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.
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