Thousands of supporters of an Iranian opposition group called on the EU and the US to remove the organization from terror blacklists at a massive rally on Saturday outside Paris.
The Paris-based National Council Resistance of Iran — an umbrella group that includes the blacklisted People’s Mujahedeen of Iran (PMOI) — held the rally at an exhibition center in the northern Villepinte suburb just days after the UK removed PMOI from its list of banned terror groups.
STATUS
PHOTO: AFP
But National Council leader Maryam Rajavi said the group’s status in the US and EU was hindering its ability to fight for regime change in Iran.
In a speech at the Paris rally, she called the terrorist labels “unjust.”
“Do not deprive the world from the most effective means to combat the religious fascism and terrorism,” Rajavi, dressed in a blue suit and headscarf, told the boisterous crowd. “Instead, side with those who can bring the Iranian people freedom.”
Although the PMOI participated in Iran’s Islamic Revolution, it later became opposed to the clerical government. Members of the group moved to Iraq in the early 1980s and fought Iran’s Islamic rulers from there until the US invaded in 2003.
US troops have since disarmed thousands of PMOI members and the group said it renounced violence several years ago.
The National Council said more than 70,000 people attended Saturday’s rally, including many people bused in from neighboring countries in Europe. Some participants arrived from the US, Canada and countries in the Middle East and northern Africa, it said. There was no independent confirmation of the organization’s crowd estimate.
UK lawmakers removed the People’s Mujahedeen of Iran from the country’s terror list last Monday, after a seven-year campaign by the group. The move gives the group more freedom to organize and raise money in Britain.
Fifteen British lawmakers were in Paris for Saturday’s rally, including former home secretary David Waddington, organizers said.
COVERT OPS
Meanwhile, the US gave a major boost to covert operations against Iran with Congress’s approval last year of US President George W. Bush’s request for US$400 million, a US magazine reported yesterday.
The move represented a “major escalation” in clandestine operations aimed at destabilizing the Islamic republic’s religious leadership amid concerns over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, said the report in the New Yorker magazine citing former military, intelligence and congressional sources.
Among the methods being used were increased US support for minority and dissident groups and intelligence gathering about Iran’s nuclear facilities, said the article, written and reported by Seymour Hersh.
Although such covert activities in Iran are not new on the part of the US, the magazine said the “scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded.”
Congress approved Bush’s request for funding late last year, said sources with knowledge of the top secret Presidential Finding, which by law must be issued when covert intelligence operations get underway.
The Presidential Finding is conveyed to a select group of Congressional leaders and their intelligence committees, otherwise known as the Gang of Eight, the report said.
“The finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change” and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money,” the report said, quoting an unnamed “person familiar with its contents.”
The report said some lawmakers were skeptical of the administration’s aims and that there was “a significant amount of high-level discussion” about the Finding before the funding was eventually approved.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the