home Secretary for his refusal to lift the terror ban on the PMOI. The British government made an enormous effort to prevent the Court from making a ruling in favour of the PMOI. In an unusual move, in August 2007 the government sent a letter to point out the dangers of delisting and the Iranian regime’s potential retaliation against British interests, urging the Court that before it informed the PMOI of any delisting, it should inform the government two weeks prior to making such a decision. This was clearly a new ploy to prevent the removal of the PMOI from the UK list. The Court however did not accept this request.

  On Friday 30 November 2007, after five days of public hearings, several days of judicial discussions behind closed doors and four months of intensive deliberations, the judges of the UK’s Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) released a 144-page and 362-point verdict declaring the inclusion of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI) on the list of proscribed organisations to be void and unlawful. The Labour Home Secretary – Jacqui Smith – appealed against this judgement, but the Court of Appeal rejected her case and ordered that the blacklisting of the PMOI should be revoked following a debate in both Houses of Parliament. The PMOI was finally removed from the UK terrorist list in June 2008.

  During the course of reviewing the case by the Proscribed Organisations Appeal Commission (POAC) and the Court of Appeal, lawyers acting on behalf of the 35 MPs and Peers who had lodged the original appeal with the POAC demanded sight of all the so-called ‘classified’ evidence on which the UK government had based its claims of terrorism against the PMOI. Hundreds of pages of carefully censored files were duly released to the courts. These included details of the mysterious phone-call from Mrs Felicity Brown, the lady pretending to work for the Foreign Office who turned out to work for British Intelligence. There were even several pages of transcripts of our conversations, with the MI5 officer admitting candidly that I had seemed ‘well informed’ about the PMOI.

  There was also a detailed, almost verbatim, account of a meeting that I had held in Brussels following a request from a senior FCO civil servant. I thought the FCO official was coming to the European Parliament to speak to me about international fisheries agreements, as I was president of the Fisheries Committee at that time. However, it turned out to be another attempt to browbeat me into severing my ties with the PMOI. I really blew my top at this meeting and gave the civil servant a piece of my mind, reminding him that he was a paid official, while I was elected by the UK citizens. I warned him to tell his political masters that I was not going to be intimidated or bullied in this way and that their policy towards Iran and their proscribing of the PMOI was simply wrong. I demanded evidence to substantiate claims that the PMOI were indeed engaged in acts of terrorism and I was bluntly told that such evidence was far too sensitive to divulge to a mere member of the European Parliament and was ‘classified’. It was a very ill-tempered exchange, all of which duly appeared in the ‘classified’ documents released to the POAC.

  Equally amazingly, although unsurprisingly, much of the so-called independent evidence on which the UK government based their decision to list the PMOI as a terror
ist organisation turned out to have come from two individuals who lived in the UK and were well-known as paid agents of the Mullahs in Tehran! Iranian citizen Massoud Khodabandeh had been recruited by the MOIS, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, in the late 1990s, and his British wife, Anne Singleton, had been recruited by the MOIS in 2002.1 Both had been trained by Iran and were well-known for press articles and propaganda that always sought to trash the PMOI and its leadership and supporters. For the UK government to base their terrorism charges on evidence supplied by two MOIS agents was preposterous. The whole thing was farcical and exposed the appeasement charade in which Blair and Straw had been engaged. No wonder the POAC delivered such a withering judgement.

  The POAC’s verdict stated: ‘This appeal against the refusal of the Secretary of State to de-proscribe the PMOI is allowed’ and ‘we order that the Secretary of State should lay before parliament the draft of an Order under section 3(3)(b) of the 2000 Act removing the PMOI from the list of proscribed organisations in Schedule 2’. The judgement also noted: ‘Having carefully considered all the material before us, we have concluded that the decision at the first stage is properly characterised as perverse. We recognise that a finding of perversity is uncommon. We believe, however, that this Commission is in the (perhaps unusual) position of having before it all of the material that is relevant to this decision. In our view, that is a requirement of the 2000 Act and of the procedures adopted before this commission. The material available to us is, therefore, wider, more extensive and more detailed than the evidence that is commonly before a judge in the Administrative court.’

  As the legal battles raged, the European Council of Ministers, in an act of open defiance of the courts, renewed the EU proscription of the PMOI on 15 July 2008. On 4 December that year, the Court of First Instance annulled the renewed proscription of 15 July and once again ordered that the PMOI be delisted and their assets unfrozen. Despite this ruling, there were further attempts by the European Council, stoked up by pressure from Tehran, to defy the courts. But by mid-December, the Court of First Instance rejected, as ‘manifestly inadmissible’, all attempts by EU governments to delay implementation of their 4 December judgement. As a result, after a war of attrition that had raged for years, the PMOI were finally delisted in the EU on 26 January 2009. Justice had at last prevailed.

  The willingness of the UK, French and other EU governments to defy the courts was breathtaking. Although British judges in the POAC had gone into the substance and full details of the case and had ruled that the decision of the UK Home Secretary to maintain the PMOI on the UK list of proscribed organisations was ‘perverse’, the UK Government still trotted out a junior minister to make a fatuous announcement that the government ‘did not accept’ the court’s verdict and had decided to appeal. They tried every legal and political trick to defy the courts.

  The entire affair was marked by a long and disgraceful series of blunders by the Blair government at Westminster over its handling of the PMOI and relations with Iran in general. It was common knowledge that, as Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw had visited Tehran more often than any other capital in the world except Brussels and Washington. But the deals he struck with the fascist Mullahs left an indelible stain on Britain’s character. Straw had admitted in a BBC Radio interview that he placed the PMOI on the UK terror list at the direct request of the Mullahs, who greatly feared the ability of this popular opposition movement to topple their odious regime. The Mullahs further pressed Straw to place the PMOI on the EU’s terror list, threatening commercial penalties for UK interests in Iran if he refused to comply. Displaying characteristic weakness, Jack Straw had readily concurred, despite the fact that he had once been an open supporter of the PMOI as an Opposition Labour MP.

  No one would have guessed that EU bureaucrats, entrusted to enact and uphold the rule of law, would scramble to find ways to defy the courts, making a mockery of the rule of law upon which the institutions of the EU and European member states are founded. Violating the rule of law and placing the European Council of Ministers’ opinion above that of the EU’s highest courts in yet another pathetic attempt to appease Iran was both scandalous and shameful.

  In a speech in the European Parliament in Strasbourg I said:

  The decision by the Council of Ministers has stepped over recognized red lines in Europe. While the Mullahs’ President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is calling for the annihilation of Israel and, according to Western intelligence reports, Iran is within years of having the nuclear capability to carry out his threat, it ill befalls the European Council to continue its failed policy of appeasement. While Iranian Revolutionary Guards roam freely in Iraq, inflaming the insurgency, killing allied troops and murdering countless innocent civilians, the Council of Ministers should be confronting Tehran from a position of strength, rather than displaying craven weakness. The EU should be offering support to those who oppose the Mullahs, rather than seeking to tarnish them with lies and distortions. The EU and the 500 million citizens it represents are proud of their democracy and its principles. These principles are in danger of being compromised by a few bureaucrats who have made the terror label a bargaining chip to curry favour with the very regime that is one of the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism. In the fight against terrorism, we must keep the moral high ground and respect our democratic principles. Otherwise, how different will our democracy be from those tyrannies we so despise? It is time for EU bureaucrats to practise what they preach. Pay heed to the ruling of the European Court of Justice and remove the PMOI from its terror list once and for all.

  Terrorism is the greatest threat of our time. Terrorists not only endanger our lives, they also challenge our freedoms and our democratic system of government. The difference between democracy and tyranny is the system of checks and balances. What made it frustratingly difficult for me was the fact that some bureaucrats in the EU were contemplating compromising this sacred principle for the sake of political expediency. What made it even more perplexing was that these political leaders had been given the mandate of safeguarding our democratic system. For them to seek to undermine the system under the guise of combating terrorism was particularly perverse.

  Since the late 1990s, the issue of the PMOI was part and parcel of the EU’s negotiations with the Iranian regime in a futile attempt to moderate Tehran’s behaviour. For instance, on 21 October 2004, the Agence France-Presse agency reported:

  According to the preparatory text for European proposals on the Iranian nuclear programme, the EU 3 underscored that if Iran complies with the EU on the nuclear issue, we would continue to regard the PMOI (Iranian resistance group) as a terrorist organisation.

  The official document made it abundantly clear that the issue was finding ways to placate the Mullahs and had nothing to do with the merit and conduct of the Iranian resistance movement.

  The continued determination of the PMOI, over many years, to clear its name and remove the unfair and unlawful terrorist designation with which it had been labelled, had become an almost classic example of a David and Goliath struggle. Victory in the British courts and subsequently in the EU courts was a first major taste of success for the PMOI and a severe blow to the Mullahs in Tehran. It was also a clear demonstration that the PMOI and its network of international supporters could achieve the impossible.

  1. A Pentagon report of January 2013 identified Massoud Khodabandeh and Anne Singleton as trained MOIS agents.

  8

  Interviews with Political Prisoners Refugee Camp, Tirana, Albania, May 2014

  Najmeh Hadj Heydari

  ‘My name is Najmeh Hadj Heydari. I am Azam’s sister [see Chapter 6]. I was arrested in the city of Saveh in 1982 and taken to Evin in Tehran. While in the torture chamber I told them I was pregnant. They did not believe me and started to torture me with cables, whipping the soles of my bare feet. In the public ward they asked me what I thought about the Mullahs and Khomeini. I said they deserve to die for usurping the freedom of the peopl
e of Iran. A half hour later they took me to Ward 311, the punishment ward.

  There were six or seven people in each cell, usually awaiting execution. They would open the cell three times a day for food. Then it fell to once a day. I was placed in solitary confinement for 45 days and only allowed out to go to the washroom. We were not allowed to shower and we were given no bedding. I was freezing. 45 days later I was brought back to the larger cell. A girl called Maryam Yazdi Ostovar, who was only 16 years old, had a bloody mark on her left leg, and her feet were shredded and swollen as a result of torture. Surgeons had removed the skin from her leg to mend her feet. She was from the city of Qazvin and told me that her brother had been executed. “They wanted me to divulge information and whipped me relentlessly on the soles of my feet, shredding them to pieces. Eventually they realised that I could tell them nothing, so they operated on my feet to mend them too.”

  Later I noticed that Maryam had been taken for interrogation again. Peeking from under her blindfold she recognized one of the people being interrogated. But half an hour later they took her out again and she disappeared for two weeks. When she returned, she could only walk on her knees. She asked for a copy of the Koran and lay down next to the wall, put the Koran on her chest and told me what had happened. Her feet were shattered. This continued for a whole week. Since she could not stand they tied her in order to hold her upright so they could continue torturing her. After telling us this she said, “leave me alone”. At 5 am they opened the door of our cell for prayers and she was unable to get up. We went to prayers, but when we returned we realised she was dead. The Guards forced us to stand next to the wall until her body was taken away.