The National Council of Resistance of Iran With Its MEK Members, Goes on Offensive at Weekend Events

04 July 2017

By Jubin Katiraie

This weekend in a cavernous convention hall outside of Paris, over 100,000 flag waving, foot-stomping, cheering supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran ( consisted of MEK/PMOI and other groups and personalities) gathered for their annual meeting.

Part pep rally and part television programming for a global audience, the annual event has for years been focused on galvanizing support for the MEK and drawing attention to the plight of dissident refugees sheltering in squalid camps inside Iraq and subject to frequent attacks from Iranian-backed forces resulting in score of deaths.

What was different this year was that all of MEK members —nearly 3,000 of them—were safely evacuated to a welcoming Albania as part of long-delayed resettlement program and escaped the clutches of an Iranian regime that seemed hell-bent on eradicating any sign of an indigenous Iranian resistance movement.

In a dramatic cinematic touch, a satellite feed from Tirana, Albania of the 3,000 resettled MEK members was beamed into the main Paris rally to the delight of the participants and vice-versa in what could be considered the world’s largest video conference call.

The atmosphere bordered on giddy as the MEK logged several positive developments over the past few months, not the least of which was the survival of their besieged members in Iraq.

The movement benefitted from a sea change in political fortunes with the departure of the Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration taking a decidedly harder tone with the Iranian regime, along with a Republican-controlled Congress that has made it a legislative priority to re-impose economic sanctions on Iranian regime for its ballistic missile program and sponsorship of terrorism.

The Iranian resistance movement, led by the National Council of Resistance of Iran which counts as its members human rights groups and the People’s Mojahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK), experienced a similar resurgence within Iran itself as the Iranian political landscape experienced what can only be described as a significant earthquake during presidential elections this year.

Top mullah Ali Khamenei and his personally selected councils did an admirable job vetting thousands of candidates for president to just six men, all of whom were old hands within the clerical bureaucracy, but Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard Corps which controls virtually all of the Iranian economy, made a move to push incumbent Hassan Rouhani out and install Ebrahim Raisi whose dubious claim to fame was to be part of a “death commission” that helped sentence 30,000 Iranian dissidents mainly MEK members and supports to death in 1988.