The problems with MEK and PMOI are two fold:
1: The groups are Marxist and terrorist and have killed Americans.
2: Anyone is better than Iran's current government...and can also be removed
later, once the danger of nuclear-armed Mullahs is removed.
Bruce
December 28, 2004
Iran 2004
The Resistance and the West's Anti-War Movement
By RON JACOBS
[From: Counterpunch]
Imagine yourself coming of age in a country where speaking out against
the government is severely repressed. Activism of any sort is met with
torture, imprisonment and even death, all courtesy of the US-trained
secret police employed by a ruler who owes his very existence to the
CIA. In turn, the United States has access to the seemingly endless
oil resources underneath your country's sands. Because you oppose the
ruler, his decadence and his repressive government, you join an
opposition movement. Many of its members are in prison and many have
been executed by the regime.
Finally, after years of struggle and countless murders and tortures by
the regime, the movement opposing the ruler and his government has
reached across class, religion, and social situation to become the
majority in the country. After months of mass demonstrations and some
acts of resistance, the oppressive ruler is forced out of power. In
the period that follows, all of the popular forces vie for a role in
the new democratic political climate that has replaced the old regime.
Then strange things began to happen. Thanks to a confluence of
domestic and foreign influences and intrigue, social and political
reactionaries hiding under the cloak of religion began to consolidate
their power, taking over the reins of government and stealthily
excluding all other popular voices from the discussions about your
country's future. Soon, restrictions are applied to women's social
standing and their employment and attire, worker-run oil wells are
taken over by the religious leaders' militias, and these same militias
fire into mass demonstrations opposed to this new repression, killing
hundreds. Some groups who were part of the popular opposition to the
old regime have joined ranks with the new regime, claiming that the
regime's opposition to foreign powers (esp. the US) is more important
than democracy. Your group begs to differ, believing that the only
true way to ensure Iran's independence is by creating a truly
democratic, popular and secular government. The next thing you know,
the group you belong to is once again the object of repression. This
time, more ominously, the government uses religion in addition to the
state powers to enforce its will. Your insistence on a secular
government makes you the enemy once again.
This is the story, in as few words as possible, of many Iranians,
including the People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI).
In recent weeks, the US press has printed thousands of lines regarding
the Iranian government's pursuit of nuclear technology. It has
dutifully reported outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell's
allegations of an Iranian nuclear weapons program and openly
speculated about a possible military attack on the country by the US
or Israel. Meanwhile, the EU is attempting to negotiate some kind of
agreement with Tehran that is designed to prevent said attack while
keeping the trade lines various EU members have with Tehran open. In
Iran itself, recent parliamentary elections (of questionable fairness)
ensured a continued majority for the mullahs supporters.
What about those allegations made by Colin Powell? Where did they come
from? Some believe that the information is from Israeli and US
intelligence. The same week, similar claims were presented to the
media by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), a
Paris-based Iranian opposition coalition that the PMOI is a member of.
The NCRI claims that the information they have comes from their
network inside Iran. This network includes some Iranians who are
involved in the project and do not want to see the current government
in Tehran have nuclear weapons capabilities. Tehran's claims of the
arrests earlier this month of a "large number" of employees at
different nuclear sites following the Iranian Resistance's revelations
about Tehran's top-secret nuclear programs tend to bolster the NCRI's
assertion. Three members of the People's Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) were
allegedly among those arrested. It was through these sources that the
NCRI was able to provide information to the media regarding Tehran's
nuclear plans, not because the group was fed information from Israel
or the US, as its detractors claim.
Meanwhile, some individuals in the US media (most recently via an
op-ed piece in the December 10, 2004, edition of the Los Angeles
Times) have once again stepped up their attacks on the NCRI. The LA
Times piece is titled "A Cult Is Trying to Hijack Our Iran Policy."
The columnist, Reza Aslan, who is the author of No God but God: The
Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, (to be published by Random
House), launches a blistering attack on the NCRI and PMOI. He calls
the PMOI a "violent, pseudo-Marxist Iranian religious cult" that rules
"with draconian, god-like authority" and "seek(s) to replace Tehran's
religious tyranny with their own." (These claims are reminiscent of
claims made against various groups within the US New Left thirty years
ago). Unfortunately for the reader, the op-ed piece provides little
evidence to establish this claim. Instead, it gives a brief account of
the group's history, acknowledging its roots in the Iranian democratic
movement of the 1960s and 1970s, but downplaying the role it played in
the Iranian revolution that culminated in 1979 with the overthrow of
the Shah. The piece continues, inaccurately comparing the NCRI to the
US-funded and designed Iraqi National Congress (INC), the exile group
that fed false information to the US media and Congress regarding the
presence of WMD in Iraq.
Mr. Aslan's hatred of the NCRI and PMOI echoes that which I have heard
from some other Iranian exiles whenever I have written positively
about either of these organizations. Given the often-extreme
sectarianism found among Iranian political activists, this is not
surprising. However, it makes it difficult for US residents concerned
about the possibility of a war between their country and Iran confused
and hesitant to take a stand on the very important issues of war and
nuclear proliferation. After all, virtually every progressive in the
US and the rest of the west does not want to see a war on Iran, yet
many do not want to support the socially regressive regime of the
mullahs in Tehran. Nor do they want to give credence to a group that
they are told is a cult that cozies up to the neoconservative hawks in
Washington who are intent on remaking the world in their own image.
So, instead, the antiwar movement either places its trust in President
Khatami's so-called reform movement, a movement that seems to have no
teeth (much like the antiwar grouping within the Democratic Party in
the US) and intends to preserve the pillars of the ruling
establishment, or they take no stand at all against the mullahs,
preferring to believe that one either supports the hawks in DC in
their desire for a US domination of Iran or the hawks in Tehran in
their opposition to that desire.
With these concerns in mind, I recently had a phone and email
conversation with three Iranian-Americans. None of them are members of
either PMOI or NCRI, but consider these groups to represent their
hopes for Iran. Just as importantly, they believe that it is this
coalition that is most likely to succeed in moving Iran toward a
pluralistic, secular, and democratic country beholden to no other
nation. They are not fanatics and come across as very reasonable men.
They contacted me in the interest of getting out an alternative view
of the PMOI and NCRI in the hope that the antiwar movement in the
United States would take a longer look at the PMOI and NCRI and
hopefully consider their positions as the movement develops a stance
vis-�-vis Iran, nuclear proliferation, and the US Empire. What follows
is a report of that series of conversations and emails.
All three men emphasized that they hoped to clarify some
misconceptions about PMOI and NCRI, whom they call the Resistance. (I
will use their terminology from here on out.) In order to make these
points, they defined some terms one hears all too often these days.
First among them was the phrase "regime change." When those of us in
the west hear this term, we usually think of it as defined by the
regimes in London and Washington. That is, some kind of military
intervention by the forces of one or both of these capitals designed
to incorporate the targeted country into Washington's new world order.
When the Resistance uses the term, they mean the fall of the ruling
regime as result of a popular homegrown mass movement-hopefully one
that is nonviolent in nature. When speaking of Iran, this mass
movement is considered to be a continuation of the popular mass
uprisings that overthrew the Shah in 1979 by sharing the same
unfulfilled aspirations of that period: Freedom and popular
sovereignty. Much of the confusion in the west over this and other
terms is the general lack of historical knowledge so prevalent among
our populations. Unlike our thirty-minute society where last week's
news is already forgotten, the Iranian Resistance and the people it
hopes to organize have a memory longer than the organization's
existence (40 years). Regime change in this instance means going to
the people of the nation, not to another nation's intelligence
agencies. Of course, this is not a simple thing, given the oppressive
hold that the current regime has on Iran's media and political space.
Indeed, as much as the Resistance detests the cleric's regime in
Tehran, that hatred is returned with equal intensity.
What this means in practice is an unending parade of propaganda
against the Resistance inside Iran and in the world. Given this
concerted effort by the Tehran regime, it seems that the PMOI and NCRI
get little room for a fair hearing inside Iran. Nor, for some reason,
do they get much of a fair hearing among progressive forces in the
west. This is in spite of their history that lists them as a
consistent force for secular, popular democracy. Their unwavering
demand for this puts them at odds with other secular groups they
fought alongside during the anti-monarchical revolution of the 1979.
When organizations like the Tudeh (Iran's Communist Party) and the
so-called majority Fedayin formed a coalition with the Khomeini forces
after the Shah's downfall, PMOI did not. Unlike the former groups, who
believed that Khomeini's anti-democratic fundamentalist policies
should be overlooked in the interest of his anti-US stance, PMOI held
fast to their belief that the only sure way for the post-Shah Iranian
government to remain independent was to build a truly popular and
democratic regime that had no religious controls. Because of this
theoretical approach, they had no use for forming any front with the
religious fundamentalists that Khomeini represented. They were joined
in their endeavor by a variety of other groups and individuals who
shared their views in this regard. These people later became the
nucleus of the NCRI. In the face of unparalleled repressive political
atmosphere in Iran in the early 1980s, all of these groups eventually
went underground. Many were destroyed following a wave of executions
by Khomeini's regime that lasted several years.
Since the overthrow of the Shah, the members of PMOI have always
focused on one objective-the overthrow of the mullahs' regime.
Sometimes this meant that they worked with the democratic and
progressive elements in the government; men like Bani-Sadr, who was
eventually forced into exile by Khomeini. Other times, it meant
holding mass demonstrations demanding an end to restrictions on
women's movements. After the mullahs' consolidated their power, it
meant going underground and waging armed struggle while simultaneously
waging a popular political struggle around the issues of democracy and
individual rights. Nowadays, it means working with people from all
walks of life and of numerous political persuasions as a means of
getting their message out. Perhaps it is this single-mindedness that
causes many western progressives to shy away from them. Yet, if one
accepts the fundamental tenet that the best way to keep foreign
exploitation under control in one's own country is to be as democratic
as possible, than it all makes sense.
What about the nuclear question? Although one can easily understand
why Tehran would want some kind of nuclear threat to keep potential
invaders at bay or intimidate its regional rivals to submit to its
regional designs, a longer-term perspective demands that there be no
further nuclear proliferation in Iran or any other country. So, to
prevent the mullahs from obtaining nuclear weapons capability, the
Resistance has made the publication of Tehran's nuclear plans one of
their objectives. Their reasons are these:
1. Nuclear weapons development runs contrary to the best national
interests of Iranians by empowering a religious tyranny and exposing
Iran to possible foreign military strikes. It is also very expensive
and takes money away from urgently needed public services and;
2. A government that believes it is doing god's will is dangerous
enough without nuclear weapons (this dynamic applies to the US as well.)
As I mentioned earlier, the information about Tehran's nuclear program
that the NCRI provides is the result of some of its members inside
Iran's nuclear facilities doing what we here in the US call whistle
blowing. It does not come from Israeli or US spy agencies, although
one imagines that these agencies pay attention to the NCRI information
and then corroborate it with their own. The Iranian Resistance has
been involved in exposing the plans of Tehran's ruling clerics since
1993 via sympathetic Iranians involved in the projects.
Why are individuals known for their right wing and imperialist
viewpoints among the NCRI's diplomatic audience? This is perhaps the
most difficult practice of the Iranian Resistance for the US
progressive movement to understand. As one of the men I spoke with
said, however: What is a neocon to an Iranian living in Iran? The
individuals I spoke with emphasized that the NCRI are merely engaging
in a practice common among most nationalist movements when it comes to
seeking outside support. One seeks support where one can find it. For
the Iranian resistance, this means talking to US Republicans and
Democrats, French Socialists and Gaullists, western communists and
social democrats-whatever it takes to mobilize support. If a group or
individual knows their own politics and objectives, it is unlikely
that they will be manipulated by others whose agendas are different
even if they work together on some issues. Besides, most of the
western supporters of the NCRI come from the progressive side of the
spectrum. The men and women of NCRI understand quite clearly that the
neocons want regime change in Tehran for the benefit of Washington. At
the same time, they know even more clearly that they want regime
change for the people of Iran and that such a change can only happen
through the popular will of the Iranian people, not through foreign
military intervention.
One of the primary methods employed by those who oppose the NCRI and
PMOI (in Iran and in western capitals) is the designation of these
groups as "terrorist." Washington enacted this designation during
Clinton's presidency as a way of currying the mullahs' favor. This is
the same reason the EU accepted this designation. The ultimate result
of this designation, despite the fact that neither of these groups
have committed any acts of terror according to the definition in use
by the US State Department and its sister agencies in Europe, is that
it severely limits their ability to organize opposition to the Tehran
regime. If one truly supports the Iranian peoples' right to resist the
tyranny in Tehran, then they should demand that these groups be
removed from these lists.
If you recall, this article began by mentioning an opinion piece in
the LA Times that argued that the PMOI and NCRI were a cult intent on
"hijacking" our Iran policy. The conversations summarized here try to
prove otherwise. These two organizations are fundamentally committed
to Iran's independence and are on public record opposing any kind of
foreign military intervention in Iran. If there is any cult that is
attempting to manipulate our policy, it is the neoconservative cult of
war profiteers and wannabe Disraelis currently in power in DC.
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay
on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on
music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs12282004.html
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