I came here today to honor the victims the September 1 massacre last year, and their family and friends. For many years as a policy official in the Pentagon, a little bit in the White House and the State Department more recently, I worked on the Middle East quite a bit. I heard about the MEK as did most professional policy people. We didn’t really know what we were talking about. And then a few years ago I examined the group a little more closely. So I looked at what the experts in Washington said about this group. I concluded that US government accounts over the years, and I didn’t see the classified accounts, but those were challenged by the attorneys to be brought to court and the government was not able to produce classified evidence on the contrary. But the public accounts appeared to have been changed over time, tampered with, exaggerated, altered, and simply not squared with the facts. They did not reflect the fact that these are people who came to oppose the dictatorships of originally the Shah, who became brutally opposed to any political dialogue or any challenge from within, or the religious fundamentalist regime that took over in 1979. What’s been written about the MEK, these alleged human rights abuses, it’s been a lot of allegations, there is no credible evidence of any of it, and this has infected some important institutions.
We heard that they terrorized the country after the Shah fell. That’s not true. Le Monde said Massoud Rajavi, had he been allowed to run, instead of having a secret fatwa calling for his death, would have gained millions of votes, including the support of all of the ethnic minorities, women, and religious minorities as well.
We heard that they had become a branch of Saddam Hussein’s military once they had gone to Camp Ashraf in Iraq. This is false; you can read the newspaper clippings at the time when they were allegedly brutalizing the Kurds in the north and the Shiite in the south in the spring of 1991. They weren’t there at all. In fact there were Iranian regime figures who were coming in addressed as Kurds and creating atrocities.
These are people who have stood for a non-nuclear Iran, religious tolerance, anti-fundamentalism, gender equality, and they have meant it and lived it for 20 plus years, and democracy going back not just to the days of opposing the Shah, but to the era of Mossadeqq and his attempts to nationalize the oil and stand up against colonialism, and even back to the constitutional uprising of 1906. These are the roots of the Iranian Resistance movement and I’m not sure that Washington understands that.
WE are forsaking our own principles, our own laws, our international legal commitments, our written pledges, and the unarmed men and women who oppose dictatorship are paying with their lives. This may not be a media story, but Camp Liberty, it’s a national disgrace. It’s also an Iraqi disgrace, and prime minister Maliki I think has lowered the reputation of his country by becoming essentially a dictator, a sectarian partisan. It falls to the new Iraqi prime minister, right now to move the country toward unity. A lot is riding on what al-Abadi does.
Through all of this and my final word is that the resistance members have remained very composed, very focused, never forgetting their fallen comrades, but they are unswerving in their belief that they will see an end to tyranny in Iran and these attributes steadfast adherence to principle, unwillingness to trade their honor for convenience to safety, are at the heart of what they stand for. So I honor their sacrifice and I only hope that we Americans can find the fortitude to face the true facts in the region, summon the strategic wisdom to stand on behalf of human rights and popular sovereignty in not just Iraq, but Syria and ultimately Iran. Our country can reclaim our own honor.