Replies

Splintered mujahedeen ready to harass US troops, Kurds and Tehran

Splinter elements within the People’s Mujahedeen have taken to the rugged mountains separating Iran and Iraq, and were preparing to wage attacks against US troops, ethnic Kurds and Tehran, local officials and military sources said.

But US commanders and local sources insist their capabilities are limited after the bulk of Mujahedeen, also known by its Persian name Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), hatched a deal with coalition authorities and withdrew to nearby Camp Ashraf in April.

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Cantwell, Commandant of Camp Ashraf, said the 4,000 MEK members in the former Mujahedeen base were consolidated, detained, disarmed and were being screened for any past terrorist acts.

“All vehicles, arms and ammunition is under coalition control, they do not even carry a bayonet,” Cantwell, a Battalion Commander with the 324 Military Police, said.

The MEK has been classified by Washington as a terrorist outfit but Cantwell said this did not mean that each member of the MEK was a terrorist, hence the screening process to determine each individual’s legal status.

“It’s about restraint of the use of force and compliance with the Geneva Conventions, we’re especially trained in that, and that’s why we’re here,” Cantwell said.

He said the screening process and heavy restrictions on movement was taking a toll on the Mujahedeen, who are only allowed routine shopping trips into the town of Khalis under a heavy military escort.

“There’s nothing here that’s cushy and there is a fair degree of anxiety among them about their future,” he told AFP.

The MEK was a well-armed, secular fighting force that with backing from Saddam Hussein had continued a guerrilla insurgency against the hardline Islamic government in Tehran since the Iran-Iran war ended in 1988.

Their equipment included British Chieftain and Russian T-55 tanks.

One military source said the MEK had initially fled its bases along the Iranian border in southern Iraq as the United States was preparing to launch its March 20 invasion of Iraq from Kuwait.

The source, and members of the local branch of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the main political parties in the area, said about 5,000 rebels then converged on the two bases near Jalawla about 30 kilometres west of the Iranian border in late March.

Those bases are now empty of rebels, occupied solely by looters and scrap-metal merchants who moved in after the Mujahedeen shifted to Camp Ashraf.

Deputy chief of the PUK branch in nearby Saadhiyah, Abdul al-Karim Mahmud, said the Americans began bombing the bases at about the same time as Saddam was being ousted from power on April 9.

“But the bombings were designed to frighten the MEK, not kill them, and then there were long negotiations with the Americans and the MEK,” he said.

He said eventually a deal was hammered out and most of the MEK agreed to relocate to Camp Ashraf but more than 1,000 of the rebels refused to move, kept their arms and headed into the mountains.

“Now they are fighting the Americans, the Kurds and the Iranians,” he said.

“The PUK were against Saddam, the Mujahedeen were with Saddam and they fought against the Kurds in the 1991 uprising. They refused to make peace with us so now they are fighting against the Americans and the PUK,” he said.

The military source, a senior officer based in the area, agreed.

“They had for a long time operated camps in southern Iraq, then pulled up to the border area to the north and west of Baghdad before the US began its invasion,” he said.

He said all the camps in the south, like those in Jalawla, and near Baghdad were empty and looted, except for Camp Ashraf which sits about 100 kilometres west of the Iranian border and 60 kilometres north of Baghdad.

There are some rebels still out there “but there is no way of telling exactly how many,” he said.

Washington announced on April 22 it had reached a ceasefire with the MEK and the following day Mujahedeen officials said the agreement allowed the MEK to keep its weapons and carry on its activities in Iran from Camp Ashraf.

But Cantwell said any such claims were non-existent by June when troops from the 324 Military Police took control of Camp Ahraf and the MEK was consolidated and “all weapons secured by MPs.”

He declined to comment on current MEK strength or any operations the rebels could conduct against the Americans, Iranian-government forces or the PUK.

“But I will say a substantial number have agreed to consolidate in one camp,” he said, “at Camp Ashraf.”

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_14-9-2003_pg4_10

2003/09/14
Daily calls to expel diplomats

Tehran, Sept 14 - Managing Director of the influential Persian daily Keyhan Hossein Shariatmadari, here Saturday called on the authorities to adopt measures to expel from Iran the ambassadors of Japan, Australia and Canada.

The three countries set forth a resolution in Vienna on Friday against Iran over its nuke activities.

The 35-member board of governors of the IAEA adopted the resolution setting the October 31 deadline for Iran to prove it is not seeking secretly to develop nuclear weapons.

The resolution calls on Tehran to clarify its nuclear program and suspend all its uranium enrichment activities.

In Keyhan's editorial, Shariatmadari commented on the IAEA governing council resolution against Iran and asserted that the said states' envoys have to be expelled from Iran and so long as their government have not apologized the Iranian government and people they should not be allowed to return to Iran.

If any negligence is seen as for expulsion of the ambassadors of Japan, Canada and Australia in Tehran, the devotees of the Islamic Revolution and the martyr's families would not allow the embassies of the trio to operate in Iran, he noted.

Shariatmadari said with a view to what has happened till now, the least reaction to the joint ploys of the United States and its allies, translated into action under the eyes of the United Nations, would be for Iran to immediately withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, (NPT).

Shariatmadari argued that the main objective of the United States and its allies which set forth and approved the anti-Iran resolution is to disarm the Islamic Republic and turn it into an agonizing state like Iraq and finally to overthrow it.

The Friday resolution of the IAEA governing council is nothing but an action to blackmail Iran, he said adding that the resolution is by no means in line with the laws and regulations of the IAEA code.

The immediate approval of the anti-Iran resolution is an ominous act that ignores all the legal and judicial mechanisms of Islamic Iran and even negates the very existence of the Islamic system, Shariatmadari said.

He commented on the voice heard as for the protocols 93+2 and said some 60 percent of the oil required by the West is produced in the Persian Gulf and if Iran is banned from exporting oil then it would not allow the oil export from the entire region.

Shariatmadari's comments came as Iran's permanent representative to the United Nations blamed the United States for its efforts to deprive Iran of nuclear power.

http://www.iribnews.com/Full_en.asp?news_id=187967&n=14

((( It seems that the regime wants to fight against the universe )))...!LOL

From the Daily Star Lebanon:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/opinion/10_09_03_e.asp

A killing Iran might not be able to shake

An authoritarian state is like the universe in that much of its mass consists of dark matter. The beast hiding behind the facade can be glimpsed only in brief flashes provoked by lighting from occasional political thunderstorms. These last longer when the authoritarian state is weak and when its society contains democratic components. That?s why a great deal of the murky operations of the Iranian judiciary will be exposed before the storm blows over the recent death of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who died on July 10 as a result of injuries sustained while being interrogated in an Iranian prison.

One can contrast the episode with what happened 17 years ago during the Iran-Contra affair. In November 1986, a rogue clergyman named Mehdi Hashemi embarrassed Iran?s government by leaking the story of its clandestine contacts with the US to a Lebanese magazine. He was swiftly tried and put to death, but damage control was not optimal. In exposing the gun-slinging ayatollah?s shadowy career, the state also exposed itself as one in which activities similar to his could go unpunished if the perpetrators did not defy the system. But the revelations were too oblique, scant and controlled to compare to scandals that in democratic systems interrupt illegal activities and occasionally bring down governments. The clergyman?s trial did not amount to a ?Hashemigate.?

At the outset of President Mohammad Khatami?s first term in 1997-98, a band of state-sponsored assassins who had done away with scores of undesirables under the previous government concluded that the reformers lacked the backbone to interfere with their activities. This encouraged them to continue with the business of assassinating dissidents, ending with the grisly murder of the renowned nationalist politician Daryoush Forouhar and his wife. But Khatami stood firm (for the first and last time in his presidency), and as a result the perpetrators were brought to justice and the information ministry uncovered as the den of their nefarious activities.

However, the light went out as soon as Khatami?s government faltered in its his resolve to see the case through. As a result the lines of command leading up from the perpetrators were never officially explored. What followed would make a mafia don blush: the ringleader was found dead (allegedly by suicide) and the trials of the accused were so rigged by the partisan judiciary as to preclude reference to those who had ordered the assassinations. Subsequently, Saeed Hajjarian, a veteran information official and reformist who headed a committee that captured the culprits, was assassinated. Akar Ganji, a top journalist investigating the political network of the murderers, was imprisoned on trumped up charges.
Once again, although the modus operandi of the ?shadow government? that had ordered the killings remained in the limelight for a much longer period than during the trial of Hashemi, a ?Forouhargate? never materialized.

The murder of Kazemi at the hands of the right-wing judiciary however, may very well turn into a ?Kazemigate.? To begin with, the victim?s Canadian nationality ensures the investigation will not be compromised as a result of insider deals. The murder is now cast as an international crisis along with Iran?s nuclear ambitions and the role Tehran may have played in the attack on the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. Therefore, it cannot be snuffed out for partisan and personal reasons, or in the name of preserving the honor of ?the holy order of the Islamic Republic.?

Furthermore, the murder of Kazemi was different from previous scandals in that it occurred on the active fault lines of Iran?s reform-right-wing divide. After seven years of oppression by the right, such reform leaders as the parliamentarian Mohsen Armin (who regularly and publicly challenges the judiciary?s fabrications about Kazemi?s death) have little to lose by hanging tough on this issue. They consider the judiciary a brutal and dastardly organization that has perverted the cause of justice in order to crush both reform and dissent. Khatami?s information ministry has also refused to play the scapegoat and obtained the release of two of its employees wrongfully arrested by the judges as the main suspects in this case.
The coming Kazemigate will direct a powerful searchlight at the violent and secret world that Akbar Ganji has called Iran?s ?dungeon of ghosts.? It could also focus the world?s attention on the intractable problem of torture in Iran. But its disclosures will not be as devastating to the system as a Forouhargate might have been. Unlike those killings, Kazemi?s murder does not seem to have been part of a larger scheme. Nor is it likely that the lines of command will lead all the way up to the top of the system.

However, at the very least some illustrious right-wing heads must roll, starting with that of the notorious judge Saeed Mortazavi, who personally supervised Kazemi?s interrogation and later attempted to cover up her death by issuing false statements about its circumstances and causes. We can also expect a heavy blow to the right-wing judiciary for its perverted, proto-legal campaign against the democratic movement and for its brutalization and torture of dissidents.

Ahmad Sadri is a professor of sociology at Lake Forest College in Illinois. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR