The MEK has been engaged since 1981 in a pitiless war with the IRI on any front, including from Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war 1980-1988. MEK’s presumed crimes have been committed in Iraq against Iraqi people– they were a part of Saddam’s repressive organs and their leaders must be normally punished for.
The leadership is traitor to their ex-brothers of the IRI because they sided with their enemy, Saddam. This cannot play down their treachery of siding with the enemy, although enemy to Iranian people was not only Saddam, but also the whole Islamic ruling elite that have destroyed the country since 1979.
Since they were in confrontation with the IRI, Saddam armed them with the Iranian weapons caught from Iranian troops. There is no proof that they used these weapons to kill civil population in Iran. Through their military adventure, Forough javidan in1988, the MEK failed to occupy some part of Kurdistan as a free zone for their “March into Tehran”, but there is no document of atrocity committed by them against the civil population, document in a degree of IRI’s atrocity when under Banisadr’s presidency in 1980, IRI’s planes bombed Kurdish population in Kurdistan.
Nobody believes that the MEK is a secular and democratic alternative to the plague of the IRI. Despite their allegations to set up a secular and democratic state in Iran, religion, in its most sectarian form, continues to remain their belief–gender segregation, Islamic hijab, Shiite ceremonies, ban of non-Islamic values remain their daily criteria. Most Iranians believe that their alleged “secular and democratic” state is nothing but a tactical cover-up. In reality, their state will be a continuation of the current IRI under another fresh leadership.
However for many people, the MEK is not in the category of Islamists like the members of IRI, Taliban and Hezbollah, but rather a sectarian group. Nevertheless, the guru-like-leadership has a divine power within the group to brainwash the members. The leadership enslaves their devotees to the point to decide about the most personal matters of members as far as their marriage, divorce and whereabouts and foster child for their children. The leadership stands above any election and disapproval.
The MEK, among both Islamic and secular Iranian opposition groups, remains relatively organised. This is the main reason that IRI and IRI’s supporters hate them at most. One of the IRI’s lobby groups in the West, Interlink, is at charge to raise campaign against the MEK.
It is ethically and politically important to distinguish the gurus of leadership from the brainwashed members. Those MEK’s members who have no blood on the hands must be helped to find a new homeland. To hand over several thousands MEK’s members to a criminal regime in Iran means to throw any MEK’s member in the wolf’s mouth. Nobody can envision how many of them will join the fate of IRI’s collective executions of 1988.
The international community must find a humanitarian solution to the fate of several thousands of MEK’s members caught in the Ashraf Camp in Iraq. They might become the victims of political bargains with the IRI or even the pro-Iranian Shiite government in Iraq.
There must be humanitarian criteria above any political bargains to facilitate their immediate transfer to the safe countries. They are facing an agonising fear in Iraq, and cannot be left alone.
Their blind belief system mixed with political ambitions remains a general problem to tackle with, but not in the cost of their lives.
