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U.S.- Protected Iranian Exiles in Limbo in Iraq

(Anne Garrels reporting from Baghdad)

NPR News Morning Edition April 28, 2008

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89990559

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

STEVE INSKEEP, host:

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.

We're about to bring you up to date on a group that's called a terrorist organization or even a cult. It's called those things but it's under the protection of the U.S. military. It's a group of Iranians. They want to overthrow Iran's government and they are in exile right now in Iraq.

We're going to hear this morning from both sides of the border about one of the stranger stories to emerge from the war. The story centers around the Iranian exiles who call themselves the People's Mujahideen, or MEK. Their U.S.-protected camp is called Camp Ashraf.

NPR's Anne Garrels begins with the story of one woman who escaped them.

ANNE GARRELS: Last spring after living in Camp Ashraf for half her life, 40-year-old Batul Soltani made a run for it. She fled to the nearby American military compound. Though U.S. soldiers protect Ashraf from outside attacks, Batul says they do nothing to stop the MEK from continuing to persecute its members.

Ms. BATUL SOLTANI (Former Member, MEK): (Through translator) The MEK leadership remains in control in the camp and we had no choice but to stay. We were under psychological and physical pressure. The U.S. does nothing inside Ashraf. They allow the MEK to terrorize the inmates.

(Ms. Soltani)

GARRELS: Until the U.S. invasion, the MEK carried out cross-border attacks against the government in Tehran. It also helped Saddam Hussein target his enemies at home. The new Iraqi government made up of those former enemies has no love for the MEK. After the U.S. invasion, American soldiers disarmed the militants and set up checkpoints around the camp to protect its members from Iraqi retribution.

Some in the Bush administration and Congress believe the MEK could be a useful ally against the Iranian government, though U.S. officials say that view is no longer widely held. They and the Iraqi government would like the militants at Camp Ashraf to leave the country. A few hundred have fled but Batul says most cult members cannot act freely, either because they've been brainwashed or because of MEK pressure.

Ms. SOLTANI: (Through translator) I never saw the Red Cross or American soldiers inside the camp. The MEK leadership manipulates anyone who comes in so they see only what they want them to see.

GARRELS: Recruited in Tehran as a teenager, Batul says her dreams of overthrowing the Iranian government turned into a nightmare. Once she and her young husband arrived in Ashraf, all couples were ordered to divorce. Her children were taken away.

Ms. SOLTANI: (Through translator) My son was six months old and my daughter was five. They said you can't keep your children here. We will send them overseas to Europe. I have not seen my children in 16 years.

GARRELS: MEK commanders also took away the members' documents and warned them they would be arrested by Saddam's security if they tried to leave. Then after the U.S. invasion, Batul says MEK leaders warned them the Americans would kill anyone who left.

Batul says she stayed on hoping if she were a dutiful member she would eventually be reunited with both her children and her husband. Finally a year ago she stole a car, made a dash for a U.S. checkpoint, and was given refuge by the American military. She's now searching for her children.

Ms. SOLTANI: (Through translator) I am asking Iranians all over the world if they know anything about my children. The Mujahideen won't tell me where they are.

GARRELS: Defectors say the Mujahideen keep those wishing to leave out of sight. Asghar Farzin says he was one of the lucky ones. An American colonel during an initial search of Ashraf five years ago discovered him by chance in an MEK prison.

Mr. ASGHAR FARZIN (MEK Defector): One day someone knocked my door. I saw American commander because I can explain for him in English; he sat next to me and listened to me.

GARRELS: With the help of the American officer and the Red Cross, he was able to leave Ashraf. But he says others still there need help and counseling.

Though they acknowledge a significant number of cult members are trapped, U.S. officials speaking on background say it's not safe for American soldiers to go into the camp. U.S. and U.N. officials say they cannot force members to go back to Iran against their wishes. But the U.N. has not found other countries willing to take them. The clock is ticking.

Under a new status of forces agreement, the Iraqi government will likely take control of Ashraf by the end of the year. Caught at the end of a press conference, General Douglas Stone, who's currently in charge of Ashraf, made it clear he would like this mess to go away. He said it's going to be discussed with the Iraqis, adding, things like this don't go on forever, right? But after five years he still has no solution.

Anne Garrels, NPR News, Baghdad.

Efforts to Return Exiles to Iran Problematic

(Mike Shuster reporting from Tehran)

NPR: Morning Edition, April 28, 2008

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89990562

RENEE MONTAGNE, host:

Since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran's government has regarded Camp Ashraf warily, but some Iranians are helping MEK members get back home. NPR's Mike Shuster reports from Tehran.

MIKE SHUSTER: Like Batul Soltani and thousands of others, Arash Sametipour could've been trapped in Camp Ashraf all these years. He joined the MEK in the 1990s, and in 2001 he was sent from Iraq into Iran to assassinate an Iranian general. The plot failed, he lost his right hand in a grenade explosion and was imprisoned in Iran.

Now he runs the Nejat Society in Tehran, a non-governmental group that helps former members of the MEK who want to get out of the organization. Recently Sametipour was in Baghdad to meet with some of them, who he agrees are in an impossible situation.

Mr. ARASH SAMETIPOUR: Since these people, they did not have any legal documents and the situation in Iraq was really critical for them, we decided to provide them any humanitarian help that we could, and I think we were successful in that point.

SHUSTER: Of the MEK militants in Camp Ashraf, more than 200 have left the camp on their own and have been living in the transitional camp the U.S. set up nearby. These people, Sametipour says, want to leave the MEK but don't necessarily want to return to Iran.

Iran's government still views the MEK as a threat and wants to see the group disbanded, according to Ali Resaid(ph), the director of the North America department of Iran's foreign ministry.

Mr. ALI RESAID (Iranian Foreign Ministry): They are a very serious and very dangerous terrorist group and it is recognized by European and even the U.S. government.

SHUSTER: Iran's government would like to take custody of the leaders of the MEK and put them on trial, says Sametipour.

Mr. SAMETIPOUR: They were involved in brainwashing process and terrorist operations inside Iran. Iranian authorities have announced that these people must be prosecuted in Iran. I think a list of 50 to 60 people are there who Iranians want them. They want them to be prosecuted.

SHUSTER: But it is the position of the Iranian government that the vast majority of those who live in Camp Ashraf are free to return to Iran without punishment, says Ali Resaid.

Mr. RESAID: For those of them who have repentance of their activities, also those of them who are not seriously involved with any assassination or these sort of things, we have amnesty for them.

SHUSTER: The Nejat Society has tested Iran's offer of amnesty. Arash Sametipour says his group has helped repatriate several hundred former MEK members, and he says they are now living normal lives in Iran.

Mr. SAMETIPOUR: Right after fall of Saddam Hussein, Iranian government had announced officially that there is an amnesty for those who are willing to return home. We have talked to many authorities over here and this is a truth that, you know, when they come back over here to Iran there won't be any prison waiting for them. They can just live like any other citizen.

SHUSTER: When Sametipour was in Iraq recently he concluded that the U.S. is not really sure what it wants to do with those in Camp Ashraf. Some in the U.S. government, he fears, may still be tempted to use them as a bargaining chip with Iran.

That may also be the case between the government of Iran and Iraq. The issue was on the agenda when Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, traveled to Baghdad in early March for talks with Iraq's president, Jalal Talibani. Iraq's government may simply take custody of these people if they are released by the U.S. In that case their fate may figure significantly in the future of relations between Iraq and Iran.

Mike Shuster, NPR News.

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Scott Peterson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

11 February 2008

The Christian Science Monitor

Gholam Reza Sadeghi felt certain of his fate if he ever returned to Iran: torture and execution, given his years as a member of the anti-regime Mujahideen-e Khalq, or "People's Holy Warriors."

But stuck in a crowded camp in Iraq with 3,400 other members of the MKO under US military guard, Mr. Sadeghi finally had had enough. He wanted out, and to see his son.

So he came back to the Islamic Republic, which imprisoned him for five years in the 1980s for participating in a group labeled "terrorist" by both Washington and Tehran. Yet some American officials view the MKO - disarmed but still intact - as a possible tool of regime change against Iran. And the MKO's continued presence in Iraq aggravates US-Iran tensions.

What Sadeghi found was a soft-touch amnesty that he had never been told of in the MKO camp. His case could resonate with the 100 or so other Iranian militants who have been allowed to leave the camp in recent weeks, afraid to return to Iran and running into trouble in Kurdish northern Iraq and upon entering Turkey.

"Because I had been in prison, I expected to go back to prison, torture, and execution," says Sadeghi, who was detained for a week and then let go. "They said [the MKO] is not a threat. [They said,] 'We know you were a victim yourself, who thought you were doing something good for your country but were deceived by a cult.' "

The MKO (or MEK) in 2002 tipped off the world to Iran's secret uranium-enrichment program - with the help of Israel, many analysts have concluded. It now says the recent findings of a US National Intelligence Estimate were wrong and that Iran restarted a nuclear- weapons program in 2004. UN inspectors, however, say that much of the information the UN has received from the group in recent years has a political purpose and has been wrong.

No nation has taken the militants who left Camp Ashraf, north of Baghdad, some of them carrying US military letters for travel to Turkey. Documents of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees show that at one point in their saga nearly two weeks ago, 19 were turned back to Iraq by Turkey, dozens were picked up in Kurdish northern Iraq and some forced to return to the dangers of central Iraq, and 26 were missing.

The situation highlights the sensitivity of Camp Ashraf, which has been virtually off-limits to journalists since the fall of Saddam Hussein. According to some of the 340 former MKO members who have returned to Iran with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the MKO controls all aspects of life in the camp. Numbers have dropped: Only 12 returned to Iran in all of 2007, and three more in mid-January.

"We don't have the impression that these people are harassed or bothered, ... mainly because the families and the [Iranian] authorities want them to come back," says Andreas Schweizer, until recently the ICRC protection officer in Tehran. "We haven't heard of any problems so far."

Indeed, in 2005, when the Monitor followed up privately on the story of one returnee, his mother complained about the lack official reintegration help. There had been no government interference either, she said.

The MKO's checkered and violent history has kept it on the US and European terrorist list. The MKO killed several American military advisers and civilians in Iran in the 1970s, played a key role in Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, and supported the US Embassy seizure before breaking away and launching attacks that have killed scores of senior Iranian officials.

Exiled first to France and then expelled in 1986, the MKO was given safe haven, weapons, and cash from Saddam Hussein. Though he used it to fight Iran during the Iran-Iraq war - an act that soured most Iranians toward the group - and to help quell local uprisings in 1991, the MKO today portrays itself as a democratic Iranian government-in-waiting.

MKO co-leader Maryam Rajavi, as quoted recently in the Opinion pages of the Monitor, claims substantial underground support in Iran, and said US labeling of Iran's Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist group is a "clear testament and an indispensable prelude to democratic change in Iran."

But analysts dispute claims of broad support. "They are so discredited in Iran that I can't imagine they have any social basis," says Ervand Abrahamian, an Iran historian at the City University of New York and author of "The Iranian Mojahedin," a study of the MKO.

"I think you would find the current President [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad more democratic than the Mujahideen," says Mr. Abrahamian. "Even in the early 1970s, it had turned into a cult organization.... The remaining members ... will do whatever [MKO leader Massoud] Rajavi tells them."

The State Department's terrorism report last year said the MKO maintains "the capacity and will to commit terrorist acts in Europe, the Middle East, the United States, and Canada and beyond."

The report notes the MKO's "cult-like characteristics," such that "new members are indoctrinated in MEK ideology and revisionist Iranian history [and] required to ... participate in weekly 'ideological cleansings.' "Children are separated from their parents, it adds, and Mrs. Rajavi "has established a 'cult of personality.'.

The US rejected a secret 2003 Iranian offer to exchange top MKO leaders for several Al Qaeda personalities now held in Iran.

"The Islamic Republic's policy toward the MKO is very clear - there is nothing hidden," says a foreign ministry official who asked not to be named. "In our opinion they are a terrorist cult. When it comes to cults, only the leaders are responsible, and the rest are all victims themselves."

The MKO and some in Congress and the Pentagon have challenged the terrorist label. Senior Iranian officers have accused US forces in Iraq of using the MKO during interrogations of Iranians detained in Iraq. Western news reports also suggest that some MKO operatives may be conducting cross-border operations into Iran on behalf the US.

Indeed, such action seemed to be on offer to Sadeghi when US federal agents first questioned him in Camp Ashraf in 2003. After release from prison in Iran in the 1980s, he had fled to Canada in the 1980s, where the MKO found him and gave him a letter from leader Rajavi. "The letter said: 'You were one of us, and suffered in prison," recounts Sadeghi. "Now you are in Toronto living the good life. You forgot your brothers and sisters, you forgot freedom and democracy.'"

Sadeghi left his Canadian wife, broke custody rules by letting the MKO ship his son to his parents in Iran, and was moved by the MKO to Los Angeles. His visit to Iraq was meant to be short-term, but the MKO took his US passport and said they destroyed it, he says.

After US forces disarmed the group in 2003, the FBI met with each member. Sadeghi says he was told that the US planned to topple Iran's regime, that they wanted his help, and that they would ensure his return to the US. Sticking with the MKO would mean "never seeing the US again."

"I didn't believe [the FBI agent] was going to send me back to the US, or I would have jumped on it," says Sadeghi. Tired of daily MKO self-criticism sessions, he finally told the Americans he wanted to go to Iran. He had not seen his parents for 22 years; his son was 16 and full of resentment. "He asked me: 'Where were you? For 10 years, no call, no postcard,' "says Sadeghi, adding that his life was broken by the MKO."For that, he hates me."

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* Familiar Faces: Staff writer Scott Peterson has written several stories about Iran's largest opposition group in exile, the Mujahideen-e Khalq (the MKO or MEK). But this time when he checked up on those who had been trickling back to Iran from Iraq, he found a surprise at the offices of the Nejat or Rescue group that helps former MKO members reintegrate into civilian life in Iran.

Nejat is run by former MKO militants. Among them, Scott recognized Arash Sametipour, an English-speaker who had conducted a failed assassination attempt and then blown off his right hand while trying to kill himself to avoid capture.

"The last time I saw him, he was wearing a prison uniform in a Tehran jail," says Scott, who had interviewed Mr. Sametipour along with several other MKO prisoners. "Today he is the main liaison between Nejat and the Red Cross. He is now trying to find a home for those 100 or so MKO members who recently left Camp Ashraf in Iraq."